Yeedi Vac Review: A Budget-Friendly Modular Robovac

Yeedi, a sister company to the more widely known Ecovacs, is a robot vacuum company that appears to be targeting a specific market. If you’re in the market for a robot vacuum with some premium features but a solidly budget price point, the basic Yeedi Vac is worth a look.

Which market is this robovac targeting precisely? People shopping for robot vacuums that want something better than the white-label cheap sub-$100 “bumper” robot vacuums but who don’t want to shell out for a vacuum that costs as much as a mortgage payment like the Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra.

The Yeedi Vac has an MSRP of $299, but it is frequently on sale for much lower than that—it’s not unusual to see it on Amazon both marked down and paired with a coupon that brings the price down to around $200.

And that’s the seeming promise of the Yeedi lineup across the board: budget-friendly prices with better-than-budget performance. So how does it hold up? Let’s dig in.

Specs and Cleaning Performance

The Yeedi Vac, formally the Yeedi k750, is the successor in the Yeedi lineup to the Yeedi k650 and offers a host of upgrades. Here’s a breakdown of the biggest features.

Suction and Debris Collection

It sports variable suction power, automatically adjusting from 600pa to 3,000pa—3,000pa isn’t the strongest on the market, some robot vacs boast up to 5,000pa, but it’s a notable level of power in a smaller budget robovac.

We tested the Yeedi Vac under real-world conditions in a home with multiple pets (including cats and dogs), tons of house plants, and regular day-to-day activities.

To that end we didn’t artificially construct any test conditions like dumping a cup of finely ground espresso beans in the middle of the living room rug or such, we simply let the Yeedi Vac do its best to deal with the regular messes life with a family and pets create.

Other than encountering things it simply couldn’t vacuum up, such as a long plant frond that had fallen on the floor, there was little we encountered it couldn’t take care of.

Every single time we emptied the collection bin in the Yeedi Vac, it was completely packed with pet fur and bits of leaves from our extensive plant collection.

Despite the strong suction, the Yeedi Vac was very quiet. The cats were more concerned about its weird movement than the noise and the dog was completely indifferent to it. It was loud enough that you could tell it was on but not loud enough to be an obnoxious distraction like a regular vacuum.

Run Time and Charging

The Yeedi Vac has a 2,600mAh battery that takes 4 hours to charge and offers an estimated 110 minutes of working time. In our experience, the estimated 110-minute run time is accurate with only minor variations.

When the vacuum begins to run down, it will automatically path-find its way back to the charging station, self-charge, and (if you have specified in the app you wish it to do so) will return to its previous location to resume cleaning.

During our extended test of the Yeedi Vac, it only failed to make it home to the charging station once. In this instance, it ran over some cords we had failed to stow away before its cleaning cycle, managed to run around the leg of a couch, and then used up the last of its charge aggressively trying to free itself before sending a push notification that it was both tangled up and low on power.

In our initial tests, the Yeedi Vac would usually need to go back to the charging station before completing the main floor of the test home, but as its mapping improved over time, it appeared to choose more efficient routes.

Still, it didn’t always complete the main floor on a single charge.

Room Mapping and Navigation

For navigation, the Yeedi Vac uses “Visual SLAM.” SLAM stands for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping and refers to any system that simultaneously maps an environment while the mapping agent is moving through it.

As the Yeedi Vac trundles around your home vacuuming away, an upward-facing fish-eye lens on top of the unit along with the other onboard sensors work to build an operational map of your home environment.

The first time you run the vacuum, it will appear to be pretty, well, dumb. That’s because SLAM is an on-the-fly active system, and until your Yeedi Vac bumbles around for a pass or two through your home, it won’t fully learn the lay of the land. After that first bumbling trip about to figure out exactly where the legs of the couch and other obstacles are, it will remember the layout of your home and will appear significantly smarter.

Overall the Visual SLAM system worked well enough. Is it some sort of amazing laser-guided mapping and object avoidance system like you’ll find on a robot vacuum that costs hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars more than the Yeedi Vac? Absolutely not. Did it do a good enough job that after one or two trips around the house it was able to navigate the space in an acceptable fashion? Absolutely.

Other than one mishap where the Yeedi Vac attempted to murder a Boston Fern that was perched on a fairly delicate thin-legged metal stand, there were no navigation mishaps. And, in the poor Yeedi Vac’s defense, after knocking over the fern it returned to the scene of the crime and vacuumed up all the leaves.

Speaking of navigation, the Yeedi Vac doesn’t use boundary strips or any kind of magnetic navigation. It does, however, use software-based boundaries (which we’ll talk about in the section devoted to the companion app) so you can tell it to avoid certain areas.

It also has basic edge/ledge detection. At no point during testing did the Yeedi Vac drive itself into the basement or off any of the step-down areas of the test home like the rear foyer.

Additional Features and Upgrades

Although we did not test these features during our review of the Yeedi Vac, they’re worth mentioning here as they may inform your decision to buy the Yeedi Vac.

The Yeedi Vac is both modular and upgradable. You can purchase a mop kit for the Yeedi Vac, wherein you pop off the hollow module at the back of the vacuum and swap it out for a water tank and mop pad.

You can also purchase an upgraded base station for the Yeedi Vac that upgrades the simple charging dock that comes with the unit to a self-emptying station that both charges and automatically empties the Yeedi Vac’s internal collection bin into a larger bin in the base station.

As of the time of this review in May of 2022, the mop upgrade is $40 and the collection bin upgrade is $200. It’s nice to have the upgrade option instead of having to decide in advance if you want to pay extra for those features, but if you’re pretty sure you’ll want them, then it makes more sense to buy a bundle.

If you get the Yeedi Vac on sale for around $200 and add on the mopping and self-emptying station, you’ll have spent $440—but the Yeedi Vac Station, an all-in-one upgrade that includes the Yeedi Vac, mop tank, and self-emptying base, has an MSRP of $550 but is frequently on sale for $360-400.

That said, robo-mopping can be really hit or miss and it really wasn’t much trouble to empty the bin in the Yeedi Vac. Sometimes it’s OK to stick with the budget-friendly model and skip the extra upgrades.

App Experience: It’s Simple and Effective

Overall, the app experience was a pleasant one. It’s all too common for smart home and gadget applications to either be obtuse to use or obnoxious to the degree they ping you with notifications.

In that regard, the Yeedi Vac app (available for iPhone and Android) did what it was supposed to do. After downloading it from the app store, we simply scanned the QR code on the top of the Yeedi Vac (it’s located right next to the power switch beneath the lid) and set the vacuum up with the simple “What’s your Wi-Fi SSID and password?” routine we’re all used to by now.

As far as day-to-day operation goes, we quickly found you really didn’t need the app for anything once it was set up. After the initial bumbling-about run, the SLAM system did an adequate job mapping the test home, and we were able to set up boundaries where we wanted them. In the screenshots above, you can see the red box that tells the Yeedi Vac not to enter that area.

You can also use the app to set custom cleaning schedules and custom cleaning areas such as prioritizing one zone over another or virtually fencing the vacuum off to only clean a certain area of one room temporarily.

But honestly, as nice as it is to have features like that if you want them, the whole point of a robot vacuum is just to let the thing roll around and work without having to think about it, right? We tried the features out just to make sure they actually worked and thoroughly review the unit, but other than telling the vacuum to always start with the foyer because that’s where the most debris from shoes would be, we didn’t see much utility in the features.

Other than that, the only time the app really came into play was when we received relevant push notifications like a notification that the brush roller was tangled or the vacuum had become stuck under a low piece of furniture.

Not only are those useful notifications to receive, but for many of them, if you tapped on the notification, you’d actually get instructions to help you deal with it.

For example, the tangled brush roller notification also includes instructions on how to remove and clean the brush roller. You won’t need those instructions every time, of course, but it’s really nice to have them there the first time you need to clean a particular part of the vacuum.

Speaking of cleaning and maintenance, the app also includes estimated wear on the various parts, such as the brush roller, side brush, and filter.

Should You Buy the Yeedi Vac?

On the low end of the robot vacuum market, there are ultra-budget vacuums with poor performance, rudimentary mapping or no mapping at all, no app integration, and overall design quality more on par with a cheap children’s toy than a home appliance.

On the high end of the market, you’re paying $700 and up for really advanced robot vacuums that include object identification, laser mapping, self-emptying bins, mopping, and more.

The Yeedi Vac, with an MSRP of $299 but a nearly perpetual sale price much lower than that, is an excellent compromise between the world of bump-and-run dumb robot vacuums and ultra-premium models.

If you’re looking for a vacuum with more bells and whistles than the most basic models but you don’t want to spend more than a car payment (or even a mortgage payment!) on the project, the Yeedi Vac is an easy sell. The Yeedi Vac is both good enough to justify spending a little more than you would on an ultra-budget model and to make you think, “Why would I pay more for a premium model?”