Two years ago, Roomba was the only affordable home vacuuming robot on the market. Now we have a few competitors in the under $300 space, with the $199 Sharper Image e Vac being the most recent entry in June 2004. It was $299 but Sharper Image reduced the price at the end of August to $199: an even better deal! While some robo-vacs look like clones of the Roomba, Sharper Image’s e Vac has a distinctly different look and design philosophy.

Design

The Sharper Image e Vac appeals to our sense of what a vacuum is “supposed” to be. It’s got a durable, classy hard plastic finish, a traditional vacuum motor (complete with breeze and loud suction) and large wheels that allow it to go where no Roomba has gone before. The integrated carry handle is strong and easy to use, and the finish stands up well to bumps, bangs and scrapes with low furniture. The robotics were designed by Evolution, a well-respected firm that also had a hand in the Sony Aibo. 

While Roomba and  Roomba Discovery models look like a flying saucer or pizza that’s round and quite low to the ground at under 3” tall, e Vac is closer to oval in shape, with a straight front bumper that’s designed to get close to walls for edge cleaning and a domed top. Roomba requires 4” of clearance when cleaning under furniture and cabinets, while e Vac, at just over 5” tall, requires 5.5” clearance. This added height accommodates e Vac’s larger vacuum motor and big 5” wheels.

Those big wheels and aggressive rubber tread are one of the e Vac’s strongest features. The robot crosses from hard floors onto area rugs with aplomb, can traverse cable bridges and low room dividers (where two different flooring surfaces mate), safely go over electrical cords and speaker wire and handles medium to high pile carpet without stalling. While Roomba is like a sports car hugging close to the ground, the e Vac is a Jeep. Of course, there are tradeoffs: bigger wheels and higher ground clearance mean e Vac rarely gets stuck, but it doesn’t get as much dirt off the ground as does Roomba Discovery. The Sharper Image eVac has a fixed height cleaning assembly that affords good clearance but doesn’t hug the floor. In contrast, all Roomba’s have a suspension system that automatically adjusts to floor height. These two different design philosophies make for a difficult buying decision: all terrain talent vs. better cleaning. Not that the Sharper Image machine is a slacker when it comes to cleaning, but Roomba Discovery beats it (and e Vac beats the original Roomba). If you’ve got a house full of area rugs, fringed rugs, wires you’d rather not tidy, or obstacles such as cable bridges, you’ll likely want to go with e Vac. If you don’t have these Roomba-challenging items and crave the cleanest possible floors, then Roomba Discovery wins.

Above: the e Vac with included remote control and a traffic cone

How do you keep e Vac out of forbidden zones? It comes with four red, weighted traffic cones that match e Vac. Place these 12” apart to prevent e Vac from going where it shouldn’t. This isn’t nearly as elegant a solution as Roomba’s, which uses included virtual wall units that emit IR beams that tell Roomba to go no further. Virtual walls have up to 14’ range, and one or more are included with Roomba (you can purchase more). Clearly, four cones can’t block off as long an area as one virtual wall. Does this matter to you? In many instances closing a door or blocking off a short entrance is all that’s needed, so e Vac’s traffic cones might do the trick. If not, resign yourself to placing shoes, boxes or other objects in place to block the e Vac.

Controls and operation

This user-friendly robot, like all robo-vacs, requires no programming. Simply make your cleaning selections using the control panel on top of the robot and let e Vac tackle the dirt.  The unit has a button that allows you to select a hard or soft floor surface, set cleaning time (15, 30 or 45 minutes), and has buttons for regular and spot cleaning. The charger port is located on the vac’s side, as is the on/off switch. To get started, select your floor surface type, a cleaning duration and regular or spot cleaning. All functions are also available on the included remote. When you send it off to clean, it plays the familiar Charge! tune and plays a short cheerful tune when done cleaning. If it needs help (brush won’t spin or the unit is stuck) it plays an “uh-oh” tune.

The e Vac differs from Roomba and Roomba Discovery in that it uses cleaning times rather than having you select a small, medium or large room in the case of Roomba, or letting the robot determine cleaning times based on its estimate of the room’s size in the case of Discovery. 15 minutes is a good cleaning time for a small to medium size room up to 15’ x 15’, while 30 minutes is good for larger rooms or two adjoining rooms. If you have a very large room, good sized adjoining rooms, or a very dirty house, select 45 minutes which is e Vac’s maximum run time. The net effect of selecting a cleaning time vs. a room size is the same. Discovery is more sophisticated, determining room size based on the distance to walls and the number of objects it runs into.

When you select the hard floor option, e Vac turns off its beater bar, which is very similar in design to standard upright vacuums’ beater bars. Hence e Vac can run longer on hard floors since the bar isn’t turning and hard floors don’t have as much resistance as rugs.

The Sharper Image robot has indicator LEDs that let you know which cleaning selections are active, battery status and if the robot has encountered problems. Should the beater bar cease to  turn freely (perhaps a sock has wrapped around the bar) or the unit becomes hopelessly stuck, the red trouble light will illuminate and the vacuum will stop cleaning, waiting for you to rescue it. The e Vac rarely gets stuck, so you won’t see that light often.

The e Vac has good robotics, finding its way out of a forest of chair legs, rug fringes and other robot traps. It starts off a standard cleaning cycle by doing parallel strokes about 3’ in length until it reaches and obstacle or wall, at which point it will attempt to clean against the wall using an arcing pattern that noses the straight front bumper against the wall until it reaches the end. Its cleaning pattern seems strikingly human since most of us use parallel strokes in a limited area too. Unlike Roomba, the e Vac never works in circles. EVac could use more randomness in its program: it sometimes gets caught in loops, following open space and wall cleaning routines repeatedly without introducing the randomness that would allow it to break out into a new area. Thus it covers about 85% of the room, and vacuums some areas more than others. Roomba in contrast, covers 95% of a room if not 100% since it has just the right amount of programmed and random behavior.

Remote

Unlike Roomba, the e Vac remote uses RF (radio frequency) rather than IR (infrared) to control the robot. If you’ve used a TV remote, you’ve used an IR remote. It requires line of sight and thus won’t work through walls. RF remotes do work through walls, so you can control e Vac even if it’s in the next room—very nice!

The remote offers all the functions available on the unit’s control panel and adds a vacuum motor off button and a four-way directional pad that allows you to drive e Vac around the room via remote. In fact, you can press the vacuum off button to almost silently drive the unit around, like a radio controlled car. While this may not be terribly useful, children and playful adults will no doubt find it amusing. The remote, like the included traffic cones, come in a matching red finish, and it uses a 9v battery (included).

Cleaning ability
(we use everyday household dust, pet hair, potting soil and kitty litter for testing)

The e Vac does a very good job of cleaning both hard and carpeted floors. It beats the original Roomba, but not the Roomba Discovery. The e Vac has a traditional vacuum motor that’s quite powerful. It generates a sometimes annoyingly strong breeze out the top vents and sounds like a 7 amp canister vacuum cleaner. The motor is stronger than both Roomba and Discovery’s which is likely why it can’t run as long on a charge as these competitors.

Evac does a decent job on hard floors, though both Roomba and Discovery beat it since they have a more complex brush system and are closer to the ground. The Sharper Image robot gets most dust and pet hair and nearly all larger debris. But you will find a few stray hairs and some dust after e Vac finishes, so you’ll want to do a deep cleaning with your non-robotic vac every few weeks. Since e Vac uses a traditional upright vacuum design, it’s not surprising it doesn’t get every last drop: we all know that Hoover uprights aren’t the best tools for hard floors.

Carpeting is where e Vac shines: it handles low, medium and high pile (not shag) carpeting very well. In fact, it likes low to mid pile carpets better than berbers or kilims. It likes to have some pile to sink its beater bar into, and excels at cleaning up pet hair. Rugs look clean and the vac gets most pet hair, all kitty litter and clumps of dirt out of carpet. It’s good enough to satisfy most of us, though surprisingly, the Roomba Discovery which has a weaker motor, manages to pull even more dirt and pet hair out of carpets.

The e Vac has a unique straight front bumper and the beater bar and vac intake assemblies are located far forward so the robot can clean close to walls. When it encounters walls, it uses an arcing pattern to run the front bumper against the wall (or other obstacle) so it can get close to edges. A nice design, though Roomba beats it thanks to its spinning brush that pulls dirt along the edges of the wall into the vacuum.

Spot cleaning mode is a common feature on robotic vacuums, and most are designed to clean a 3 square foot area when spot cleaning. If you have a small mess that needs cleaning up, select your floor type, then press the spot clean button on the vac or remote. The e Vac will clean the area just in front of it using a cris-crossing star pattern that’s similar to the way most humans vacuum.

Clearance and dealing with obstacles

The Sharper Image machine needs 5.5” clearance to clean under furniture and kitchen kick boards. It fits under most beds and cleans kick boards with lower clearance since the vacuum bar and inlet are far forward under the protruding front bumper. Clearly, it can’t get under low clearance areas as Roomba, which needs only 4” clearance.

You don’t need to block off stairs, e Vac won’t try any daring acrobatics on your landings, ledges or stairs. IR sensors under the front bumper keep an eye out for drops greater than two inches and the unit will automatically reverse away from the edge and continue cleaning close to, but not over, the edge.

Like other affordable robotic vacuums, e Vac has touch sensors in its front bumper. When e Vac runs (gently) into a wall, chair leg or a sleeping dog, it turns or backs up a bit and goes around the obstacle. Expensive robo-vacs like the Electrolux Trilobite use sonar sensors to determine the location of obstacles, so they rarely bump into anything. But these clever guys will set you back $1,500 or more. Bumping isn’t a bad thing: the robot bumps into obstacles very gently and has a spring-loaded soft plastic front bumper that doesn’t mar furniture, hurt toes or otherwise wreak havoc on household items. And bumping vacs get closer to wall edges and furniture legs than do their avoidant bigger brothers. Items weighing less than ¼ pound should be picked up because e Vac will move these around rather than avoid them.

Thanks to its large wheels and relatively high clearance, e Vac rarely gets hung up on power cords, cable bridges or the cosmetic plates that cover the junction between two types of flooring. Area rugs and fringes rarely phased our e Vac—it climbs up and gets the cleaning done. In the rare instance that it does wrap fringe around its beater bar, e Vac turns off the vacuum motor and reverses until it untangles itself, then turns the motor on and continues cleaning. The e Vac is a winner when it comes to cables, area rugs and fringes! While I sometimes have to rescue Roomba, e Vac handles them without a problem.

Maintenance

This beast is easy to maintain. It has a good size dirt cup that will last through one or more cleanings, and a washable filter. Two spare filters are included. To empty the dirt cup, press the release lever on top of the vac, remove the lid and cup assembly, then pop the cup off the lid to empty it. The filter sits inside the dirt cup and covers one entire side of the cup. One complaint: dirt and pet hair do adhere to the large filter surface so you often have to remove the filter and shake it over a garbage can to get the dirt out of the cup.

The beater bar is designed like an upright’s, with a ridge of short bristle that generally doesn’t get gunked up with hair. After three weeks, medium length human hair did wrap around the axle’s end, and it was a simple matter of turning the unit over, popping out the brush and pulling off the hair wad to get it clean again. The accumulated hair didn’t prevent the vac from cleaning, nor did it hinder brush spinning, though after a few months it likely would.

The wheels are exposed, so hair doesn’t accumulate in wheel wells and we haven’t had any problems with dirt blocking wheel sensors, which was a problem for the original Roomba.

Battery life

Evac takes six hours to charge and can clean up to 45 minutes on a charge. In a 50-50 mix of hard floors and low pile carpet, the unit ran for 40 minutes before calling it quits. Even $1,500 robotic vacuums run for around an hour per charge, so these run times aren’t that bad, though they can’t compete with Roomba Discovery, which ran for at least 1.5 hours consistently. If you have a large home, don’t plan on getting the entire house done on a single charge with e Vac. The robot uses a NiMh battery pack that drops into a cavity on e Vac’s underside and locks in place. Some dust accumulates between the battery and housing over the course of a month, so do take the battery out and wipe it off with a dry cloth from time to time.

What’s the technology behind this?

Robotic vacs have a brain (motherboard, memory and processors) with cleaning programs pre-installed at the factory. Affordable models have touch sensors in the front bumper that let the robot know when it’s encountered an obstacle and IR sensors to “see” drops such as stairs. Some of the more expensive robo-vacs as well as Roomba Discovery models, use transducers to “hear” dirt, so the vac knows where it should spent extra time cleaning. This is a great feature because our robotic helpers can appear frustratingly dumb when they ignore a pile of dirt that we can plainly see. Even if they do have dirt detectors, most robotic vacuums are programmed to clean each section of floor more than once. Why? Because their vacuum motors aren’t as strong as 12 amp uprights and their senses aren’t as sophisticated as ours so they may miss dirt the first time around.

Conclusion

The Sharper Image e Vac is a well made, attractive and sturdy unit. It should run reliably and require little maintenance. It does a very good job of getting hard and soft floor surfaces clean, though not as good as Roomba Discovery.

Pro: Great if you have electrical or speaker wires, higher pile carpet, area rugs and fringes. EVac rarely gets hung up on these while Roomba and Roomba Discovery can find them challenging. If your house has plenty of area rugs and fringed rugs, e Vac will be a set-and-forget device that will rarely need your help. Good on carpets (even high pile), getting most dirt and pet hair. RF remote allows you to control e Vac when it’s in another room. It sounds like a vacuum, which means your old-fashioned mom may have more faith in it.

Con: Doesn’t get as much dirt and pet hair as Roomba Discovery, especially on hard floors. Rug nap isn’t raised as much compared to Roomba Discovery. Higher clearance means it will make it under some but not most furniture. Battery life needs to be better. Control panel buttons are on the top of this domed device, so if it gets under tight quarters, the underside of furniture can actually press a button or two.

List Price: $199, 1 Year Warranty

Web site: The Sharper Image

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