Ecovacs Winbot W2 Pro Omni review: Near perfect in its luxury

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Washing windows is not an expensive task. Grab yourself a $5 bottle of Windex and a $16 window washer, and you can clean every window on your home for a year.

You’ll need to put in the time and effort, though. And that’s where the task of keeping your windows clean falls over, right?

Because it sucks.

It’s a horrible job. It’s thankless because as soon as you finish doing it, some kid or pet is going to rub their dirty fingers or tongue across it, making it dirty again.

So what price can you put on the ability to effortlessly wash your windows every month? If you said $1,000, then the Ecovacs Winbot W2 Pro Omni is for you.

It is an exceptional product, from its design to its performance. It’s simple to use, it packs away intelligently, and it washes windows with only a minimum of effort.

But it’s not cheap. And that means it’s not for everybody.

What is the Winbot W2 Pro Omni offering?

Ecovacs is best known for its robotic vacuum cleaners, and so it’s something of a natural evolution for the company to move into robotic window cleaners.

I say that, but technically Ecovacs has been making window cleaning robots since 2011, so it’s not a new category for the brand.

And you can tell. Launched back in October, the W2 Pro Omni shows a level of refinement you don’t get from a first generation product. Everything comes conveniently packed away in the base station. The main window cleaner slides into one side, with a dedicated pace for the window cleaning solution.

Around the back of the unit is the power cable, the safety rope and the mop pads. There’s a 4,500 mh battery in there as well, which is enough for just under two hours of window cleaning.

The Winbot W2 Pro Omni uses a lot of the same technology as its robot vacuums. It sucks air through a central circle of holes to attach itself to the window, before moving around using rubberised treads like a tank.

There are spray nozzles on the front and back of the cleaning unit that disperse the cleaning liquid as it moves, and a handle on the top you need to use to attach and remove the cleaner from your windows.

The mop pad is a microfibre pad that attaches to the bottom of the unit like velcro. There are a bunch of sensors inside so it can automatically detect the edge of the glass and keep everything stable while it cleans.

Safety is also super important. The cleaning unit attaches to the base unit with a single, retractable cable that offers power and acts as a safety cable, with a tensile strength of up to 100 kg.

If you’re cleaning external windows at a height, there’s a 1-metre safety rope in the base unit you should use to secure if from falling.

What does the Winbot W2 Pro Omni do well?

While you can set the Winbot W2 Pro up in the Ecovacs app, you don’t have to. There are dedicated controls on the base unit that makes it effortless to use.

There are three main cleaning modes accessible through the unit itself: Fast cleaning, thorough cleaning and edge cleaning. You can get more options in the app, including manual control, but you probably won’t use them.

Once you turn on the unit and select your mode, there is voice guidance through every step. It will tell you to attach the unit to the window, when it’s safe to let go, and when to grab it again after cleaning is done.

The robot will systematically and methodically work its way around your window, cleaning as it goes. It’s quick and effortless, particularly if you use it regularly – the Winbot will remind you almost every time you use it that it’s great for monthly window cleaning.

(I wish I could turn that reminder off. It’s easily the worst thing about the whole unit).

It’s not too loud when it’s cleaning. Ecovacs says it runs at about 63 dB when cleaning, which is about the same as a fridge.

If you have a lot of glass, or really tall windows, the Winbot W2 Pro Omni will be an absolute blessing. The power cable extends automatically up to 5.5 metres, so it can reach the higher sections you would need a ladder or extension pole to get to.

What could the Winbot W2 Pro Omni improve?

There’s no real active scrubbing with the mop, so if you have any deeper marks, like maybe some bird poop or a large build up, you’re still going to need to manually clean the window.

On my first test, there was a significant bird mess on one of my front windows, and I attempted to clean it by manually controlling the Winbot to go over the spot repeatedly. While it definitely improved the cleanliness with every pass, it would have been significantly quicker and easier to just wipe it off with some windex.

Because of its size, the Winbot can’t clean smaller window sections either, so if you have small windows or small sections on larger windows, you’ll still need to manually clean those as well.

Verdict

There’s a real wow factor with the Winbot W2 Pro Omni. The first time you attach it to a window and watch it clean your glass effortlessly, you can’t help but be impressed.

It’s a single purpose gadget that does its job well. Because it’s not actually intelligent, it can’t do as good a job as a human, but it can achieve impressive results with minimal effort.

And so you have to ask whether you’re prepared to pay for that performance. Because the biggest barrier to entry for this gadget is its asking price.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the Winbot is overpriced. It’s a really impressive piece of engineering, intelligently designed to do a specific job.

But spending a thousand bucks on a robot to do a job you can do for a few bucks, some time and some elbow grease? That’s a tougher ask, particularly in this economy.

Buy the Ecovacs Winbot W2 Pro Omni online

Ecovacs Winbot W2 Pro Omni

RRP: $999

Check Price @ Amazon