Technology has been promising to make drudging housework simpler and easier for a long time now, but the results have been hit-and-miss to say the least. In this case, eufy’s new high-end cordless stick vacuum, the MACH V1 Ultra, is certainly making strides in the right direction. It’s a single cordless device that can easily vacuum, mop, and steam clean.
With a list price of $700, the V1 Ultra isn’t exactly a small investment. So, there’s a lot of balancing cost versus convenience here. This is a daily driver sort of vacuum for keeping floors neat and clean, and it’s able to deep clean with steam. Without a doubt, it works great. The vacuum is remarkably quiet without sacrificing suction power, it can dry the floor as it mops, has smart sensors to detect the level of dirt, and glides along the floor with ease. It even self-cleans when you’ve put it back into the charging dock.
The MACH V1 Ultra also features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, because of course it does. There is an accompanying eufy Clean app it can connect to, but the only thing you can do with this is tell it to self-clean remotely as opposed to just pressing the self-clean button on the vacuum. Given that part of the self-cleaning cycle requires you to empty its waste compartment manually, remotely executing the cycle seemed a bit extraneous overall.
There are three cleaning modes. The default is the smart mode, which mops and vacuums at the same time. There’s the steam cleaning mode, which heats up to a temperature of 230 F in about 30 seconds, which is really fast, enabling you to spot steam clean especially troublesome floor stains without having to stop and wait. The third mode is suction for standard vacuuming, which is ideal for rugs and general sweep ups.
The MACH V1 Ultra is really for hard floors, although eufy says it can be used on up to “medium-pile” carpets. We used the vacuum on area rugs and it works well, so long as you don’t accidentally suck up a corner of the rug into the roller. Still, if you’re living in a mostly carpeted home, this probably isn’t the perfect tool.
It’s also not as versatile as a full-on, long-tubed canister-type vacuum. The V1 just works on floors, there are no tubes or extensions, and you can’t use it get under things like sofas or furniture more than a few inches. In fact, if you try to squeeze it under something by lowering the stick to the ground, it will likely just leak for your troubles.
There’s a little prep work involved in setting up the V1 Ultra, as expected. The water tank is just filled with tap water and there’s a long thin removable container for the included cleaning solution. Click the canisters back in after filling them and you’re ready to go. The instructions might actually make the vacuum seem more complicated to use than it actually is. The mode button above the little LCD display simply lets you switch between the three cleaning modes. There’s a power button and a self-cleaning button. There’s also a small dial to the side of the screen that turns the floor cleaner on and off, but little explanation of its use is in the instructions.
There’s a trigger as well, which is used for when you need extra powerful cleaning, otherwise as soon as you turn the V1 on it goes into cleaning mode and you just push it along. Switching between modes on hard floors works well and is incredibly convenient. Although it’s good to remember that if you have to move between mopping a hard floor and vacuuming an area rug, the cleaning roller is wet, so you’ll likely get some wetness on the rug as well.
For the smart and suction modes, the battery lasts around 82 minutes. Steam mode, however, drops that severely to around 15 or so, a side effect of its rapid heating. Granted, when cleaning several hundred square feet of floor, we didn’t need anywhere near that time to get the job done.
The self-cleaning mode is an interesting feature. When docked, the MACH V1 will run through a process where it cleans its roller brush and flushes its system. It requires the user to empty the waste canister, which is a two-step process. You dump the dirty water, but must also knock out all the detritus it’s sucked up from the removable top part of the canister. It’s not a fun job and requires rinsing off all the parts, including the filter. Once that’s done, the vacuum will go into a lengthy drying period, which takes about half an hour. The LCD screen shows you where it’s at in the cleaning process and the app (if you opted to connect the vacuum to it) will alert you when it’s done.
Vacuums in general are remarkably cantankerous devices that need regular maintenance. While the MACH V1 does an excellent job of trying to minimize that kind of work, there are some other things to keep in mind. The vacuum comes with an extra roller, which they suggest gets changed every six months. The cleaning solution it uses seems to last a while, but will also need to be reordered, and both add some cost to regular usage. The roller costs about $40 and a small bottle of the cleaning solution is $30.
The MACH V1 Ultra uses tap water for its ozone-based steam cleaning, instead of something like distilled water, so despite there being no mention of it in the instructions, it comes with several packets of citrus acid for descaling (cleaning out residue left over from the water). This is suggested to be done every six months, but we had to search specifically online to find instructions for it.
As an all-in-one floor cleaning solution, the MACH V1 Ultra works great. It manages to vacuum, mop, and steam clean excellently. It won’t replace a more versatile vacuum that lets you use extensions to get into nooks and crannies and under low spaces, but for regular floor maintenance, this is a top-notch device. It’s easy to use, the self-cleaning system works well, and it made keeping the floor clean a lot more convenient than having to haul out multiple vacuums, brooms, and mops.