It mops like a pro – but the experience isn’t as slick as some
You could be forgiven for not knowing Hobot. Although popular in Australia and South Africa, the company only recently launched in the UK, with its fifth-generation Legee D8 robot mopping vacuum cleaner leading the charge.
Unlike some robot vacs, where mopping hard floors is more of an added extra, the Legee D8 specialises in it, especially when combined with the optional service station Legee Lulu. This refills it with water, and washes and dries the mop pad for a hygienic clean every time.
Bear in mind that the D8 and the Lulu must be bought separately and the price above is for the D8 robot vacuum and mop only – although there is a way to buy both for less than the price of the robot alone on Amazon.
Design & Build
- Robot has flat front for edge cleaning
- Eight cleaning modes
- 500ml compression waste bin
While multiple robot vacs are disc-shaped, Hobot’s Legee D8 favours a D-shaped design, its flat front allowing it to get closer to walls and plinths. Finished in white plastic, its measurements are fairly average at 34.4 x 34.3cm and a low height of just 9.75cm.
On top, there’s a raised LiDAR sensor, and a single button that works in four ways, meaning it’s simple to control manually: it’ll let you send it home, change the cleaning mode (there are eight) and start and stop cleaning without having to reach for your device. The button also lights up, changing colour when charging and cleaning.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
Flip up the lid on top and you’ll find the practical parts: a 320ml water tank, cleaning tool for shifting any clogs, and 500ml waste bin. The bin also has a handy compression feature, allowing you to empty it less often.
Underneath, rather than a couple of spinning mop pads like some robot mopping vacs, the Legee D8 has one large pad (plus a spare in the box) that uses reciprocating, or up and down, motion. Plus, there’s a couple of sturdy wheels with treads, and a guide wheel at the front.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
Performance & Features
- Lulu station doesn’t empty robot’s onboard bin
- App and mapping can be frustrating
- Mopping function stronger than vacuum pick-up
For this review, we also tested the Legee D8’s companion product, the Legee Lulu cleaning station. It’s an optional accessory that recharges the Legee D8 instead of the base it comes with, cleans and dries the mop pad, and changes the water, reducing the need to refill. Unfortunately, unlike most stations, the Lulu does not automatically empty the Legee D8’s onboard bin, meaning you’ll still need to stay on top of the dirt emptying every few days or so.
One of the first things that may strike you about the Legee D8 is how talkative it is. You’ll soon learn that Legee is not pronounced, as you might guess, ‘lee-gee’ but actually ‘leggy’, because it says its name often as it narrates what’s going on. The voice can be muted during certain times and the volume reduced, fortunately.
And if you really don’t like it, you can opt for ‘creative voice’, which allows you to record your own voice or use other audio. Another plus for large homes is that the Legee D8 can switch between three sets of Wi-Fi networks, and use a hotspot if Wi-Fi is unavailable, giving it more flexibility.
Setting the Legee D8 up was pretty straightforward – the app connected instantly, which is rare. However, we felt that Lulu’s power cable was quite short, which limited where we could install the service station without an extension. Despite this, most of the time, the Legee D8 returned to the Lulu station without issue.
We found some features of the app confusing to use: each cleaning function isn’t clear from the image, and mapping can be frustrating. Over several weeks, we found that adding a new obstacle on the floor (a box or moving a chair) caused the Legee D8 to remap the whole floor and try and save it over the old map we had created with boundaries and names.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
This meant it ignored the specific areas we had set up for the daily schedule and tried to clean every room. We also thought that the app needed a spot clean function but couldn’t locate one. However, we did like that the mapping data is stored on the D8, rather than in the cloud, as we felt this was more secure.
Cleaning performance was mostly satisfactory, though we found some niggles. It features 5,000pa of suction combined with a single side brush and central brush that promised ‘tangless’ (presumably tangleless) cleaning up of hair, but on both a hard and soft floor, it struggled with larger debris pick-up (we were using oats to represent debris).
In addition, while the Legee D8 recognises soft flooring and picks up its mop, it only does this by 7mm. On a mid-pile carpet, this means the mop pad can still drag, especially if it’s very wet.
We used flour to represent dust pick-up. On the hard floor, this was picked up well. However, on carpet, despite trying the highest suction level, some flour was still left behind, and had to be sucked up by our usual vacuum. However, this is typical of robot vacuums. Hard floor cleaning of wet mess also presented some issues. While the dried-on brown sauce we left on the floor was mostly picked up, there was still stickiness and marks on the floor afterwards. It required two more wet cleans before this was resolved.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
The Legee D8 picks up dirty water as it cleans – however, we noticed that on the deep clean mopping setting, when the mop pad was very wet, it could sometimes leave drips of water behind. Also disappointing was the dirt compacting. A couple of times, we had the alert to empty the bin only to find that it was just half full. In addition, the Legee D8 struggled with low obstacles, such as a fireplace hearth, was prone to sucking up pet toys and other similarly sized items, and became stuck on a doormat more than once.
What we did like was Lulu’s washing capabilities: the rollers it used to clean the D8’s mop pad did so efficiently, and it had heated air to dry them – which can be ceased if there’s no need for it.
Price & Availability
The Hobot Legee D8 is priced at £599 on Amazon. If you want the Lulu service station, you’ll need to buy that as well. It costs £299, also from Amazon. However, if you’re prepared to join Prime, you can get one – or both – for much less. With Prime, the Hobot Legee D8 costs just £399 and the Lulu service station £149 and you can sign up on the product page.
This saving is significant and we think it makes a real difference to whether or not the Legee D8 is worth buying. But if it isn’t the right model for you, have a look at our round-up of the best robot vacuums we’ve tested for more options.
We’ve got information on how you can get a free trial of Amazon’s Prime service and what benefits you’ll get with it.
Should you buy the Hobot Legee D8 and Lulu service station?
The Legee D8 is best thought of as a mopping robot with vacuuming as an addition, especially when you consider the functions of its service station. This makes it more suitable for those with large areas of hard flooring, rather than homes where carpet is king.
It offers a few interesting features: being able to record your own voice prompts is novel, while the mop pad washing is impressively thorough. However, in terms of being fuss-free, it’s not as advanced as some: we spent more time rescuing it and maintaining it than we would have liked.
