Seemed to really work. Had a huge issue with pet hair but had nit connected the dots on the real problem. Thx

lol thank you. :) It works great for everything else, just not hair. My guess is that they built it this way to perform better in tests with artificial “dirt” like beads, cereal and jellybeans. The kind most reviewers use to measure emptying effectiveness.

You're welcome. Just a word of caution...this fix only worked until my dog started shedding, then it was too much for the bin again. What I ended up doing was having it clean one room at a time (in the schedule) so that it returned to empty itself each time. That fixed it...mostly. I still find clogs, both with one port closed and both ports open, but a lot less often.

@@MrRoombato Thank you! Tape works great, but with a large shedding dog the per room schedule was what I was looking for. Now it empties between each zone/room. If only the app was better thought out.

@@cdevans01 If only a lot of things with that robot. :)

Ecovacs needs to do a lot of things. At this point I'm not holding my breath.

Glad to help!

thank you for the information!

This totally helps. You don't even need to unscrew it. Just get some foam/plastic from your packages and make it large enough to stay stuck in the hole that was blocked off section. Make sure its tight enough to not get sucked in and clog the emptying bin and push it in enough so theres space for the bin flap to open when emptying.

Just keep in mind depending on other factors, it may degrade performance overall. For me, it turned not to be effective long term because of how much my dog sheds, so I had to augment it with setting up the schedule so that it would clean each room individually (and return to the dock each time).

@@MrRoombato So, are you doing a scheduled area cleaning (e.g., do room A at 8:00, return; then do room B at 8:30, return; etc.?). Thanks for the advice. The scary thing is that the robot is finding dirt and hair I didn't know existed, and I'm cleaning way more behind it just to make sure the next go around is less strenuous. I think for the first several passes though, your hack works well to get the clumps, and then I will remove the tape. Thanks again.

@@jefskott99 Yes, that's what I mean. For me, none of it ultimately worked. Once my dog starts shedding, the bin can't handle it no matter what I do.

Well, actually... :) This doesn't fix it. It still gets clogged up, it just takes longer. It's a really, really shitty bin for pet hair. What worked for me was changing my schedule from cleaning a large area (several rooms) at once to cleaning one or two rooms per scheduled event. That way it returns to the bin and empties itself more often.

@@MrRoombato would you recommend a different one for households with more pet hair than average?

@@itstvil It's really hard to recommend anything right now. iRobot has by far the best auto-empty dock, but their navigation and mapping suck and they scratch floors. Ecovacs has the best robots, the worst auto-empty docs and the buggiest dumbest app. Roborock has the best apps and used to make great robots that couldn't clean carpets well but haven't even released their auto-empty bin, and their new brush and brush/housing design scratches floors. The Neabot N1 is good, does everything well, but has no google/alexa commands other than start/stop and there are no aftermarket filters (that I could find, and the factory ones are expensive). Maybe the new Neabot Q11 will be great? I dunno. Right now I don't even know what to recommend. I would buy the Neabot N1 (it's about 400 with the auto-empty bin) and be happy with that until something better came out. It seems that all of the companies suck at different things and if you just combine them all into one you could have a great robot. There are rumors that Ecovacs and iRobot have entered into some sort of unholy alliance and that sounds really promising, but the downside is they are both using floor scratching rubber brushes and floor scratching floating down pressure brush housings. I am starting to hate vacuum robots. :) Maybe just get an i7+, clean the brushes often and just forget about lidar.

I'm sorry you have to go through that. It's a horrible bin design.

@@MrRoombato I did this for 2 days but now when my robot automatically empties the dust bin light turns red and the lid of the bin pops open.

Don't try longer than your return window. :)

I'm glad it works for you!

You are welcome! Glad it helped.

Hair would get caught on the wall and tangle the brush, I think. I actually considered trying it and that was why I didn't.

So the robot itself is great with pet hair and human hair. You do have to clean it every now and then but not nearly as often as most LIDAR robots. However...the self-empty dock is complete garbage if you have pet hair. So if you are buying just the robot, great. With the dock? Look elsewhere.

Thanks!

I'm not sure I understand...can you explain a bit more?

In this video, you tape the bin to cover up one side right? Instead of tape full of that side, we just need to tape half of it. Ex: You taped the left side, but for the few times the debris from left side doesn't GET out enough. Instead of blocking the air to help them get off, why don't we just make it slower ( or weaker air to get out ). It will help the the solid, small debris from left side get out through there. Also, it is not strong enough to push thick pet hair and dusts to separate them out.

@@MrRoombato I'm not good at explaining, sorry about it.

@@voxgaming2064 Now that is interesting!! And will probably work better. Unfortunately I don't use the T8 anymore, I just got too fed up with it. If I did, I'd definitely try it. Thank you!

@@MrRoombato what robot vacuum do you use now if you don't mind me asking?

My pleasure!

If the self-empty dock and the robot were packaged separately, then the robot will come with its own charging dock/station. That's the little thing. It won't be able to find it on a different floor unless it starts there and figures out its in a different area/map, which they are not the best at doing.

I think the problem you'd run into is hair getting stuck on the divider as it goes in. But maybe not. If you try it, please let me know how it works out.

@@MrRoombato usually if I run the vacuum suction twice it and sucks out everything but today was a great example of how it didn’t work as I hadn’t run the vacuum for over a week. your analysis of the hair creating too strong of a bond to go either left or right is spot on.

Thanks man! I'll do that now. KZfaq says I don't need tags if my keywords are in the title or the description...do they lie?

@@MrRoombato I could be wrong but I feel like they help.

@@AdamsReviews Well I guess they can't hurt! I'm going to retrofit everything with tags. Thanks for the tip!

I don't know. Maybe? This solution didn't really work for pet hair either...not once my dog started shedding. It's just a terrible bin design. But your solution may be the key. If you try it, please let me know how it works.

@@MrRoombato I will. What I have found to work a little better is to set multiple cleaning zones on a schedule. Becuase after each cleaning is complete it will go and empty itself.

@@AndrewMcSpadden Yep, that was the last thing I tried. It worked for a few days and then I started finding the robot's dust bin full of dog hair almost every day. Contrast that the to the Neabot Q11 or Dreametech Z10, which both empty their bins completely and flawlessly every day even during shedding season.

Before you try taping one of the holes closed (that has yielded mixed results in long term testing), try setting the robot to clean one room at a time, so that it returns to the bin after every room (or two). That did the trick for me.

@@MrRoombato How do you set it to clean one room at a time and return to the bin? I could make a schedule that cleans one room, so you make as many schedules as you have rooms. Is that it? If so, how do you choose what time to pick for each room/schedule? Does it just queue up multiple jobs so I can set them all to the same start time?

@@neilmouneimne5451 That's it. I don't know if it will queue up jobs, but I think it won't. I just set the times 30 minutes apart. Or I used to, back when this thing was my "daily driver." Even so, the self empty bin couldn't always keep up my dog's hair and I often found the dust bin clogged.

Yes, definitely.

Glad it worked!

LOL! I used to, but now I think there may actually be something to it. Of course it's probably just wishful thinking. I don't think they have any sensors to determine that stuff. Though often, when it prompts me to clean the filter, I find a hair clog in there, so I wonder...

@@MrRoombato pretty sure it's just a prompt that reminds you every 30 hours of use or something

@@DanRichardson You're probably right, and I used to be convinced of this, but lately, I'm not so sure. It's probably a coincidence, but the clog thing has been uncanny.

Well most of that will end up wrapped around the brush. :P But yes, it will work for that too.

They will not say anything, as I seriously doubt they watch my channel. After all, I have videos titles "Angry Ecovacs Rant" and such. :) Yeah, I've been doing it for a while too...great minds think alike! It only recently occurred to me to make a video about it.

I actually thought about posting about it, however they do watch my channel. But it’s good info to get out there.

@@Hotsparks66 I don't hate Ecovacs. Far from it. The T8 AIVI, despite its numerous issues that Ecovacs refuses to fix, is still my favorite vacuum robot. If Ecovacs wants to reach out to me at any point, I'd be happy to review any new products they release. But I'm not going to lie about them. And I'm not going to sugar coat the truth about their flaws so as not to anger them. They make the best robots on the market (the physical robots themselves) with some of the worst programming and worst app of any of the major players. If they don't like that, they can change it.

@@MrRoombato I agree. How long have you been doing reviews?

@@MrRoombato OMG, 😱 thank you so much. Would you please start a FB page? The Ecovac fanboy mob gets so upset if you say anything critical about the product, and group owners stand on the sidelines with a blind eye to it all, censoring legitimate concerns. My wife and I had the exact problem. I saw it brought up on a FB group, and the solution, if you can believe this was to vacuum one room at a time. I called ecovac, and they tell me that auto clean cannot be used, the room split feature is not intended for splitting rooms, and to set up custom cleanings to clean two areas and clean the entire house this way daily. They have doubled down on this as they just launched another vacuum brand using this design. This is a leading robot vacuum company? RR didn't clean carpet and were made for the EU and Asian countries with rugs and very little pet hair.. They told me that the gearing by FW design is intended to stall to deal with main brush motor burn out warranty claims, which drove them to rubber brushes. Ecovacs makes great robot hardware, but my word, the bin is terrible, and the software... Wow... Their support is the worst... They will never send you a product because they can't trust you to lie for them... Aside from Adam, who also does not get a ton of free products, you are the only one being honest about the products... well, cordless vacuum reviews are pretty fair.

It's a mixed bag, to be honest. If what it picks up is mostly pet hair it works great. If there is too much other stuff mixed in, it could lead to a clump. I suggest letting it clean every day and see how it does once it picks up most of the hair. For my T8, I am going to cover one whole when my border collie is shedding, and uncover it when he's not.

Yeah, if you have a LOT of pet hair, it won't do it. The bin really sucks. What I ended up doing was changing my nightly cleaning schedule so that it cleans only one or two rooms at a time. That way, it returns to the bin after each job and empties, then does the next job in the schedule. That's actually been working great for me. I even took out this mod to see if it would still work, and it does.

I did block 1 hole from inside like your, plus block 1 hole with tape on the bin, and reschedule by areas. Let's see it working well this week. Anyway,thanks for your video bro, keep up ur work.

@@kamediavlog7164 I hope it works for you! If it does, try removing the tape and see how it works with both openings. While it does do better with hair with only one (still not good enough though!), it does better overall with two. My dogs shed like crazy and so far, doing one room at a time has worked perfectly without this mod.

So...the thing in this vid made it better, but not better enough that it didn't cause the same problem (just not as quickly). The only thing I found that works, with or without this mod, is to run your scheduled cleaning one room at a time. So a different event for every room. That way, it returns to the dock after every room. Since I did that, I never had this issue.

@@MrRoombato Wow, thanks! You're the man!

@@cdog4656 my pleasure

@@MrRoombato it's funny I've one cat, and would never think that's enough to cause this kind of problem. But it does. I've plugged in your system now and looking forward to seeing how it works 👍

Good luck!