Narwal's flagship self-cleaning wet/dry robot vacuum is on sale for Black Friday. We've spent several months with the Narwal Flow, and while it doesn't offer any spectacular party tricks, it's the smartest, best-performing robovac we've seen.
The march of progress continues in the home automation space. The robots get cheaper and better, their designs begin to converge on what works best, and at some point, it becomes intelligence that separates the best of the best from the pack.
Judging on intelligence alone, the Narwal Flow is the best such machine I've tested, out of half a dozen different high-end units. I'm not sure that's a measurable metric, it's more like a feeling; I just don't see this robot doing as much dumb stuff as the others, and despite the absolute war zone of a home it's been given to clean, it's also the best I've ever seen at staying out of trouble and finishing the job.
It still eats the odd charging cable or sock, mind you, but that's becoming vanishingly rare – maybe a once-weekly event – thanks to stereo high-definition cameras, onboard AI with enough grunt to run 10 trillion operations per second (TOPS), and the ability to recognize, tag and avoid more than 200 different objects. In our disastrous mess (don't let the photos fool you, we live like barnyard animals), that means each cleaning cycle drops "rogue item" icons all over the floor map in the app for a depressing debriefing session.
Specs-wise, it impresses off the bat with 22,000 Pa of suction – there are others out there that beat this now, but a year ago that would've been a ludicrous figure. Twin side brushes feed a single-side mounted roller brush underneath – this is a super-effective design for long hair, which tends to get wrapped around rollers that mount at both sides. We have a lot of long hair in our house, and it simply isn't an issue with Narwal's design. Not once in several months have I had to untangle hair from the roller brush; that can be a monthly duty with other units.
The mop is a big, flat roller design as well, mounted on a carriage-style design that extends out sideways like an old-school typewriter head. Between this and the side brushes, the Flow does a great job of cleaning to the edges and into the corners.
There's no two ways about it: the dock for this one is an absolute beast of a thing, it's pretty huge. But it washes and dries the mop roller, self-adjusting the temperature of the wash up as high as 80 °C (176 °F) according to what kind of mess it's been mopping up. It also sucks the dust out of the robot's dustbin into a 2.5-liter disposable bag that Narwal claims is good for four months of regular cleaning, and does some mysterious kind of disinfection routine on the plastic dust canister in the robot.
It doesn't have an automatic detergent dispenser – but it does come with a bottle of detergent to add to the clean water tank as you fill it up, and in my view that should be mandatory with every robovac given how much they cost. As with previous Narwal Freo robots I've tested before, it does tend to go through water pretty quickly – but that's not because it's trying to mop the carpets; it lifts its mop up and out of the way while vacuuming. And while you do need to empty and refill the water canisters fairly regularly, the grime in the dirty water tank makes it pretty clear that it's not wasting its time.
Watching it in action, the Flow gives an air of purpose as it assesses a space and gets down to business. It rarely seems lost, or attempts to scale Mt. Laundry, or rolls out the back door and down the steps. It feels like a step-change in intelligence, and flat-out just cleans the house better and smarter than anything I've tested before.
When it sees a mess it thinks might be sticky or soggy, it turns around and backs over it mop-first, so the side brushes don't get glooped up, and it does seem to pay attention to how good of a job it's doing, going over the worst bits several times and hitting carpets from two different directions to rough up the fibers in different ways. Smart!
So let's get down to complaints, because there's still some things I'd change about the Flow, for sure. For starters, carpets. I'm not sure about your part of the world, but wall-to-wall carpets are still pretty common here, and while the Flow does actually do a great job vacuuming these rooms, by default it's set to avoid them altogether. That seems silly to me, but it's only a small settings change.
Then there's the dust canister and dock self-emptying design. Narwal has built this robot with a removable, bent plastic tube in its guts that serves as the dust canister. Upon returning to base, it runs its vacuum in reverse to blow debris out through a hole in the bottom of the robot, which links to a complex-shaped channel running up to the dust bag in the dock.
This is all well and good in normal operation, but when things go wrong – which does occasionally happen, like when it eats a bulky piece of garbage on the floor, this arrangement can get clogged up. And it's really not designed to be easily cleaned out; you've got to poke something through the dust canister to push all the junk through, or else pop the top off this canister in a way that feels like you're going to break it, then stick it back on, which is fiddly and annoying. This should be a simple push-button lid catch.
And if things get stuck in the base station, you've got to dig them out of the hole and hope they're not stuck further up the tube running up to the dust bag, because you'd have to push a 15-inch-long (40-cm) pipe cleaner through there to clear that whole tube.
What else, while I'm having a whinge? Well, I do wish it would engage max suction as it backs into its dock, because sometimes it leaves the dock looking dirtier than the floor it's just cleaned. And I also wish that disposable dust bag was a reusable one with a zip to empty it, because I struggle with the concept of buying consumables, and will inevitably end up emptying this thing with chopsticks when the bag gets full.
Then there's the power/home buttons on top – these could do with lights in them. Narwal has given the Flow a handy little headlight that lets it operate, cameras and all, in dark rooms. That's great, but if you need to go in and restart it for some reason, you can't see where the buttons are or which is which without the lights on.
I've actually had three Narwal Flow units running here over the last several months – two wouldn't self-empty, which we eventually worked out was because they were USA-specific 110-V units that didn't get along with the 240-V wall sockets here in Australia. Whoops! On the correct model, everything worked out of the box as you'd expect.
All the robovacs I've tested thus far have been a darn sight better than trundling around the house doing the job manually like some sort of savage. All have had their foibles, and all have required some help from time to time. The Narwal Flow is the best robovac I've laid hands on to date, with the fewest foibles and the street smarts to stay out of trouble even in a complex and chaotic environment. Narwal's one-sided main brush excels in long-hair zones, and the company can be proud of what it's achieved with the Flow's onboard AI and vision systems.
The Narwal Flow retails for US$1,499, which puts it right up there at the premium end, alongside flagship models from other manufacturers – but it's currently some US$500 cheaper at US$999 in the lead-up to Black Friday, which makes it a nice pickup. Smart home robotics may not yet be at the Rosie the Robot stage, but they're improving out of sight in the age of AI. There's never been a better time to be lazy with the housework!
Check out a video below:
Source: Narwal
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