I tested the Narwal Flow robot vacuum cleaner and was impressed with its edge-hugging mopping

The Narwal Flow robot vacuum cleaner promises a high-end experience with artificial intelligence and right-to-the-edge roller mopping.

Setting up physically was straightforward and the Narwal Freo app was smooth too. Setting up the Flow, it wisely asked whether I had pets, carpets, stairs (yes to all three) because presumably it can turn off some features and save a few electrons if the answer is no.

It was then perfectly happy to start making a map of the house and didn’t demand bright daylight to do so: it has its own headlight. It mapped well, guessed rooms well and at first I thought it recognised furniture well too. Later I realised that this was more guesswork.

But its AI is usually right about things. It claims to recognise more than 200 objects; it certainly knew that the shoes on my back doormat were shoes.

I found the map better than the Dreame. Editing it and dividing and combining rooms was easy and I could see them as a flat map or 3D. It’s compellingly easy: I had to remind myself it’s not The Sims and it doesn’t need every detail.

That said, one time the app presented me with a screen that was entirely in Chinese. I backed away from it, like Homer Simpson into a hedge, and we never spoke of it again.

The Narwal Flow set about vacuuming first. I set it to do one room at a time. It did each quickly and then returned to base for instruction. So I set it to mop the living room.

Mopping was very impressive. There’s a roller mop just behind the middle of the Narwal Flow, so it doesn’t reach right to the edge… but it can slide out to each side. I was amazed to see not only shiny, mopped clean floors but also to watch it in action. As the vac approached the side of the room, the mop would slide out to go very close to the edge. The result was mopping so thorough that a human would be proud. The machine returned to its base and cleaned its pads.

And then I messed up. I like to sprinkle baby powder on my kitchen floor. It’s not a kink; it’s to thoroughly test vacuums. But I was far too liberal with it this time. The room was antiqued.

I set the Narwal Flow, via the map on the app, to vacuum and then mop the kitchen, but it couldn’t cope. It came to the right area and did lots of little passes but it wasn’t as methodical as the Dreame. It only vacuumed about half the kitchen (which at least smelled great…).

It returned to mop which left floors clean and shining, but like the vacuuming, areas were missed. It did venture to the trickier end but it seemed to spend a lot of time pottering around, questioning its choices. To anthropomorphise, I’d say it was scratching its head, thinking “this isn’t right, I didn’t vacuum that bit yet, so why am I mopping it?”

It returned to metaphorically scratch its head a few times. It cleaned multiple times and the results did improve. But the cleaning was imperfect and it certainly wasn’t methodical enough. Didn’t the Narwal Flow know what it had missed? Couldn’t it see which areas were still dirty?

Later, I asked it to mop the dining room and kitchen again. Mopping on the same floor as the base station is a breeze because it can return to base as many times as it wants for fresh, gurgling hot water.

The thing about robot vacuums is that they’re quiet, inobtrusive and they eventually get everywhere. So it doesn’t matter than it got stuck under a chair for a while, all that matters is that it got back out again. It had some bumps under the dining table too, but it found its way out of the forest of chrome legs eventually. And over time it did indeed clean up my baby powder problem.

It says it has a built-in “HeyNawa” voice assistant but I found voice commands wouldn’t work until it was paired with a voice assistant such as Alexa, Google Assistant or Siri.

I took the machine upstairs and set it mapping two other floors of the house.

It mapped the first floor swiftly, didn’t fall down the stairs and managed the 20mm lip up to the bathroom just fine. Though the map always thought there was a base station on this floor and I couldn’t persuade the app otherwise.

Sadly it stopped cleaning that floor, claiming ‘pet interference’ which sounded all too believable. But when I tried again the next day it kept getting lost on that floor. It would trundle up and down the hall, looking for rooms that were right in front of it.

In the loft, it must have looked in the mirror and hallucinated a whole extra room that I don’t have. But to its credit, the Narwal handled the 20mm step up into the bathroom with ease.

The Narwal recognised the rug in the loft bedroom. On first inspection, I was disappointed that it hadn’t been vacuumed. Then I realised that it had been mapped as a rug and the precautionary principle was exercised: it was marked to be traversed but not vacuumed. I manually marked it as ok to vacuum, tried again and it worked, hurray.

The experience was much better than the Dreame in that the Narwal could look around and tell which floor it was on. It told me to take it to the right floor and then it told me when it needed carrying back to base. This worked best if I set it to only vacuum or mop, not both. I could take it to the base and it would prepare a hot, wet mop ready for action.

This is an expensive robot vacuum and I expect perfection from it. I didn’t quite get perfection. But with a bit of practice to get the other floors running smoothly, this could get pretty close.

The main thing I learned though: don’t tip half a bottle of baby powder on your kitchen floor.

Caramel Quin Contributor

About

Caramel is an award-winning journalist, engineering graduate and professional nerd who tests a wide range of consumer technology. She was on the team that launched Stuff in 1996. She also worked on the magazine’s 1999 US launch. Caramel has been freelance ever since. She prides herself on real-world testing and understanding geek speak, translating it into plain English. Her pet hates are jargon, pointless products and over-complicated instruction manuals.