Narwal Flow Review

Introduction

It was the Narwal Robot Vacuum & Mop (launched in 2019) that first showed me robots could be brilliant at mopping hard floors. A lot of time has passed since then, but the company shows it’s back on top for mopping with the Narwal Flow, which uses an innovative self-cleaning mopping system.

Pure vacuuming performance is excellent, too, but there are a couple of quirks in the app and the Flow doesn’t deal with deep-pile carpet as well as the competition. But, if you’ve mostly got hard floors and want them scrubbed back to their best, there’s currently nothing better. 

Design and Features

• Self-empty, self-clean dock
• Track mop system
• Slightly quirky app

Robot mops with rollers are becoming more commonplace. Using a similar cleaning system to a hard floor cleaner, these robots put fresh water onto a roller, pick up dirt, and put the dirt into a separate tank. That way, only clean roller ever makes contact with the floor, so there’s not chance of spreading dirt.

With mid-range cleaners, such as the Eufy Omni E25, making roller technology mainstream, what can a company do to stand out? With the Narwal Flow the answer is to improve the mopping system with the track mop.

Rather than a simple roller, the track mop uses a cloth wrapped around a roller system. The difference is that the track roller exposes much more of the cloth to the floor than a roller system does.

That makes the Narwal Flow operate like a roller, in terms of fresh water being added and dirt being removed, and a traditional mop with a large surface area used to agitate dirt.

As well as cleaning where the robot is, the track mop can extend sideways outside of the robot’s body for proper edge cleaning, too. This mopping system is completely different to anything that I’ve seen before.

The mop can lift 15mm off the ground, so the Narwal Flow can move over most short-pile carpets without wetting them. If you’ve got deeper carpets that might get wet, you’ll need a robot that can drop its mop cloths off, such as the Dreame X50 Ultra Complete.

The Narwal Flow can also lift its front off the floor, allowing it climb 3cm high single thresholds, or 4cm high double thresholds. That caters for most thresholds on flat floors.

Narwal uses the self-cleaning dock to wash the mop pads at between 45°C and 75°C, choosing the temperature automatically based on how dirty the cloth is. Hot air drying takes care of the mop pad afterwards, making sure there’s no odour or bacteria build-up.

There’s a 5-litre tank for clean water and a 4.75-litre tank for dirty water. I always clean out/refill at the same time.

Although the Narwal Flow is compatible with detergent, you have to mix this yourself with the clean water tank, as there’s no separate detergent tank. It’s that hard to do, but it is an extra step.

This docking station also takes 2.5-litre bags for dirt, which will hold around 120-days’ worth of dirt. Once full, the self-closing bags pull out and a fresh one slots in.

Back to the robot, there are some other clever touches, too. The main floor brush only connects at one side, so hair is channelled to the non-connected side where it falls off and is sucked up. That’s similar to how the floorhead on the Dyson V16 Piston Animal works.

And the side brushes are V-shaped, but they can swing their two strands together to encourage hair to drop off.

Navigation is handled by the front sensors and dual RGB cameras (AI obstacle detection and avoidance), so there’s no LiDAR dome on top. That means that the Flow can fit under most sofas and sideboards for a deep clean everywhere.

There are controls on top of the robot to start a clean, and also to return the robot to the dock. It’s handy having these.

Flip open the top and there’s the integrated bin, which houses the robot’s main (washable) filter. Narwal thoughtfully supplies a spare filter in the box, too.

Control of the robot is via the Narwal app. Once connected, the Flow needs to go out on a mapping run. This is quick and, once finished, the app makes a guess as to where rooms are. It wasn’t bad, and the robot automatically detected some larger bits of furniture, such as my sofa, but I could easily tweak settings. Rooms can be split and merged, and it’s easy to add no-go (or no-mop) zones if needed.

As the robot goes around it will automatically detect the flooring type, hard floor or carpet. Hard floor detection can be enhanced by setting the type of floor on a per-room basis, such as hard wood floor or tiles, and set the floor alignment, so that the Flow can clean in the direction of the flooring.

I did have an issue in that the Narwal Flow detected part of the hard floor in my kitchen as carpet, so completely avoided a large portion of this floor in mopping mode – exactly where I’d put my test stains.

It’s possible to tell the Narwal Flow to ignore the carpet completely and mop, but only a per-room basis, and there wasn’t an option to delete the detected carpet. Eventually, after a few more runs, the Flow did detect that the floor was in fact not carpet, but it was a little frustrating at first, as the robot kept ignoring the area and wouldn’t mop.

An additional option is to use the Clean option (again on a per-room basis), which uses enhanced suction for cleaning. And, the Flow can also put a guard down to increase suction when on carpet, and aid dust collection.

Cleaning can be done for the entire map, a room (or rooms) of your choice, or with zones. Zones can be drawn on the map, but I could also select a bit of furniture for a quick zone, such as cleaning around a sofa.

Cleaning options are vacuum and mop, vacuum and then mop, vacuum only or mop only. That’s exactly as it should be.

For cleaning, there’s a choice of using Freo Mind, where the robot will automatically adjust its cleaning mode based on the level of direct detect using its AI DirtSense 2.0, or you can customise the clean yourself.

There’s a choice of up to three passes (depending on mode), normal or meticulous cleaning, a choice of four power modes for the vacuum and three mop humidity modes. FreoMind should work well for most homes, but the custom options are useful if you want to tackle a particularly deep stain manually.

Performance

• Incredible mopping
• Good obstacle avoidance
• Powerful vacuuming with the right options

I used my normal dust spillages for testing the Narwal Flow, starting out with the vacuuming tests on carpet. Here, I used a teaspoon of flour placed on the test rug, and then let the Flow have two passes of the area using its Freo Mind setting. Although the robot covered the area well, it left quite a bit of dust behind, and I was hoping for more given the 22,000Pa suction power.

I then edited the map settings and set the Narwal Flow to the clean mode on carpets. I also switched it to manual mode and set the vacuum power to maximum and for a meticulous clean. 

When I hit the go button, the Narwal Flow told me that it could set itself to Vortex power on the selected floor surface. This time around, the vacuum cleaner did an incredible job, cleaning up every last bit of dust, leaving the carpet visibly clean. That’s incredible performance.

Next, I moved on to the hard floor tests. For dust placed in the middle of the floor, the Narwal Flow did brilliantly, collecting everything.

I also added flour to the floor by the kitchen plinth. Although the Narwal Flow has an extendable side brush, it struggled to collect this dust with the vacuum-only mode, and left a lot behind, just swirling it around.

Once I switched to the mopping tests, the Flow managed to deal with the left-over mess and collected most of it.

Next, I moved on to the mopping tests. I had an initial problem that the Narwal Flow had detected part of the hard floor has carpet, so the robot kept skirting around my stains. In the end, I had to tell the cleaner to clean that part of the carpet.

I’m glad that I did, as the Narwal Flow is an incredible mop. Its roller, with its large surface area, made quick work of most of the stains.

My coffee stain was removed instantly, leaving the floor shining.

I found that the same was true for my red wine stain, which was lifted from the floor with ease. 

My mud stain was also easily removed; the vacuuming test had removed the solid particles, and the mop picked up the ground-in stain.

My ketchup test is the hardest for any robot, but the Narwal Flow was hugely impressive. Two passes removed everything bar a tiny stain, which a third pass easily removed. That’s easily the best I’ve seen from any robot vacuum cleaner.

Using the Narwal Flow at home on my light-tiled floor, which suffers from three cats coming and going, I was really impressed. After a three-pass intensive mop, the floor looked as though I’d spend a lot of time tackling it with a hard floor cleaner.

Hair’s no problem for this robot either. Adding strands of human hair to the floor, I found that the Narwal Flow picked up everything and not a single strand was caught around the main brush bar or the side ones.

I measured the Narwal Flow at 65.9dB, which is pretty good for a robot vacuum cleaner. You can here it going around, but it’s not so distracting that you can’t be in th same room as it.

Battery life is as good as I’ve come to expect from high-end robot vacuum cleaners. Even set to two passes of vacuuming, set by two mopping passes, the Narwal Flow had enough battery power to managed the entire Trusted Reviews Home Tech Lab, with power enough for some spot jobs.

Should you buy it?

FAQs