Narwal Flow review: Masterful mopping

Can one annoying thing turn you off an otherwise excellent product? That’s the question I find myself asking with the Narwal Flow.

The Narwal Flow is arguably the best robot vacuum cleaner I have tested.

I don’t say that lightly. I’ve reviewed a lot of robot vacuums over the past few years, and there’s a lot that I really like about the Narwal. Its mopping is second to none, and its mapping is also fantastic.

But it has a tendency to randomly beep when it’s in the dock. Just a single, loud chirrup. There are no notifications or alerts that something is amiss. There’s no way to turn off the sound. I don’t even know what it’s trying to tell me.

But at all hours of the day – random hours, I might add – the Flow will beep at me. 

And it’s driving me crazy. It has made writing this review a much harder proposition than if I was purely writing about its performance. Because it’s a pretty great cleaner.

But the beeping, man. It’s driving me crazy.

What makes the Narwal Flow stand out?

Narwal’s latest flagship is all about the mopping. It has a track-style mopping pad that looks like the roller in the Deebot X8 from Ecovacs, except it’s a rectangular shape rather than round. 

This design seems to deliver the goods. Narwal says that it uses 45ºC heated water on your floors, while applying 12 N of downward force to scrub up stubborn stains properly.

All I can tell you is that after the Flow has flown through my home, the floors look and feel better than any other robot vacuum has left them.

On the vacuum front, there’s 22,000 Pa of suction, which is up there with other flagships, and the base station comes with a 2.5 L dustbin so you should be able to go months before you have to really get in there and touch any of the dirty stuff.

At $2,999 RRP, this is a flagship unit targeted towards people wanting the best possible robot vacuum. But so far, I think it makes the best possible case for that asking price.

Narwal Flow Specs

Design and build quality

Narwal doesn’t truly change the formula too much on the design front. The Flow is a circular-shaped robot vacuum in white that comes with a short white and grey base station. 

There’s no protruding “head” part, with the vacuum instead using sensors and cameras around its body to navigate. 

But the key difference is the mop. I’ve not seen a mop like this before, and I think Narwal has hit on a winning design here. 

The mop has a track design… It’s like the rounded roller mop in the Ecovacs Deebot X8, but instead of being round, it’s shaped like an oblong.

This means the Flow gets the benefits of the roller mop, and being able to apply clean water to the mop head and scrape off the dirty water, but also have a flat area in contact with the ground for a more distributed pressure system.

The mop can extend out to the right-hand side of the vacuum as well, allowing it to get right to the edge of your floors and close to furniture, so your floor is thoroughly cleaned every time.

The base station is sleek, sitting fairly low to the ground with a nice curved design that helps it fit into different environments. The top compartment houses the fresh and dirty water tanks, while the front compartment pops off to reveal the station’s 2.5 L dust bag.

Cleaning performance 

The Narwal has given me the best mopping performance in my home of any robot vacuum I’ve tested. While I was a big fan of the X8 Pro Omni, I found it had a tendency to leave behind streaks or marks, particularly as the round roller moved around furniture or corners.

The Narwal Flow leaves my floors impeccably clean and streak free. But more than that, I think it’s mapping and object recognition make it perform better than any other robot vacuum I’ve tested as well. 

I have a round rug under my dining table, and the Flow’s track mop does an impressive job of mopping around the edge without mounting the rug and washing the carpet.

The Flow does come with a small bottle of cleaning solution in the box, but there aren’t really instructions on how much to use — you simply pour some into the clean water tank when you fill it up.

In the next generation, I’d love to see this automated.

From a vacuuming perspective, the Narwal has the potential to do a fantastic job, but I have had mixed results. 

On the default “Smart” Suction power setting for the AI cleaning mode, I found that the vacuum didn’t suck enough while vacuuming and mopping together. Larger crumbs were left scattered around my floors after the vacuum has done its job.

But the Flow offers 22,000 Pa of suction. By switching it over to more manual control of the cleaning settings and setting the suction power to “Strong” for a clean, I was able to get the Flow to pick up all the crumbs and dust during a clean.

Carpets, meanwhile, got a deep, thorough clean every time with the “Intensive Carpet Clean” option set. Even after weeks of testing, the main brush hasn’t really tangled on longer hair, which is also a massive win in my books.

The obstacle avoidance is also exceptional. Using its cameras and sensors, the Flow gets right up close to objects to clean near them without getting caught. Narwal says the Flow can detect 200 different objects to avoid them. In my testing, it all seems to work really well.

Ease of use 

The Narwal Flow is easy to set up and control. The Narwal Freo app gives you pretty comprehensive control over the different settings and rooms you want to clean.

Mapping your home is something I have found many robot vacuums I’ve tested struggle with, but the Narwal Flow’s map is probably the best I’ve experienced. It accurately broke apart each of my 3-bedroom home’s rooms and living areas, so I didn’t need to spend a lot of time customising the rooms.

It didn’t completely nail the floor types in the house’s carpeted bedrooms, unfortunately, which means that in its AI cleaning mode, it tries to go in to mop small sections near the mirror that it “thinks” is tiled. 

To work around this, I simply put the carpeted rooms on a different vacuum-only schedule to the rest of the house, though I would prefer to be able to tell the software the entire room is carpeted.

You can set up voice control through Alexa, Google Home or Siri through Siri Shortcuts, if you like to talk to your vacuum. You can also remotely control the vacuum and access the camera feed of the vacuum, if you wanted to check on pets or make sure your home is secure while you’re away.

The vacuum and mop will clean themselves after every clean, washing the mop pad in the base station and drying it with hot air. While the cleaning process can be a little noisy, the drying is whisper-quiet – I had it running while the family watched TV and you couldn’t even hear it.

Despite the ease of use, the base station itself does need the occasional clean, which is a little awkward given the narrow entryway of the vacuum itself. 

But on the whole, the Flow is an incredibly simple to control robot vacuum. Set it with a cleaning schedule and leave it to do its job.

Power and battery 

The Narwal Flow has up to 22,000 Pa of suction power, which is up among the best of any robot vacuum today. It also mops with a downward force of about 12 N, so it’s got the guts to do a good cleaning job.

But to do that through an entire house in one sitting requires plenty of battery life, which fortunately, the Flow provides. Even with the intensive carpet clean, the Narwal Flow easily vacuumed and mopped my entire home on a single charge.

However, the Flow did have one slight quirk that really started to drive me crazy. At random times while docked, the vacuum (or dock, I’m not sure which) would let out a loud beep. 

It’s the same beep that happens when the vacuum enters the dock, and discussion online suggest cleaning the charger contacts. But that made no difference to me, and the fact it’s discussed online indicates that there’s some kind of issue here.

Given it happens even in Do Not Disturb mode, and without any indication of a problem in the app, it’s an issue I’d love Narwal to address via a firmware update.

Verdict

The beep. If it weren’t for the random beeping, this vacuum would be an easy recommendation. It has given my home the best clean it’s ever had from a robot vacuum. It’s easy to use. It’s robust. It hasn’t gotten tangled on any cables or clothing left around. 

There are still some areas I think Narwal can improve with the Flow. Its cleaning solution should be automated. Its mapping should allow for changing an entire room’s flooring to carpet. The AI-powered vacuuming probably needs to be recalibrated to do a better job while mopping.

I think, on the sum of it all, I can overlook the random chirrups from the Narwal Flow as it beeps at random times. The cleaning performance is arguably worth it.

But I have to tell you, it’s annoying!

Buy if you:

• Want a flagship robot vacuum with exceptional mopping capabilities
• Want a product you can set up and then largely forget about
• Can’t handle having a robot vacuum that constantly gets tangled.

Skip if you:

• Don’t need comprehensive mopping functions
• You hate the sound of random beeps
• You aren’t looking for a flagship product

Wait for:

• The Narwal Flow is new, and discounted during the launch window. I don’t expect you’ll see a better price this year.

Where to buy

The Narwal Flow has an RRP of $2,999. You can buy it from:

• Narwal
• Harvey Norman

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