This is one of the few review proposals that I had to get permission from my better half for … and frankly, she told me no, but I did it anyway.
You see, my wife is extremely hard-headed in an old-school “it’s my way or the highway” sense. She’s also the antithesis of me in terms of embracing technology of any sort. She has a smartphone, but good luck getting ahold of her. And only in the last few weeks, as she’s started her own garden for the first time, has she used AI on purpose to look up gardening tips. We also have three small children, a poodle small enough to be a squirrel, and live blocks from the beach. Neither of us had ever had a robovac before.
All this is to say she was absolutely adamant about sweeping, vacuuming, and mopping her own floors and not leaving it to an inferior robot.
At least once a day, the vacuum would come out for a whole-home session that would take her an hour or so when all was said and done. Moving chairs, rugs, children’s toys, etc. And at least once a week, the mop would come out after the vacuum, also taking her an additional hour. Not to mention all the spot cleanups from a less-than-one-year-old deciding that crushing her Goldfish snacks is way more fun than eating them, never mind the three and four year old’s antics … and the sannnnnd.
JS @ New Atlas
Why didn’t I pitch in and help, you ask? Well, obviously, because I don’t do a good enough job, and she’ll just end up cleaning behind me, wasting both of our time. I’m sure, whether you’re a man or woman reading this right now, you understand exactly what I’m talking about. Husbands are also inferior house cleaners.*
The short version:
Wife is pleased. Very much pleased, in fact. She now vacuums, at most, once a week, and she mops, also at most, once a month now. This awesome little robovac-mop is literally shaving a full workday a week off her already insane I’m-a-mom schedule. And this pleases me.
It’s a solid 9.5/10 on the vac-scale and also a 9.5/10 on the mop-scale.
The long version:
I waited until she’d left for the grocery store to unbox it and set it up. It took me 15 minutes, at most, to get the base station put together and ready for action. After clicking in the Narwal’s “whisker-sweeper,” I chucked it into the dock and let it charge up a little while I made sure the floor was clear of any obstacles and opened all the doors inside. Maybe 10 minutes later, I paired it up with the app on my phone and followed the prompt that unleashed the beast into the wild to fend for itself.
It disembarked from the dock, did a little 360-spin, then just started going. It zigged and zagged all over the kitchen, pausing for more 360s now and then, before moving from room to room, repeating the pirouette-process. For some reason, I was surprised when it went under the bed in the bedroom as it auto-mapped out our house.
JS @ New Atlas
It took all of 25-30 minutes to fully build out its map of our ~1,250-sq-ft (~116-m²) house – far less time than any cat I’ve ever had as a pet before. And as quickly as it started, it happily announced it was done and charging. The app showed my entire floor layout with surprising accuracy, even having auto-labeled every room correctly and with little notes where it had seen power cords or shoes on the ground. Again, for some reason, I was surprised by all this.
Overall impressions:
It’s been nearly two months since firing up the Narwal for the first time. In that time, we’ve experienced exactly one issue with it. It refused to go into the bathroom for some reason for the first few weeks. After I assured it there were no crocodiles in the toilet (there was also a firmware update), it suddenly wasn’t scared anymore and would just as eagerly vacuum and mop the bathroom as any other room.
Per my logs, we’ve tasked it 102 times for a total of just under 43 hours of work, cleaning over 18,500 sq ft (1,719 m²) of area. In that time, I’ve refilled the freshwater tank three or four times (also simultaneously emptying out the dirty water), and that’s it. It very efficiently uses water for mopping. I’ve flipped the robovac over three times to check sensors, brush, mop head, etc., and only once did I have to pull out a small wad of hair. But even then, it wasn’t wrapped around the brush like with a traditional vacuum. It was just kind of sitting there, waiting to be plucked.
JS @ New Atlas
The Narwal Flow 2 is just sooo easy.
Robovac specs at a glance:
- Suction: up to 30,000 Pa (that’s a lot)
- Battery: 7,000 mAh Li-ion (after whole-house vac/mop, ~55% battery remaining)
- Runtime: ~190 min (my house isn’t 190 minutes long)
- Obstacle avoidance: dual 1080p RGB cameras + AI/VLM object recognition
- Mop system: rolling/crawler mop with real-time self-cleaning
- Mop pressure: 12 N downward pressure (that’s basically 2.6 lb / 1.2 kg)
- Hot-water mop washing: up to 158 °F (70 °C)
- Anti-tangle floating brush and side brush
- Robot dimensions: ~13.8 x 14.3 x 3.7 in (35.1 x 36.3 x 9.4 cm)
- Dock dimensions: ~17.7 x 14.1 x 20.8 in (45.0 x 35.8 x 52.8 cm)
- Robot weight: ~11 lb (5 kg)
- Cleaning modes – vacuum only, mop only, simultaneous vac and mop, vac then mop
- Pet recognition
- AI dirt detection (it actually works too)
- Adaptive suction/water flow
- Remote video/pet monitoring
- Edge mop extension
There’s almost an overwhelming number of options in the app. I used to like lots of buttons, but now I just want things simple. That’s the only negative thing I have to say about the package as a whole. But realistically, the buttons make sense and genuinely serve a purpose.
For example, sometimes the little robovac would get confused at the line separating my office and the dining room, where I have a tallish threshold that separates the two rooms. The button that says “I promise, little Narwal, there are NO steps in my house that you’re going to fall down,” gave it the confidence to just use its little “Mach 5 ejector wheels” (yes, I know the Mach 5 used jacks to jump with) to lift itself over the threshold without hesitation. It can to little pushups! I grin every single time I see it.
I love the feature that prioritizes keeping the carpets dry when you’re vac/mopping. When enabled, it’ll make sure to avoid traversing carpeting with a wet mop. Little things like that make this unit devilishly clever. It even has a “find my pet” mode so you can live-stream its chase of your poor animals directly to your phone. I don’t use that feature, but it has it.
JS @ New Atlas
The Flow 2 has voice command capabilities, along with working with Matter, Alexa, and Google Home. “Hey Nawa!” and it’ll respond. Maybe because my wife and I have thick Californian-American accents, it often doesn’t understand what we’re saying – which frustrates her, but it doesn’t bother me, as I just tap-tap my instructions on the app anyway … or maybe it’s because we haven’t bothered to learn the explicit commands it uses. But it has the ability!
I also appreciate that in the app, it tells you the levels of wearable and consumable parts, like dust bags, filters, and sensors. It doesn’t report the level of mopping detergent it has left, but it will tell you when it’s empty, or so I’ve heard. We haven’t run out in the 55 days it’s been running around my house.
Dock functions at a glance:
- Auto dust emptying
- Hot-water mop washing
- Hot-air drying
- Detergent dispensing
- Optional refill/drain kit
- Noise: <60 dBA
Also, regarding detergent, you’re sort of locked into the Narwal ecosystem on that aspect. If you use something other than a Narwal product, it could void your warranty should something go awry. And from my experience so far, the small cleaning solution tank does last a long time, but it’s incredibly difficult to get more product. I’m a big fan of Amazon because of how convenient it is, but even there, a 31.5-oz (895-ml), $30 bottle (ouch) of floor cleaner is a month-long wait. There are a number of people reporting having successfully used other products in their Flow units, but I’m not taking any chances and I’m not advocating doing so … buuut …
Nawa, the lil robovac, has a pet-friendly mode that I enabled first thing. I’m not sure if that means Nawa is friendly to its personal pets, or if it simply doesn’t like my dog. My 5-lb poodle has been the subject of many gentle nudges to move out of the way so that Nawa can vacuum underneath her. Never a full battering-ram-type hit … so maybe that’s what friendly means in Nawanian?
JS @ New Atlas
The thing is quiet for the most part, too. When it’s out and about, sometimes it’ll sneak up on you. It has adaptive suckage, so in areas that it detects are already clean, it won’t engage turbine-mode and will just do normal sucky things. The second it sees the beach sand that’s continuously tracked through my front door, it spools up, for sure. If the house is quiet, I can, just barely, hear it on the other side of the house when it’s going full-boogie – but I also have a fairly open floor plan and either hardwood or large tile flooring throughout the entire house, so everything is louder than it would be if you had carpet. When Nawa returns to the dock, it’ll pause just in front of it and go into some double-self-cleaning process where it’ll ramp up to what sounds like 100% power for a moment, dock, then ramp up to 100 again as it empties itself into the dock. It’s a ~20 second process, but feels like an eternity when the baby is napping.
After every vac or mop, the dock will also go into a self-cleaning/drying mode, which I very much appreciate. Depending on the setting you choose (I pretty much leave everything set to “smart”), the dock will quietly blow continuous air through the dust bin or Nawa’s mop to dry everything and keep its little home bacteria-free – or as free as it could be, I suppose – until it’s dry.
I have tried to mess with it too. Moving chairs or objects around, in its way, making mazes, back out of its way, and every time, it figures it out. And it seems like it remembers too, as when the coast is clear, it’ll go back and clean up the area I’d blocked it from. This thing is genuinely awesome.
All in all, I’m super stoked about the Flow 2. Frankly, I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without such a thing – granted the Flow 2 is very flagship with all the bells and whistles. I’m especially happy that the wife is happy about it too. For her to admit that Nawa does a good job absolutely floored me. Nawa picking up the slack and almost completely taking over vac/mop duties has freed up a ton of time for Wife, and now she has more free time to do other fun things, like cook or do dishes.*
Product page: Narwal Flow 2 or Amazon
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*tongue-in-cheek
