As I noted yesterday, this is a darn good robot mop/vacuum, and my home has never felt this clean with any other robot before. So let’s get into it…

When it comes to mapping out your home, Carl the Fourth is pretty darn smart. Like all devices now, it’s got “AI onboard” which means it can “see” objects and obstructions far better than older vacuums. Instead of mucking about by bumping into everything over and over, the Narwal Flow 2 using twin sensors to get a 3-D view of your home…

The initial mapping of my home was shockingly fast because Carl just zoomed around sensing where everything is. From the map he makes, I can see how he is seeing my home…

The AI is smart enough to detect objects like phones, cables, fabric, and shoes. I have two pairs of shoes by my door and they were identified easily (albeit in singular instead of plural form)…

Furniture like beds, couches, tables, and even pet feeders(!) are recognized and marked on the map. The problem is that they are not marked on the map correctly. Here’s the map that Carl made of my home…

Let’s look closer at my couches…

You can see that the coffee table perfect lines up where Carl cleaned. But the couches? The large couch is shown 2/3 of its length for some reason. But look at the smaller couch. Not only is it drawn massive, it also doesn’t reflect the angle of the actual furniture. This is truly bizarre. Why doesn’t the map representation match what is actually on the map? Maybe this will get better with updates.

When it comes to creating cleaning zones within your house, it’s very difficult. I turn the furniture icons off because they’re not remotely accurate. I would use past mopping data, but it doesn’t show up. All you get is the sensor map… WHICH FADES AWAY WHEN YOU START DRAWING ZONES?!?? They’re barely visible…

Ugh.

Narwal recommends that you first do a full vacuum-only so that any dirt doesn’t interfere with the mopping so I did that. Even though my Roomba had cleaned just two days before, the Narwal Flow 2 came back looking filthy. Which means Carl the Fourth is obviously doing a deeper clean and getting closer to areas which collect dust, cat hair, and cobwebs. This was quite impressive.

I left some cat vomit residue from the previous week because I had gotten a notification that Carl had shipped and was on his way. I wanted to see if he would be able to scrub it up…

The answer is no. Not only did Carl not get them cleaned up, he didn’t even identify them as dirty spots so he would attempt to clean them up. In reviews and the sales promotion, I saw video after video of Carl scrubbing spots clean with the “Smart Stain Detection”… but not here. I don’t know if it’s because my floor is dark wood instead of light wood, but should that really matter when the spots are fully contrasted against the floor? How did all three of these get missed? I sincerely hope that Narwal sends improvements to the Flow 2 in order to upgrade its smarts for stuff like this. I ended up having to wet paper towels and manually wipe them up as usual. Bummer.

The next morning I woke up to find that Jake had tried to hack up a hairball, leaving fresh water vomit dribbled from the dining room to the guest bedroom. So I opened up the Narwal app… drew a box around the area affected… then unleashed Carl and waited to see if the fresh spots would be recognized. Turns out they didn’t need to be. He blazed over them without a second glance, obliterating them easily…

And then… yesterday I woke up to find that one of the cats had done a scarf and barf. So here we go. This is why I got Carl in the first place. Will he think that this is poop and avoid it? Or will he recognize this as cat vomit and attempt to clean it up?

Oh heck yeah! Carl noted the stain, then turned his vacuum on highest speed and attacked it. Going over it again and again until it was gone, then he mopped over it until the floor was clean. Great job, buddy! Though this does worry me a bit. I haven’t had a chance to look at Carl’s undercarriage to find out if there’s cat puke smeared on it. And does this mean if my cats end up pooping on the floor for some reason that he will try to clean it? That’s a good question.

UPDATE: Carl ran through the vomit and got his wheels messy. Not good. Would probably have been easier to clean the vomit than clean these wheels.

The water in the base station is pre-heated in the tank to 140º, which is supposed to give you a better mopping. The problem is that even fresh off the base station, the water Carl leaves behind is not at all hot. Maybe slightly warmer than ambient room temperature. This is disappointing after reading it so prominently in the promo literature, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Where it likely makes a lot of difference is in cleaning the mop head during/after he’s been mopping. Multiple rinses with 140º water is sure to clean the head better than room temperature. For that, I am thrilled, because it addresses one of my biggest problems I had with the Bissell SpinWave robot, which doesn’t clean its spinny pads at all. You have to manually toss them in the wash.

There’s a bigger problem with the spinny pads and vibrating pads and roller pads on other mopping robots, though. They just smear the dirt around with water, and my floors never felt freshly-mopped. The Narwal Flow 2 doesn’t use any of these technologies… Carl instead uses a flat mopping head which has a “rolling track mop” head that rolls around it while constantly being rinsed off and re-wetted. It actually cleans your floors…

Just look at how my SpinWave “cleaned” my floors in comparison…

But here’s something else that’s cool about the mopping… the head can extend outward from the side to get closer to edges than it would if it just stayed underneath the unit. The technology behind the Narwal Flow 2 alone makes it better than any cleaning robot I’ve ever had. After mopping, my floors look as clean as if I hauled out a mop and manually scrubbed them. It’s so amazing to see. I walk on the floors in my bare feet and they feel great. So good that I could never go back to the spinny pads, vibrating pads, and other stuff I had in my other mopping robots.

Time will tell if the notorious hard water where I live is going to build up inside the robot or the base station and ruin them. I toyed with the idea of using distilled water, but that would get very expensive very fast.

As expected for a robot with the advertised suction power, the vacuum is great. But it seems to have a bit of a problem due to the way it sections off your home. Carl understands that the kitchen is a different surface than the dining/living/bedroom area, so it attacks them separately. This is a bit of a problem, because the kitty litter that gets trapped against the transition strip between them doesn’t really get vacuumed for some reason…

There’s an HD camera on board which allows you to look out the front as cleaning is happening. You see what the robot sees…

You’ll note that there’s a directional pad in the lower left where you can manually drive the robot. I haven’t done this yet. It might be fun from a remote-control car standpoint, but if I have to do that in order to vacuum or mop, I’ll just grab my vacuum or mop!

Disclaimer: My home is wall-to-wall hardwood, so I don’t know how well it does on carpet.

So… yeah… love this thing. Hope it gets even better. Let’s sum this up, shall we…

THE GOOD

• The low profile allows the Flow 2 to easily get underneath tables, beds, and toe-kicks.
• The vacuum is great. Suction power is excellent and the edge spinner brush moves dirt from the right side of the robot towards the vacuum brush. Cat kibble that spilled on the kitchen floor were sucked up without issue.
• The mop is excellent. The technology behind what Narwal is doing is far, far superior to any other mopping robots I’ve used. The flat surface, constant cleaning, and ability to extend outward to clean everywhere it remarkable.
• The camera system is pretty good for fresh stains. Carl noted the cat vomit and cleaned it up. Not sure what happens if he runs across a hairball or a pile of poop though.
• The battery life is great. My entire floor can be cleaned using only 25%, even though Carl has to run back to the base station half-way through cleaning to get the dirty water swapped out for clean.
• The base station clean/dirty water tanks can get through two full moppings of my home. I was anticipating them needing to be changed out after every mopping, so this was a pleasant surprise.
• Before docking at the end of a clean, Carl will raise himself up and turn on full suction to grab any dirt and debris that was trapped underneath him. Very nice.
• You don’t have to manually add the cleaning solution to the water tank and mix it up. There’s a separate reservoir for the cleaner that gets injected into the water as the robot is filled up.
• The base station is big, but not comically so. It can handle two full cleanings of my home, so I think it’s just the right size (as it starts doing regular cleanings so things aren’t as dirty, the sensor may notice it and even go up to 3 or 4 cleanings between tank changes). I wish I could afford buying the tankless model, but I can’t afford to have it plumbed into the kitchen. There is a cool LED color light bar which turns colors based on what’s going on, but I haven’t bothered to learn which colors mean what.
• The mopping pad is not only washed with hot water, it’s dried afterwards. The refuse bag is also dried so any bacteria vacuumed up is killed. I have the drying on “quiet mode” which takes quite a while. There’s faster modes available but they’re (assumably) noisier.
• The operation is shockingly quiet given how powerful the vacuum suction is rated. It’s twice as strong as my Roomba, but twice as quiet at the same time? How? Silent? Not at all. But I can easily watch television while it’s in operation.
• Supports the Matter Smart Home standard (among others). Robot vacuums are fairly new to Matter, so it’s pretty basic. I don’t know why you would use it instead of the app, but it’s there for your automations and integrations.
• Comes with a 3-Year Warranty. — I’ve come to expect 9 months to 1 year, so that’s nice.

THE BAD

• UPDATE: The dirty water tank will start to stink. I mean really stink. The second time I went to empty it, the smell was gag-inducing. Likely from the bacteria breeding in it. So I ended up washing it out real good, then letting it sit open in the garage. Narwal desperately needs to add a UV light or something to keep bacteria odor from accumulating like this.
• The map on the app has to be fixed, because it’s awful. The furniture is recognized, but not oriented properly so I turn it off. The mapping data becomes so light when drawing zones to clean that it’s almost impossible to draw areas accurately. And even if you could, the zone drawing tool is horrible. Instead of dragging corners you get one corner to resize, then have to drag and re-size over and over until your get it right. And it’s tough to do that because the touches aren’t registered very well. You also can’t draw non-square areas, which is baffling. The app is such a critical feature to get right, but the Narwal blows it utterly.
• Carl seems to get confused when he tries to dock with his base station. He comes up to it, turns around, starts backing in, then stops, comes forward, turns around to look at where he’s supposed to park, then turns back around and finally backs in. Not sure what that’s all about. Kinda cute though.
• There should be spinny brushes on both sides for a cleaner in this price range.
• As noted, the “Smart Stain Detection” didn’t notice my dried-on stains at all. Not even a little bit. Since he will attack new stains, I guess this isn’t a big deal? Time will tell.
• The sensors on the robot must be pretty good, because there’s minimal bumping into furniture. All my other robots bash into stuff repeatedly no matter how many times they’ve cleaned my home.
• The retail price of the Narwal Flow 2 is a jaw-dropping $1500. If you bought it during its pre-release/early release, the price was $1100. I don’t know that it’s worth this cost. If I were pricing the value of it vs. the capabilities it has, I’d say around $850. Even that is really too expensive. But given how helpful it is at performing a task I no longer have to do… and doing that task very, very well… it could be worth it.
• The replacement parts (rollers, bags, fluids, etc.) are pretty expensive. The official Narwal bags are two for $20 on their site. Sure, third-party manufacturers will release cheaper parts, they always do, but why doesn’t Narwal have reasonable pricing? Isn’t this costing them business? Notable that Flow 2 supplies are very difficult to find on their site right now, and some of the information is not correct yet. Since the product is new, I’m guessing this will be resolved soon.

Ultimately I’m very happy with Carl the Fourth. He’s very expensive, but does his job very well. Much better than I do with my quick cleanings on Sundays. Yes, I will still do an occasional deep-clean, but probably not every month. Maybe every-other-month or when company is coming. In-between, Carl will be vacuuming and mopping Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

I just hope that he has a long service life, because when you have built-in obsolescence or planned failure at this level, because if he dies right after the 3-Year Warranty ends, that’s too soon.

The problem is… I have cats.

In addition to year ’round kitty litter getting kicked around, this time of year Jake and Jenny are shedding like crazy. This means fur is everywhere and hacking up hairballs are more frequent. Yuck. Every Spring I toy with the idea of buying new robots to help keep things clean (all my floors are hardwood, so it’s very noticeable).

So every Spring I toy with the idea of getting new-and-improved robots. Then I don’t because I don’t want to spend the money only to be disappointed again.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago and I said something to a friend about cat hair being everywhere and I was presented an option for a too-good-to-be true new robot that was being released on April 20th… the Narwal Flow 2.

So of course I researched all the pre-reviews of the product and did a deep dive into the competition.

The robot I was looking at a couple months ago was the Matic, former Google Nest engineers. The reviews were amazing and its reimagining of floor cleaning seemed a smart take. But it was way too tall. It wouldn’t fit under any of my furniture, which means all the cat hair blowing under it would never be touched. So I passed.

I have mixed experiences with Dyson (I find them mostly sub-par) but was told they have been investing loads of their cash into robots, so I looked at some reviews. But their latest and greatest Spot+Scrub was getting terrible reviews.

The previous Narwal models were always in competition with Mova, Roborock, and Dreame, so I investigated their offerings. I had experience with i-Robot and Ecovacs, so I looked into those as well. After exhaustive research, I decided that the models competing with the Narwal Flow 2 weren’t much better or worse, so I pushed the button on it because the offer I had was too good, then I hoped for the best.

After living with the robot for a week, I have opinions.

Which I will share tomorrow.

SPOILER ALERT: This is a darn good robot mop/vacuum, and my home has never felt this clean with any other robot before.