- New Narwal Flow vacuums forward, and then in reverse, for cleaner carpets
- A descending brushroll cover also improves pickup on deep carpet
- A roller mop promises cleaner hard floors with less smearing
Narwal has unleashed a whole fleet of new robot vacuums at CES 2025, but the one that has particularly caught my eye is the Narwal Flow, which has an innovative way of making sure it gets your carpets properly clean, as well as a rather clever mopping system designed to remove the dirt from your hard floors, rather than just smearing it about.
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We rate Narwal amongst the best robot vacuum makers around. While its innovations are slightly less flashy than what other brands are showing at CES (Dreame’s new bot can climb stairs, Roborock’s has a mechanical arm that’ll pick up your socks, and SwitchBot’s will deliver you your lunch) they might be more genuinely useful.
Let’s start with the vacuuming. Typically, robot vacuums can struggle to pull dust from thicker carpets, but the Flow has a new different features to help ensure a deeper clean. First up, it’ll do a kind of moonwalk on your floor: it first vacuums forward, and then reverses, tackling ingrained dirt and hair from both directions. The backwards motion also helps to lift the carpet fibers and release anything stuck deeper in there. Narwal says this approach results in double the dust pickup compared to regular forwards-only driving bots.
The brushroll also has a cover that descends close to the floor when the robovac detects it’s on a carpeted area. This effectively creates a kind of vacuum – in the non-appliance sense – in the area, increasing pressure and improving pickup.
Unfortunately, there are no images to illustrate the vacuuming features included in the press materials, so you’re going to need to use your imagination here. When we tested Narwal’s previous flagship, the Narwal Freo Z Ultra, we weren’t blown away by the carpet cleaning powers, but the various fiber-agitating features, combined with an incredible max suction power of 20,000Pa sound very promising indeed.
Going with the flow
The Narwal Flow also boasts an innovative mopping system. Rather than your standard rotating mop pads or D-shaped mop, the Flow has a constantly rotating mop fabric-covered roller (like a tank track). This is fed with clean water from a small onboard clean water tank, but the remaining dirty water is also siphoned off into a dirty water tank, to keep the roller as fresh as possible.
Other premium hybrid robovacs might have a mop-cleaning function built into the dock unit, but this one is constantly cleaning its mop as it goes. The result should be cleaner hard floors, with less smearing of spillages.
The roller’s profile is wide and relatively flat rather than being a perfect circle, to maximize contact with the ground. It also runs in the opposite direction to the robot’s movement, to help agitate dried-on dirt, and it can even kick out to the side to get closer to the edges of rooms.
It’s not a brand new idea – it has also appeared on the likes of the Eureka J20 robot vacuum, where it impressed our tester – but it’s still very rare, and looks like a more effective mopping solution than existing alternatives.
Elsewhere, you’re getting main and side brushes that are optimized to prevent hair tangle and a side brush that extends out when encountering a corner and can also reverse its direction (Narwal has learned a new trick, and it’s applying it to everything). Navigation is powered by dual RGB cameras (here’s more on how robot vacuums find their way around), and this bot is apparently able to identify over 200 common obstacles.
We don’t have pricing details yet – although they are promised soon – and the Narwal Flow is due to launch sometime in mid-2025.
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