- The new Narwal Flow vacuums forwards and then backwards, for cleaner carpets
- A sloped brushroll cover also improves pick-up on deep carpet
- A roller mop promises cleaner hard floors with fewer wipes
Narwal has launched a whole range of new robot vacuum cleaners at CES 2025, but the one that has particularly caught my attention is the Narwal Flow, which has an innovative way of ensuring your carpets get a good clean, as well as a pretty clever mopping function has. system designed to remove dirt from your hard floors, rather than just spreading it.
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We rate Narwal as one of the best robot vacuum cleaners available. While the innovations are a little less flashy than what other brands showed at CES (Dreame’s new bot can climb stairs, Roborock’s has a mechanical arm that picks up your socks, and SwitchBot’s delivers your lunch), they might be really more useful.
Let’s start with the vacuuming. Normally robot vacuums struggle to suck dust from thicker carpets, but the Flow has new features to ensure a deeper clean. First, it kind of moonwalks across your floor: it sucks first forward and then backward, tackling stuck dirt and hair from both directions. The backward motion also helps to lift the carpet fibers and loosen anything stuck deeper in them. Narwal says this approach results in double the dust pick-up compared to regular forward-driving bots.
The brush roll also has a lid that lowers close to the floor when the robovac detects it is on a carpeted floor. This effectively creates a kind of vacuum – in the sense of the device – in the area, increasing pressure and improving absorption.
Unfortunately, there are no images illustrating the vacuum functions in the press materials, so you’ll have to use your imagination here. When we tested Narwal’s previous flagship, the Narwal Freo Z Ultra, we weren’t blown away by its carpet cleaning power, but the various fiber-boosting functions, combined with an incredible maximum suction power of 20,000 Pa, sound promising indeed.
Go with the flow
The Narwal Flow also has an innovative mopping system. Instead of your standard rotating mop pads or D-shaped mop, the Flow has a constantly rotating, mop cloth-covered roller (like a tank track). This is fed with clean water from a small clean water tank on board, but the remaining dirty water is also transferred to a dirty water tank, to keep the roller as fresh as possible.
Other premium hybrid robovacs may have a mop cleaning feature built into the dock unit, but this one continually cleans its mop as it goes. The result should be cleaner hard floors, with fewer streaks of spills.
The profile of the roller is wide and relatively flat rather than a perfect circle, to maximize contact with the ground. It also walks in the opposite direction of the robot’s motion, to help stir dried dirt, and it can even kick to the side to get closer to the edges of rooms.
It’s not a brand new idea – it’s also appeared on the likes of the Eureka J20 robot vacuum cleaner, where it impressed our tester – but it’s still very rare and seems like a more effective mopping solution than existing alternatives.
Elsewhere you get main and side brushes optimized to prevent hair tangles and a side brush that sticks out when you encounter a corner and can also change direction (Narwhal has learned a new trick and applies it to everything). Navigation is powered by dual RGB cameras (read more about how robot vacuums find their way here), and this bot is apparently capable of identifying more than 200 common obstacles.
We don’t have pricing details yet – although they’re promised soon – and the Narwal Flow will launch sometime in mid-2025.