Narwal’s latest Flow 2 robot vacuum packs a lot of new features compared to its predecessor. With better suction performance, a higher-temperature mopping system with real-time self cleaning, and better navigation, the Flow 2 is a great upgrade to an already fantastic robot vacuum/mop.

7/10

Dimensions

17.7 x 14.2 x 20.9 in

Battery Life

7,000mAh

Brand

Narwal

Price

$1,500

Narwal’s Flow 2 is a new robot vacuum that utilizes AI to clean surfaces more efficiently. It features the NarMind™ Pro Autonomous System, which takes images from the vacuum’s cameras and analyzes them to plan out a smarter way to clean. This features the FlowWash Mopping System, which continuously uses clean water to get rid of stubborn stains.

Pros & Cons

• Impressive suction power
• Quiet, yet powerful
• One of the hottest water robot mops around at 140F
• Cleans the mop with 212F water in the base station
• Great AI functionality (a rare sight)

• Does not handle high pile carpet well
• Doesn’t get the edges of rooms nearly as well as it does the center

Price and availability

The Narwal Flow 2 comes in two versions, with one including the basic base station and the other including an automatic refill and drainage system. Pricing starts at $1,500, and the Flow 2 can be purchased directly from Narwal or from Amazon.

Quiet, yet powerful cleaning capabilities

Just don’t let it go on high-pile carpet

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

I was honestly impressed with just how quiet the Narwal Flow 2 was, even on the strong level (three out of four) of suction. If I were going by sound alone, I wouldn’t think that the vacuum had a ton of suction, but it definitely proved me wrong.

The Flow 2 worked fantastically at cleaning in most of the scenarios I put it up against. The grid cleaning pattern it uses ensures that almost every piece of dust or debris is picked up in the middle of the floor as it goes, since it hits every spot of the floor twice.

This robot vacuum left nice carpet lines where applicable, and it worked well on carpet, hardwood, and tile flooring types alike. The one area where the Flow 2 struggled, however, was with high-pile carpet. I tested it on a fairly plush rug in the living room, and it did not have a good time there.

The Flow 2 got caught on the rug multiple times, and even had to shut down for overheating the wheel motors a few times. It simply could not navigate on the high-pile rug at all, so I had to set up a no-go zone for the rug to keep it out of there. Normal rugs, traditional carpet, and all other flooring types worked fantastically.

One other area where the Flow 2 seemed to lack is in its edge cleaning abilities. I feel like the edge cleaning brush spins far too slowly and doesn’t reach out quite far enough to get things along the edge. So, there’s a good chance that debris along your baseboard might get left behind when cleaning. The middle of a room, however, should be spotless.

Advanced mopping features are nice, if slightly frustrating

Don’t plan on using the Narwal Flow 2 for a quick cleanup

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

The Narwal Flow 2 has a ton of really nice mopping features, like a rolling track mop instead of just a vibrating head and even smart stain detection. There’s a lot of tech packed into the mopping system here.

In my time with the vacuum, I found that the mop handled the messes that it came across with relative ease. The rolling track mop really does work well at picking up the residue on the floor, and my vacuum kicked into the smart stain detection mode several times when it would continually mop and vacuum an area until it was completely clean.

One of my favorite parts of the mop is that it’s constantly being infused with clean, hot water instead of just dropping new water on the floor. This definitely helps, but the hot water portion also has a slight drawback. Before the Flow 2 takes off on a mopping mission, it has to heat the water up for this function. Since it gets to 140F, which is one of the hottest temperatures of any robot mop, this can take a while.

It takes about five to eight minutes from when told to start mopping before it actually gets around to it. Really, this isn’t a problem as the results are fantastic (probably thanks to the hot water it uses). However, it’s just something that you should be aware of as it threw me off the first time I tried to tell it to go mop.

Also, while the mop does extend from the side to get up close to baseboards and under cabinets, like vacuuming, the Flow 2 doesn’t do a perfect job going up against the wall. There was always a little bit left where it didn’t clean well against the baseboards, but everywhere that the Flow 2 did touch, it did a great job.

The last part of the mopping that I wasn’t ultra impressed with was its effectiveness on grout. We had a flour spill in the kitchen, and then the flour got into the grout. The Flow 2 wasn’t able to get it up, even after going over it multiple times.

This is a pretty difficult test, for sure, but it’s one that I wish it did a little better with. I ended up having to sweep the flour up, and it was pretty difficult to get up as it had been wet by the mop and started to harden in the grout.

Aside from the edges of rooms and the grout, the Flow 2’s mopping functions worked well and left me impressed.

A robot vacuum with actually useful AI features

The built-in camera takes a picture of obstacles and offers live view monitoring

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

In a world where AI is a headlining feature of just about every new product release, Narwal’s AI functionality is actually fairly nice. The Flow 2 is able to use its onboard camera to not just see what’s ahead, but also let you know what’s there. On the map, it will place little dots where there was an AI-detected obstacle and then show you a picture of said obstacle whenever you click on it. This is something that I wish more robot vacuums did with their cameras, as it makes it genuinely useful.

The camera on the Flow 2 also helps a lot in the mapping process. Whenever I was making the initial map, I was surprised at how accurately some of the furniture pieces were represented. This is because it uses the onboard camera and AI to try to identify the furniture as it maps, which is a really useful function.

The camera also offers live view monitoring, but it is protected by a PIN code that you create. This helps keep the live view from being compromised on your phone without someone knowing the PIN, and that’s a nice added bonus to me. However, the first time you want to use the camera, the vacuum has to be idle, and you need to hit the home button on the vacuum’s top three times.

I guess the need to triple-tap the button is a hardware safety function that keeps the camera disabled unless you want it enabled, which is yet another feature that I wasn’t expecting. There’s a LED headlight as well, which automatically turns on and off as needed.

The app is powerful but could use some work

A song as old as smart robot vacuums themselves

Of all the robot vacuum apps I’ve used, the Narwal app is probably one of the better ones. It does a decent job of explaining what all the buttons do, and it surfaces the important things while burying the unimportant things—I love that. It was pretty straightforward to set up the vacuum, too, with initial mapping being quite easy to do.

Using the app is also just as straightforward. You can select a zone, room, or rooms and then tell it whether you want it to vacuum, mop, vacuum and mop, or vacuum then mop. Everything else is buried under other menus as it should be.

Map editing was also pretty simple, though designating the floor type for a room did trip me up a bit. You can designate rug, tile, or hardwood, but not carpet. I would like to see that modified so I could say that a room was entirely carpeted with no rug, for instance.

The only other gripe I have with the app is that remapping or moving the base station isn’t as straightforward as it should be, either. We started out with the base in a closet, but then moved it to the laundry room because it fit better there.

Trying to have the Flow 2 remap the house to figure out where it now lived wasn’t all that simple, and, eventually, I gave up on that and just told it to vacuum, which got it lost. The second time of having it vacuumed from its new location triggered an update of the base station’s location on the map, and it’s been fine ever since.

Should you buy the Narwal Flow 2 robot vacuum?

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

The Narwal Flow 2 robot vacuum comes in with a pretty hefty $1,500 price tag (or $1,600 if you want the refill and drainage system). This puts it up there in the realm of the most expensive robot vacuums, so it definitely needs to perform well to be worth the price tag, and I think it does.

While there are definitely some gripes I have with the Flow 2, like wishing it would clean the edges of a room better and that it would handle high pile carpet better, it does do its core job quite well: clean the floor.

The heated water for the mop definitely puts it in a league of its own when it comes to mopping performance, and that’s something I wasn’t expecting. I definitely was very impressed with the rolling track mop.

If you’re wanting a high-end robot vacuum that is chock-full of features, then the Flow 2 is a great option. Many of my gripes could easily be fixed in future software and firmware updates, but the hardware itself is definitely solid.

7/10

Dimensions

17.7 x 14.2 x 20.9 in

Battery Life

7,000mAh

Narwal’s Flow 2 is a new robot vacuum that utilizes AI to clean surfaces more efficiently. It features the NarMind™ Pro Autonomous System, which takes images from the vacuum’s cameras and analyzes them to plan out a smarter way to clean. This features the FlowWash Mopping System, which continuously uses clean water to get rid of stubborn stains.