Narwal Freo Z Ultra Review

Narwal Freo Z Ultra Review: Design and Features

Let’s start with the basics. At a glance, the Freo Z Ultra looks much like any other high-end robot vacuum. It’s a round bot about 14 inches in diameter and roughly 4.5 inches tall. Up top is a LIDAR turret (not unlike you’d see on a self-driving car), which helps with room scanning and object recognition. In front are the aforementioned dual RGB cameras. Underneath, toward the front, you have two spindly sweeper arms that help direct debris under the robot; in the middle is the vacuum inlet with a roller brush, and toward the back are two spinning mop pads. You can also attach an included “baseboard cleaner” to it, which is effectively a fluffy duster that you stick on the side of the robot so it can wipe low, vertical surfaces.

The base station is roughly 17 inches wide, 15 inches deep, and 18 inches tall. It takes proprietary 2.5L bags that Narwal claims will last you up to 120 days before you swap it, depending on how dirty your place is. It has two large, removable water tanks (one for clean water and one for dirty water) that are easy enough to empty or refill. It also has a separate cube where you can install a detergent cartridge. On the top lid is a small touch panel with some basic commands you’ll probably never use because the app and voice commands (via Google/Siri/Alexa) are much more convenient. The robot and base look sleek and modern. The base can also clean the robot’s mops with temperatures reaching 167 degrees Fahrenheit, which should be enough to kill most bacteria, and then it air dries the mops, too.

The setup is pretty easy. You pull everything out of the box, attach the mops, plug the base in, fill the fresh water tank, push the bot into its base to charge, and then pair everything with the app. After sorting through some connectivity issues and firmware updates, I hit the button to scan my apartment, accomplished quickly and efficiently, mapping my whole floor plan in about 7 minutes. The map it created, though, needed some work. It correctly identified a bed and a couch, but it split my whole (one-bedroom) apartment into two big rooms. Luckily, it was straightforward enough to edit that in the app. I created dividers for the bedroom, bathroom, hallway, living room, dining room, kitchen, and entryway. That way, if just one room needed to be cleaned, I could tell it to clean that specific room.

Narwal Freo Z Ultra Review: Performance

The cleaning, however, could use some work. The default profile is to clean the whole apartment, vacuuming and mopping as it sees fit, so I thought I’d start there. I hit the button on my app, and the base station announced that it was making electrolyzed water, which… I guess cleans better than regular water? Theoretically? Maybe? It glowed and looked cool, anyway. Once the mops were all saturated, the robot left its dock and went straight to a carpeted corner of my bedroom. It then meandered for a bit without mopping or vacuuming. It just kept turning itself around in a corner by my bed. Eventually, it started vacuuming and did some weird zigzag pattern that didn’t make much sense to me. It went back and vacuumed that spot again later, seemingly without reason.

It also mopped one section of the floor near my bathroom sink, then went back and vacuumed it, which is the opposite order in which it should do that. Then it moped it again. Then vacuumed it again, then mopped it again. Mind you, there was no discernable dirt or debris in this spot. It just got kinda obsessed with it, and mind you, this is still before it had gone into my kitchen or cleaned the living room or anywhere else. The pattern it chose to clean my apartment seemed almost comically inefficient.

I will say that it did a fairly decent job of cleaning areas once it got to them. It picked up a lot of hair and dirt from my bare floor, and it did a pretty good job of getting sand off of my medium-pile carpet, too. It was nice and quiet, too, which I appreciated. The mops did a nice, quick job of cleaning up some spilled milk on my kitchen floor. But when I laid down my infamous Snack Gauntlet (made of Goldfish crackers, pistachio shells, some pub mix, a few Tic-Tacs, and some dry, ground oregano leaf), it did just okay. It tended to choke on the pistachio shells and disgorge them elsewhere. Sometimes, it would catch the Goldfish cracker, but other times, it would smash it and spread the debris around the floor. I found a few almost-whole Goldfish on the other side of my apartment from where I’d left them. It did well with the Tic-Tacs but had a hard time with the oregano, especially on my hardwood floor. There was just so much left on the floor after it thought it was done.

For a comparison, I tested it against the Roborock Qrevo Curv. The Roborock formed a much more efficient cleaning pattern and appeared to be much more powerful. It made quick work of the snack gauntlet, missing just one Goldfish, but the oregano and everything else was all gone. I also found that the Roborock mops are much closer to the edges than the Narwal. One of the Roborock’s mops extends outwards to clean under small overhangs. In contrast, the Narwal has to get right next to the wall and do a little 90-degree wiggle to get its mop toward the edge. Not only does that make it a lot slower (you’d be slower, too, if you had to stop and wiggle every few seconds), but there were spots where the Narwal left three-inch gaps between the wall and where it cleaned. Not great.

The one place the Narwal beats the Roborock is in object avoidance. It seemed to put its binocular vision to use and did a much better job of avoiding hazards I’d laid out for it, such as the odd slipper or sock, which the Roborock was prone to sucking up and dragging around. The Narwal could use its AI to correctly identify and avoid charging cables when encountering them on the bare floor, which was more than the Roborock could manage. However, it did still suck up a couple of charging cords when it encountered them on my patterned rugs. I suspect the camera needs more contrast (which the bare floor provides). It also did a good job of navigating through the maze of table and chair legs in my dining room. It wasn’t quick, but it always made its way in and out.

One weird thing is this bot goes back to its dock to clean its mop a lot. It seemed to go and mop a section of my floor (maybe 3-foot by 5-foot) and then go back to clean the mop before returning to the same area. Not only does this make cleaning take a lot longer, but it goes through water quite quickly. Midway through cleaning my apartment for the second time, it alerted me that the base was out of fresh water. Sure enough, it was dry, and the dirty water tank was full. But my apartment was pretty clean, and only 161 square feet of hardwood wasn’t covered by rugs. I could see that the water wasn’t very dirty, either. I thought this thing was supposed to be able to go four months without maintenance, but when I looked at the fine print, it only mentioned that there was no need to change the vacuum bag. Again, the Roborock was much more efficient, allowing me to go through several cleanings before dealing with the water.

I did like that the robot’s AI could recognize when a spot was still dirty and needed more cleaning, and it would generally go back and handle it, but ultimately, when it was done, it was almost never as clean as the Roborock left it. Its app also doesn’t give you as much granular control, and the baseboard cleaner, while clever, made it harder for it to get back into its dock. Sometimes, it would take five attempts before it could dock itself, and, as I mentioned, it tries to dock itself constantly. This all adds up to a slower, clumsier-seeming robot.

Narwal Freo Z Ultra Review: Verdict

Ultimately, there’s a lot to like here. It does a pretty decent job of cleaning, and because its object avoidance is so good, it might be a better choice if you have a pet prone to accidents. Unfortunately, I’d just tested the Roborock Qrevo Curv, and Narwal’s Freo Z Ultra doesn’t clean quite as well, costing nearly the same (the Narwal is $1,500, while the Roborock is $1,600). During testing, I often wished for the best of both worlds. It would be unbeatable if I could put the Freo Z’s vision and obstacle recognition on the Qrevo Curve’s efficiency and power. For now, though, I’m sticking with the Roborock.