Narwal Freo X Ultra review: Leave the cleaning to this robot

Vacuuming is my least favorite chore. I’ve long been vocal about my distaste for the noise of a vacuum, the hassle of plugging and unplugging it into the outlet, the strange aches and pains I develop after contorting to reach under furniture. Even a cordless model still involves more dusty work than I’d like — give me wiping down the bathroom any day of the week. So of course I’ve been curious about vacuuming robots. I just don’t think I ever believed that they could truly get the job done until I learned about the Narwal Freo X Ultra.

The Freo X Ultra is to Roombas what a Ferrari is to that red-and-yellow coupe so many of us rode about in as children. It’s serious technology, shiny and sleek and a little intimidating. It might be a little extra and unnecessary, but have I wanted one since I first learned about it? Yes. My only real question was whether this product would actually alleviate the burden of vacuuming, or just be a fun appliance I remembered to pull out for special occasions, or show off to visitors.

It promises comprehensive vacuuming and mopping, but would it stand up to a work-from-home lifestyle and a fluffy cat? I was ready to try it out. If you’re curious too, here’s my Narwal Freo X Ultra review.

Unboxing and first impressions of the Narwal Freo X Ultra

The Freo X Ultra arrived in a large box that was rather heavy for me to maneuver into my kitchen. I was immediately concerned about my ability to move the unit around my apartment, but I needn’t have worried, as a lot of the extra weight came from dense polystyrene foam and accessories that were stored inside the charging station, but were entirely removable. The exterior box showed what the contents would look like and I started to get excited. My box was a little crumpled in one of the upper corners, but this was entirely cosmetic. Narwal has packed its robot very effectively, so each component emerged in perfect, shiny white condition.

The first item out of the box was the robot base, as in the piece that would travel around my home and do my cleaning for me. It was substantial but not unwieldy to carry and I was reassured by how smoothly it glided across the floor once I removed it from the box and set it down. I quickly noticed how high-quality the materials felt and how the front panel was able to flex gently to accommodate the extra cleaning arms. The controls were minimal and I began to feel confident that this device was something I could run efficiently.

The next piece was the large docking and charging station, which I removed from its polystyrene casing. Immediately I had visions of EVE, the ultra-modern robot companion in the Disney movie “WALL-E” — the station was white and shiny, with smooth rounded edges and a dynamic digital panel that lit up adorably once I plugged it in. Inside, I found clean and dirty water containers, a bottle of cleaning detergent and additional accessories like extra dust bags and a dust bin. I removed everything and then moved the unit into my chosen spot (Narwal recommends that you give the vacuum a meter of unimpeded space in front of the base for the device to return).

I consulted the little manual and quickly assembled the few pieces I needed to. The robot base required a couple of adjustments and the installation of two mop pads and two cleaning brushes. The station required me to fill up the clean water tank, insert both tanks into their respective slots and add the detergent. All in all, the setup took about five to 10 minutes to complete. I was excited and relaxed — after all, they do say the best technology is the simplest.

Key specifications:

• Battery life/runtime: 210 minutes.
• Dimensions: Robot: 13.8 inches wide x 13.8 inches deep x 4.2 inches tall. Base station: 16.3 inches wide x 14.6 inches deep x 16.3 inches tall.
• Smart mapping: Yes.
• Weight: Robot, 9.36 pounds, base station, 18.7 pounds.
• Bin capacity: 1-liter dust bag.
• Smart-home-compatible: Yes, Siri.
• Accessories: Zero tangling brush, dustbox filter, power cord, two filter sponges, three 1-liter disposable dust bags.
• Cleaning time: Varies.
• Warranty: 1 year.

Key features of Narwal Freo X Ultra

Mopping: DirtSense and EdgeSwing technology

There are many robot vacuums but fewer robot mops on the market today. Yet it’s clear that Narwal takes both modes of cleaning seriously, as the technology is state of the art. The Freo X Ultra uses two main mop pads for this process, which are designed to raise themselves by 12 millimeters to avoid any contamination of carpeted surfaces; only wood or tile are supposed to get wet, which I put to the test in my home.

To clean, the robot fills itself up with detergent and sufficient clean water from the tank and gets to work, using Narwal’s DirtSense technology to determine where and how much to clean. The device monitors wastewater to determine if the floor is truly clean or not. If the initial pass is deemed insufficient, the robot will go over the area again until it’s clean.

This robot also features EdgeSwing technology, which lets the mop heads maneuver right up against any baseboards or walls. Narwal calculates that this technology increases the floor coverage by 40%, which is particularly meaningful if you live in a home with many small rooms or irregular walls.

Vacuum power

For a robot vacuum to be worth it, it needs to actually do as good a job as a human would. This model uses sensors and algorithms to intelligently detect dirt and LIDAR technology that allows for 360-degree scanning. Narwal has also equipped the Freo X Ultra with 8200 pascals (Pa) of suction power, which is close to top-of-the-line for robot vacuums.

It also comes with a certified zero-hair-tangling brush that quickly traps hair and fur without it getting caught. In fact, this product has earned SGS certification with a 0% hair tangling rate and is TUV-certified with a 99.56% hair removal rate, making this a great product for pet owners. The product is also shown to remove 99% of dust and debris from hardwood floors. Meanwhile, on carpet, the Freo X Ultra utilizes a matrix pattern to ensure that every square of textile is treated and cleaned.

Automation

One of the biggest benefits of a robot cleaning tool is that you don’t have to do the cleaning yourself. Narwal took this one step further by building automated cleaning capabilities into the Freo X Ultra, from cleaning its own mop heads and drying the pads, to dispensing detergent and drying the dust box. This ensures that bacteria and odors are kept to a minimum and human involvement is reduced to emptying and refilling water tanks. The FREO X Ultra even knows when it needs to be charged, so you don’t need to worry about making sure you’ve moved the robot to its base station — it will get there on its own.

Smartphone app

You can even operate the robot when you’re not home, thanks to Narwal’s comprehensive smartphone app. Through the app, you can instruct the robot to map your house for cleaning. Once that’s completed, the app allows you to select from various cleaning combinations and even identify which rooms you’d like to be cleaned. This means that you can set your Freo X Ultra to begin a cleaning cycle while you’re at work or monitor its cleaning progress while you’re on the go. While the smartphone app isn’t required to operate the robot — you can control everything through the panel on the base station — the app does make the process easier.

Performance

Vacuuming

The main appeal of the Freo X Ultra was always going to be how effectively it vacuumed. I skimped on my usual cleaning duties in the week before it arrived so I could really put it to the test, which wasn’t enjoyable considering I have a lot of long hair and so does my cat. Fortunately, the Freo X Ultra delivered results pretty much instantly. The powerful 8,200 Pa suction was effective on every surface in my home, which is predominantly made up of kitchen tile, hardwood and plush rugs. Even the thick rug in my living room, where my cat Ravioli loves to roll around and snooze, looked fresh out of the box after the Freo X Ultra had vacuumed it thoroughly.

The challenge was the crannies under low-lying furniture and the spaces tucked behind planters or other decorative items. While I’m willing to move some pieces to give the robot free rein over the floor, I also don’t want to have to completely reorganize my home before I can vacuum. The Freo X Ultra does a great job of mapping your home and identifying the lay of the land, including getting right up to the baseboards, but this doesn’t extend to the patches of floor under a bookcase, for example. For those tight areas, I found I still needed to manually clean or use a handheld vacuum. However, I was impressed by how well the robot was able to navigate around unexpected items like cat toys without slowing down its rigorous matrix-cleaning pattern.

Mopping

In my mind, the mopping feature was a handy extra — until I put it to use and quickly fell in love. The Freo X Ultra tackled my whole home with ease, cleaning right up to the edge of my rugs but never getting the textiles wet. The robot was able to get rid of stubborn stains thanks to the patented Rouleaux mop heads, which exert a downward pressure of up to 12 newtons to work away at dirt, lowering to seven newtons on wood surfaces to protect the material.

I found that both my hardwood living room floors and my tiled kitchen were scrubbed spotless, with the robot quickly able to identify where the worst dirt and grime had accumulated. It even went over the clean surfaces to double-check that they met its exacting stands. Naturally it took a little longer on the initial clean than on follow-up cleaning sessions, but I only had to refill the water tank once on a thorough clean of my New York apartment. If you have a larger home, I can see how refilling the tank may be more frequent and irritating, but it’s still a whole lot easier than mopping by hand.

Noise and disruption

One of my biggest complaints with a traditional vacuum is the noise, which makes it impossible to enjoy a podcast or TV show unless you’re blasting the sound through headphones. I was pleasantly surprised at how quiet the Freo X Ultra was as it made its way around my home. As it fills up with water and detergent in its docking station, there is a pleasant whirring noise that sounds a little bit like the ocean. As the robot moves around the home, you can hear the vacuum working and the wheels moving over ledges, but it was easy for me to enjoy a movie or listen to music without raising the volume substantially. Considering I live alone with a very quiet cat, I’m used to near-silence in my home aside from the media I choose to play and yet I wasn’t bothered by the robot at all.

Ease of use

The base station comes with a clear display screen that lights up with easily recognizable icons, plus a removable piece of card with all the instructions. You can also find these instructions in the manual. However, I admit I almost never use this interactive screen because of how easy it is to operate the Freo X Ultra through the smartphone app. Setup was quick and easy and it guided me to program the robot to map my apartment. The visuals are impressive, giving you clear visibility over the map of your home the robot creates and its progress as it cleans. You can remotely track both where the robot currently is and where it’s been on this cleaning route.

The app also lets you select which kind of clean you want — just vacuuming, just mopping, some kind of combination — and where you want it done — the whole house, one room or something in between. You can even select a specific rectangle within a room when you encounter a mess in a specific area.

I really appreciate the ability to schedule future tasks, which you can choose to repeat on a weekly or daily schedule. These tasks can be timed to the minute and fully customized, such as asking the robot to vacuum the living room every Monday morning and do a full mop of the house every Thursday afternoon. This ensures you keep up with your regular cleaning schedule — the Freo X Ultra made cleaning so easy, in fact, that I sometimes forgot I needed to oversee the programming at all, so the schedule kept me and it on task.

Design

This product looks very sleek and modern, like something you’d find on a spaceship or in the households of the future. I appreciated its relatively small footprint, something that was particularly important for me in my small New York apartment. It didn’t look out of place in my living room and has actually blended in quite nicely with the white walls. The rounded corners ensure that there are no sharp edges to bump up against — which is great if you have pets or children — and also lends a futuristic style to the appliance. Since it does need to be stored in an open and accessible area, it would be nice if you could choose the color of the unit, but white should work in most settings and was no issue in my space.

I value how simple and easy the robot is to operate, which is partly down to design. The setup took a matter of minutes and was very intuitive, plus Narwal included clear signage and stickers to assist with the process. While the manual is very comprehensive and clear, I do think the actual buttons on the robot base could be a little clearer — I accidentally triggered the child lock on two separate occasions, but this was easily rectified and mostly avoidable if you just use the smartphone app. All the complicated machinery is hidden inside both pieces, so you never need to fiddle around with the mechanisms. Instead, the interior water tanks are stored in a separate compartment that is simple to navigate.

Is it for you?

The fact that I had named my Freo X Ultra within a couple of hours of setup is a testament to how quickly this product won me over. I appreciated how quick and easy the device was to set up, its compact size and design and the efficiency with which it got to work cleaning. Both my cat and I followed the robot base around on its first journey, curious to see it in action, and I was pleasantly surprised at how adeptly it moved around my apartment. Rugs were no impediment, there was no clattering into table legs or walls and my floors were noticeably cleaner even after just the initial pass. In short, it was incredibly effective at what it promised to do and I was sold on its value. Lil Sweeps is now a trusted member of my household.

However, it should be noted that this definitely is a luxury product. At $1,399 full retail price, the Freo X Ultra is much more expensive than even the best cordless stick vacuum, so this is a real investment in something that mostly offers convenience and ease. While the cleaning is high quality, it’s probably not more effective than best-in-class vacuums. What you’re paying for is the hands-off convenience, the remote access and the ability to enjoy a cleaner home with half the manual effort, though you will still need to use a handheld vacuum on and under low furniture. For some people, this will be more than worth it.

User reviews

The Narwal Freo X Ultra has received positive reviews from verified users, with the product earning a 97% 5-star rating on its brand site and an average score of 4.3 on Amazon, from nearly 300 reviews. Reviewers consistently called out the robot’s ability to vacuum up pet hair efficiently, making it a candidate for the best robot vacuum for dog hair, and handle the general mess and debris that accumulates in a busy household. Multiple customers commented that this product was a marked upgrade on Narwal’s previous design, which they also liked.

Several reviewers praised the capability to schedule cleanings for opportune times, such as the middle of the night, so that they can wake up or arrive home to a clean house. This is partly possible thanks to the quiet operating mode and automated features. While some people said that their high-end vacuums performed a little more powerfully than the Freo X Ultra, they appreciated that the robot didn’t require manual control. Many users seem to deploy their unit as a daily cleaner, supplementing its work with a manual clean every week or month. The few negative reviews mostly referred to defective units that couldn’t remain connected to Bluetooth and stopped working.

Narwal Freo X Ultra alternatives

Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni S1 Pro

For a comparable hands-off vacuum-and-mop cleaning robot, the Eufy Omni S1 Pro is one of the closest alternatives. It’s slightly more expensive than the Freo X Ultra at $1,499 and comes in black, with a sleek, narrow charging station and wider base for the robot. It offers 8000 Pa suction power, which is slightly less than the Freo X Ultra’s 8200 Pa, and Eufy’s precise edge-to-edge clean thanks to the squared shape of the robot base. This model doesn’t offer anything substantially different from Eufy’s other robots, but is simply an upgrade in most areas, from faster charging to deeper mop cleans and superior obstacle avoidance. If you’d much prefer a black unit in your home, the $100 price difference may be worth choosing this product instead of the Freo X Ultra — otherwise the performance and functions are very comparable.

Eufy Robot Vacuum X10 Pro Omni

The X10 Pro Omni from Eufy is a stripped-down version of the robot vacuum, with a bulkier black charging station and a much lower price of $799.99. The vacuum suction power is only slightly less than the Freo X Ultra at 8000 Pa (compared to 8,200), and the mop pads feature the same ability to raise up to 12 millimeters to avoid getting textiles wet. That said, some customers report that the mopping isn’t quite as thorough as Narwal’s products. The auto-detangling roller brush is effective on pet hair and the accompanying smart map can be customized with no-go areas and virtual boundaries to better control your cleaning. While the app can be a little bit complicated to navigate, I particularly like how it allows the robot to map multiple floors for customized cleaning.

Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra with 8-in-1 RockDock Ultra

Roborock’s most advanced robot vacuum is the S8 MaxV Ultra, which is an incredibly powerful piece of machinery that offers industry-leading suction power of 10,000 Pa. Available in both black and white, the charging station has a more rectangular, blockish shape but is otherwise similar in design to the Freo X Ultra. In fact, many of the capabilities are identical, from the side brushes and edge-to-edge cleaning to the duo-roller detangling brush and all-in-one automated dock. While I had no issues with the vacuuming power of the Freo X Ultra, this device promises to do even more. The Roborock S8 is designed with two additional features that I liked: the ability to control the robot through voice command and the camera function, which lets you enjoy remote video access to your home to check on pets or your home more generally. It’s a state-of-the-art piece of technology where the only negative is the price point — it’s the most expensive model in this category at $1,799.99.

Roborock Q Revo Robot Vacuum

At a sale price of $769.99, the Roborock Q Revo robot vacuum is the most affordable alternative and offers a similar shape and size to the Eufy X10 Pro Omni. You can also choose between white or black, which is a nice detail. This unit offers a lot of the same automation features as the Freo X Ultra, and its mopping features are particularly strong for the price, but it has weaker vacuum suction power at just 5500 Pa. The mop pads can also only raise seven millimeters, so you may have issues if you have a lot of thick rugs in your home. Overall, this is a more budget-friendly option that doesn’t offer quite the same level of performance, but would still be very useful as a supplement to manual cleaning.

The AP Buyline takeaway:

The Narwal Freo X Ultra is a delightful cleaning robot that vacuums and mops to an incredibly high standard, all at the push of a button. While the device is definitely expensive, the ease of use, remote control capabilities and cleaning customization options make it worthwhile.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Is Narwal better than Roborock?

If you’re looking for the best robot vacuum, both Narwal and Roborock make a range of different robot vacuum products, with a lot of similarities between the two brands. Comparing like-to-like products, Roborock offers some additional capabilities that the Narwal does not and its products are available in either black or white, while Narwal vacuums are exclusively white. However, Roborock products are more expensive than their equivalent Narwal counterparts and this price increase may not be worth the marginally superior performance. Ultimately, it will be about personal preference and what you place more value on: the best possible clean or the best value.

Does the Narwal Freo X Ultra self-empty?

The Freo X Ultra returns to its docking station throughout the cleaning journey to empty out dirty water, refill it with clean water and clean its mop pads. It also deposits any debris from vacuuming into a dust bin in the charging station. In this sense, the robot does self-empty after use. However, you will need to manually empty out the dirty water once the tank is full and fill up the clean water tank when it’s empty. You will also need to empty out the dust bin every few weeks, but the Freo X Ultra uses a compression system to ensure you won’t have to do this too frequently.

What is the voltage of the Narwal Freo X Ultra?

Both the robot base and the charging station have a maximum output power of 65 watts.

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