The Narwal Freo Z Ultra Robot Vacuum, Narwal’s latest flagship model, introduces game-changing innovations that earned it two major Vacuum Wars awards in late 2024 and rocketed to the top five in our Best Robot Vacuums list. This advanced robot vacuum and mop combo features a fully equipped auto-empty station that not only handles debris but also washes and dries its mop pads. Despite its premium features, the Narwal Freo Z Ultra is reasonably priced for a flagship model of this caliber. After purchasing the device and conducting extensive evaluations over the past few weeks, we’re excited to share its pros and cons in this review.
The Freo Z Ultra robot vacuum mop combo combines advanced AI navigation with powerful cleaning features. In our evaluations, the Freo Z Ultra excelled across all categories, showcasing its advanced AI-driven navigation and obstacle avoidance. Equipped with dual HD cameras and dual-chip AI, it identifies and avoids obstacles, including over 120 object types, ensuring thorough and safe cleaning around furniture and unexpected hazards. Its impressive 12,000Pa suction power effortlessly handles dirt and pet hair, while EdgeSwing technology cleans right up to walls and a specialized module tackles baseboard dust. For mopping, dual rotating mop heads press down with 1.2 kg of force at 180 RPM to remove stubborn stains. The docking station supports a hands-free experience, with a self-cleaning and drying system for the mops, keeping the robot hygienic and ready for up to 120 days of use.
Features Overview
Robot Hardware
As far as hardware on the robot, it has:
- A top-mounted LiDAR smart navigation system
- Front-mounted obstacle avoidance sensors
- Two side brushes
- A single brush roller, which is tapered and unconnected at one end for better pet hair management.
- A removable baseboard brush on the side—something that we haven’t seen before but is a wonderful idea.
Advanced Auto-Empty Station
The new auto-empty station is very advanced. It’s one of the areas that’s a major upgrade from their previous version, the Narwal Freo X Ultra. The Freo X didn’t have a way to empty the robot’s dustbin into a disposable bag at the station, which was one of the reasons that prevented us from recommending it. But that’s changed with the Freo Z, and it now empties the robot’s dustbin into a 2.5 L disposable bag, which will last 120 days before needing to be changed.
The new station also automatically washes the robot’s mop pads, dries the mop pads, and refills the mop tanks with either water only or water and proprietary Narwal detergent. Additionally, it also has a rare water ionizing feature, which supposedly makes the water better for sanitizing.
It’s also a self-cleaning station, which reduces the amount of manual cleaning you will need to do, though it does have a removable tray for that purpose.
Exceptional Mopping Ability
Its actual mopping ability was another major pro. It uses two spinning mop pads, which are oddly shaped to reduce missed spots down the middle. The mop pads spin at 180 RPM and have above-average downward pressure at 1.2 kg or 2.6 lb of force. All of that led to it being well above average with mopping ability. For example, in the dried-stain mopping test, it was even better than electric mops like the Bissell CrossWave.
It also has some useful mopping features such as adjustable water levels and clean along floor direction, where you can set the direction that your floor panels lay in the app to prevent streaking. Its mop pads can automatically lift up 12 mm when it senses carpets, which allows the robot to vacuum and mop houses with a mixture of hard floors and carpets in the same run, making it much more efficient than robots that don’t have that feature.
New Obstacle Avoidance System
One of the biggest pros with the Narwal Freo Z, though, is its new obstacle avoidance system, which is another area where Narwal made major improvements from their previous version. It uses a rare dual-camera system with two advanced microchips. It’s also light-assisted for dark area cleaning. It has 120 objects pre-programmed for recognition, which is higher than average, and all of that resulted in the best obstacle avoidance score I’ve seen so far—not quite perfect, but very close.
Efficient Navigation and Battery Life
It was overall very smart with general navigation and mapping as well. Its navigation efficiency was higher than average in our tests. It mapped our floor plan in just under 5 minutes, and it had a 41-minute vacuum and mop time, which is shorter than average with excellent coverage.
Its battery life was very good as well. Although Narwal hasn’t published an official battery life number that I’ve seen, its battery efficiency in our tests—where we run it on various power settings on a fixed floor plan—was significantly higher than average. We calculated its square feet per charge at around 1,236, which is also above average. It has a fast charging feature as well, which is somewhat rare and usually only seen on higher-end robot vacuums.
Superior Cleaning Performance
Another pro is that it was good where it really counts, which is with cleaning performance.
Sweeping and Vacuuming – Its general sweeping ability on hard floors and carpets was great across the board. It was able to pick up all the types and sizes of debris we tested it with nearly perfectly.
Pet Hair Pickup – One area where this really showed up was with our new pet features test. For example, it was above average with a 2.5-inch pet hair pickup test on carpet, and its uniquely designed main brush roll was good at resisting longer hair tangles as well. For example, we did not see any tangles with the 7-inch hair test, where the average amount of tangled hair on that test is currently 41%.
Crevice Cleaning – Its crevice pickup test was right about the average amount, and it had slightly above-average suction power in our bench tests.
Impressive App Features
Its app was a big pro. We think it is one of the better apps out there, and it’s especially impressive considering that Narwal is a newer company. Its score on the app stores is lower than average, which is probably more reflective of older versions of the app. It has most of the features you would see on higher-end robot vacuum apps, such as multi-level maps, individual room settings, lots of scheduling variability, the ability to modify bin behaviors, virtual barriers, zone cleaning, and 3D mapping. It even has some of the more advanced pet features like Pet Checkup, where it will go look for your pets without the vacuum on to make sure they’re okay, as well as video calling.
Cons
Below-Average Carpet Deep Clean Test
Moving on to the cons, there wasn’t all that much to report, but there were a few things. For example, the Narwal Freo Z scored significantly below average with our carpet deep clean test. This test measures how well a robot vacuum picks up deeply embedded debris like sand from medium-pile carpets, and in this case, it only achieved 55%. However, I don’t think this result is entirely reflective of its real-world performance. For some reason, Narwal robots in general have proven particularly challenging to test in our lab environment. They just don’t seem to handle enclosed spaces well, often acting unpredictably during these kinds of tests. We ran this test multiple times, but the Freo Z never completed a normal, consistent run, so it probably would do better than 55% in normal conditions.
Testing Challenges in Lab Environment
Another example of this was when we were testing its mopping ability, where we got extremely erratic behaviors that kept invalidating the mopping results. The only way we could resolve it was by covering the obstacle avoidance cameras because there was no way to turn off its obstacle avoidance in the app like we normally do. These kinds of things really frustrate people trying to review and test robot vacuums, but the average person probably would never notice it.
Below-Average Airflow
Another thing was that it had below-average airflow in our tests, but considering it had above-average suction, it was sort of a draw.
Newness of the Product
The main thing we could warn consumers about with the Narwal Freo Z, though, is not to do with its performance or abilities or features but rather the fact that it is new. That being said, Narwal’s online reviews are surprisingly good overall, and because customer experience is so important, we’ve started to take those online reviews into account when ranking products on the Vacuum Wars Top 20 Robot Vacuum list. This way, if something is wrong with a product and reviews tank, it starts to go lower in the rankings, and if people like it, it starts to go higher.
Conclusion
So, on paper and in practice, we were extremely impressed with the Narwal Freo Z. It has received two major titles in 2024: Best Obstacle Avoidance and Best for Pets. It did great with the basics of sweeping hard floors and carpets and mopping ability. It has a ton of features, including some we’ve never seen before, and its price is competitive, making it an extremely solid choice.
