Is this robot vacuum cleaner a genuine alternative to Dreame or Roborock?
22-7-2026
Translation: Katherine Martin
Pictures: Lorenz Keller
The Narwal Flow 2 cleans floors using warm water – and does so more thoroughly than almost any other robot vacuum to date. This underdog more than holds its own against established, top-of-the-range models.
When you’re the new kid on the block, the first thing you need to do is build trust. Narwal does this by placing an A4 sheet containing the customer service information for Germany and Switzerland, including a website, e-mail address and phone number, right at the top of the box. In Switzerland, customer service (and product imports) are handled by Solis, a Swiss household appliance manufacturer. By doing this, Narwal is signalling to users that it’s there for them if they have any questions or if something isn’t working.
Although the Shenzhen-based manufacturer has been making robotic vacuum cleaners for six years, it hasn’t made much of a name for itself in Switzerland yet. With new products and a new sales strategy, the company’s setting out to change that.
A hot-water roller for hard floors
The Flow 2 is Narwal’s latest flagship model. Its party trick? Washing floors with a large roller that’s continuously rinsed with water heated to 60 degrees. So it’s perfect for my flat’s mix of tiled and hardwood floors. In a home like mine, the robot can really flex its muscles, vacuuming and mopping simultaneously.
Thanks to the roller’s large surface area and the warm water, the vacuum gives my hard floors a thorough clean. The roller, which extends to the side, reaches the edges of the floor, but doesn’t quite get into corners. Although there’s a side brush, it doesn’t really cut it in corners either.
The overall result is one of the cleanest I’ve seen from a robot vacuum cleaner – and it was achieved in a respectable time too. In automatic mode, the robot takes just over a minute to clean one square metre of flooring. On the flipside, it does consume more water than average. I can tell by how quickly the fresh water tank empties and the wastewater tank fills up. After the vacuum has covered about 160 square metres, I need to refill it with clean water and empty the dirty water tank. In other words, it can only clean the flat about twice.
I don’t have many rugs, but the robot vacuums the ones I do have meticulously. Partly because of its hefty suction power of 31,000 pascals, and partly because the robot presses the brush containing the suction unit down onto the rug. This results in less suction loss, all while keeping the roller mop at a safe distance from the rug.
The only downside is that the robot can’t cover its roller. If it were vacuuming a shaggy carpet while the roller was still damp, this would become an issue. That said, the robot does automatically detect carpets and mark them on its map. When you start a cleaning cycle, it vacuums all your carpets and rugs first, then dampens the roller mop and tackles hard floors.
How well can the Flow 2 really clean?
One experiment reveals how good the Narwal truly is. I rub some ketchup onto my tiled floor, then let it dry. Once I’ve done that, I set the Flow 2 to automatic mode and send it off on a cleaning mission.
The result? The vacuum’s software detects the tough stain, then vacuums and mops the area twice. At first glance, it doesn’t look perfect. Although most of the sauce is gone, there are still some visible red bits. When I try to clean them off by hand, I realise how firmly they’re stuck to the floor. I need to apply a lot of pressure and scrub the stain half a dozen times to get rid of it.
Even so, I’m impressed. I wipe the floor with a white sheet of kitchen roll, going over the red marks. Once I’ve done that, everything’s spotless – no red stains, no smeared ketchup. Other robots I’ve tested struggled much harder with blitzing dirt from my floor. And honestly, if I were using a standard mop, I’d need to rinse it out two or three times with this much ketchup.
When I tested a competing robot vacuum last autumn, it performed significantly worse on large amounts of dirt.
After cleaning, I use my Dyson vacuum cleaner’s green laser to inspect the edges and corners of the floor. While the edges are spotless, there are still some crumbs in the corners. Basically, the Narwal shares the same issue as robot vacuum cleaners without retractable brushes. These models leave a one-square-centimetre area in corners untouched.
Above-average software
Although the app isn’t particularly exciting-looking, it does the job. I immediately manage to get to grips with it, despite never having used it before. It’s especially nice that it displays your most frequently used cleaning programmes as quick-select options on the home screen. With one tap, you can start a full-scale cleaning session – or simply select the rooms you want to cover so that the robot cleans them right away. In other manufacturers’ apps, the same action takes one or two more taps.
You can also bring up your most recently used settings, allowing you to instantly clean a pre-defined area again. In a lot of other apps, you need to set this up anew each time.
Even the Flow 2’s setup process easily holds its own against its competitors. It takes the robot nine minutes to map my home, making it one of the fastest I’ve ever tested.
The results are impressive: the system recognises every room, even labelling the bedroom correctly. I easily manage to make edits to the map later, including separating the open-plan kitchen from the living room. During my six-week test, the robot never had any navigational hiccups, never losing its bearings or getting stuck.
Things get tricky if there’s an object right next to the base station – in my case, an automatic feeder for my cat. Narwal states that the area in front of the station’s exit needs to be kept clear. Otherwise, it repeatedly displays error messages. I moved the feeder 50 centimetres away, and everything’s been working fine since.
Commendable standby mode, mediocre climbing skills
The robot isn’t particularly quiet, nor is it unpleasantly noisy. My own measurements – 60 decibels in automatic mode during vacuuming and mopping, measured from about one metre away – confirm this. This puts the Flow 2 squarely in the average noise level range.
I was surprised by the vacuum’s electricity consumption. It obviously takes a lot of power to heat the water to 60 degrees, wash the roller with 100-degree water after cleaning, then dry it with hot air at 60 degrees. The base station consumes 90 to 100 watts.
However, in standby mode, the Narwal Flow 2 is the first robot vacuum I’ve tested to achieve a truly impressive result – just 0.8 watt-hours of power consumption. According to my measurements, vacuums from competing brands use up two to three times that amount. Then again, the electricity price is too low for this to make much difference over the course of a year. I pay about two francs for standby power with Narwal. With a competing model, it’d be between four and six francs.
The Flow 2 can’t climb particularly high for a current top-of-the-line model. According to the manufacturer, the robot can handle thresholds up to four centimetres high. It does this by raising the front part of its body and hoisting itself over the obstacle, just like Roborock’s first climbing robots did.
The results are similar too. The Flow 2 seems to struggle while it’s climbing, pushing and bumping its way along. It easily clears my 28-millimetre test threshold, but falls short at 41 millimetres. If you have thresholds measuring up to three centimetres, you’ll have no issue with the Flow 2. It definitely wouldn’t manage an obstacle over four centimetres. As for thresholds between three and four centimetres, it’d depend on the design. Some competitors’ vacuums can climb as high as five centimetres.
Plenty of strengths, two weaknesses
In everyday use, the Narwal makes an excellent impression on me – thanks in part to numerous little details. At first glance, the cleaning tank looks like a cartridge, but you can fill it yourself. Long hair doesn’t get caught in the brush – any strands get sucked up and whisked away into the dust bag.
In the app, you can tweak all the settings to your exact specifications. This includes obstacle detection using photos and AI analysis, which works great. The robot detects cables or cat toys on my floor and steers around them. After that, I see a photo of the obstacles in the app, giving me the opportunity to move them out of the way.
There’s one downside to the roller mop’s excellent cleaning performance: it uses a lot of water. Although the 4.5-litre fresh water tank is pretty big, the capacity only stretches to 150 to 200 square metres in automatic mode. It can clean the flat twice before I have to refill the fresh-water tank and empty the wastewater tank.
The drip tray in the base station gives me more work than usual. Inside the base station, the robot cleans and dries the roller. On Narwal’s model, a lot of dirt builds up in the plastic tray. I have to clean it every two to three weeks. With competing models, on the other hand, it needs cleaning every four to five weeks. On the bright side, the tray is easy to remove and wash.
What about data protection?
Privacy is important to a lot of people – especially when it comes to devices that scan their entire homes.
You don’t need the app or Wi-Fi to use the robot in standard cleaning mode. However, that really does only give you the basics – vacuuming and mopping all accessible surfaces. If you want to adjust the settings, you need to register through the app and connect the Flow 2 to Wi-Fi.
During the setup process, you decide whether the device logs can be transmitted to the manufacturer if an error occurs. You also get to decide whether you want to participate in the user experience programme, and, most importantly, whether to enable video streaming and live video.
One important thing to bear in mind is that the obstacle detection program runs locally on the robot, so the images aren’t sent to the cloud. If you decline the privacy policy for images, they won’t even appear in the app.
This puts Narwal on par with most other manufacturers. However, only a few competitors offer local image processing instead of cloud-based analysis.
In a nutshell
Can go toe to toe with the best
The Narwal Flow 2 is up there with top-of-the-range robot vacuum cleaners from Dreame and Roborock. It’s especially impressive on hardwood floors thanks to its self-cleaning mop roller, which cleans hardwood or tile floors with warm water. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t have a retractable brush for cleaning corners equally thoroughly.
Aside from that, the vacuum ticks all of my boxes. Its navigation and obstacle detection features work flawlessly, the app is satisfyingly simple and clearly laid out, and in standby mode, it consumes less power than any other robot vacuum I’ve tested.
Pro
- Excellent cleaning performance
- Fast
- Precise navigation
- Commendably low standby power consumption
Contra
- High water consumption despite its fairly small tank
- Does a mediocre job of cleaning corners
Lorenz Keller
Senior Editor
Lorenz.Keller@digitecgalaxus.chGadgets are my passion - whether you need them for the home office, for the household, for sport and pleasure or for the smart home. Or, of course, for the big hobby next to the family, namely fishing.
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