The Narwal Freo Z Ultra is the robot vacuum for me

As the bots continue to battle for victory, Narwal has reentered the arena with the best robot vacuum I’ve tested to date. The Narwal Freo Z Ultra is a robovac and mop that has been an absolute pleasure to have in my home.

For this generation of bot, Narwal has added a feature that has become standard in the industry, whether it needed it or not. A vacuum bag now resides within the base station to extract dry debris from the bot. The previous model, the Freo X Ultra, compressed several weeks’ worth of debris into the onboard storage. You can now get several months of vacuuming without interaction with the Freo Z Ultra.

Best of all, the Freo Z Ultra is the quietest bot I’ve experienced by far. Let’s dig a little deeper into why the Freo Z Ultra is my favorite new robovac.

Aside from offering over double the amount of suction power than most bots can provide, the spec sheet for the Freo Z Ultra is a little unimpressive at a glance. This is where I urge you to stop scouring the spec sheets as your sole point of research. The Freo Z Ultra, just like the Freo X Ultra before it, the experience of having one in your home is far better than what raw numbers could tell you.

A robot has either vacuumed or mopped my floors a minimum of once per day so far this year. In fact, there are two bots competing for floor space as I write this. Subjectively speaking, the Narwal Freo Z Ultra continues to get into the most places, and leaves behind the best shine on my hard floors. With 12,000Pa of suction power, it’s also able to pick up items heavier than steel marbles, or dust embedded deep in your carpets.

The Freo Z Ultra’s general shape and size are similar to those of the Freo X Ultra and other round robot vacuums. That means that this bot is narrow enough to fit between most chair legs and underneath most furniture. It also has a bonus cleaning feature: a side brush that cleans your baseboards. The Freo Z Ultra uses cameras as well as LiDAR and lasers for mapping, navigation, and obstacle avoidance.

But at this price tier, automation is the name of the game, and Narwal is a leader in the user experience in this regard. Every system, from cleaning and navigating to self-cleaning, is as automated as possible. The less you have to interact with your Freo Z Ultra, the better, and I wanted to see how long it would take before I had to intervene…

What I found out in my testing was that the total length of time the Freo Z Ultra can operate without your interaction is completely dependent on your settings. If you naturally maintain a clean home and only use the bot to vacuum, you’ll be able to go several months before you truly have to put your hands on the unit. In between the dust compression systems and the volume of collection space in the new in-dock vacuum bag, I truly expect I could get up to six months in my home.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have the Freo Z Ultra set to do deep-clean mopping cycles. In my relatively clean home, a full tank of water lasts approximately 1,400 square feet at these maximum-clean settings. I’m mopping about 450 square feet of my home, so I’m replacing the water every third cycle. The lightest mopping mode should nearly double this coverage, and there is always the optional hard-wire system to tap directly into your home plumbing for infinite water, just like we’ve recently seen with vacs the SwitchBot S10.

If you’re playing things by the instruction book, it is recommended to replace HEPA filters every seven weeks. It’s also a good idea to dust off the sensors every other week for maximum performance.

Perhaps my favorite feature of the Freo Z Ultra (and several Narwal units before it) is the Certified Tangle-Free brush. Narwal vacuums remain the only vacuums I’ve ever tested that have not required hair removal efforts.

On a per-charge basis, the Freo Z Ultra is rated for 2.5 hours of operation, which is about what I experienced.

The first thing the Narwal Freo Z Ultra does when you set it up is map your home. This is a full 360-degree LiDAR scan of your space, so you have to be sure to set up your space the way it will normally be used before mapping. You don’t have to re-map after you move rugs and furniture, but you’ll certainly get better results if you do.

Once mapped, your cleaning route is determined by many factors. Narwal’s software will take into account the geometry of your rooms, what type of rooms you have, the typical cleanliness of those rooms, and historical cleaning patterns to better optimize its route every time it starts out. Once in your space, the Freo Z Ultra uses LiDAR, Lasers, and dual RGD cameras to identify obstacles and messes on your floors.

The vision system has a 136-degree field of view. Imagery is processed on-board with a quad-core processor that uses AI object detection to differentiate things to be cleaned from things that don’t need to be cleaned. If ever the software fails, there are still physical bumpers on the bot that react to collisions with objects. So far, the bot has bumped into a few of the angled chair legs in my home, but it has successfully avoided cables and similar objects that could get caught in the brushes. It also has downward-firing sensors to help identify sharp drops and flooring types.

The Freo Z Ultra is smart enough that it may choose to dust and mop your hard floors before it lifts the mop out of the way and increases vacuum pressure to get into your rugs and carpets. While I’m a bit sad that Narwal chose to add cameras, the privacy-conscious buyer should know that Narwal sought outside certification to back its promise of privacy.

As I continue to run the Narwal Freo Z Ultra through my home, it occurs to me that I have a few preferences that run counter to the bot, but it remains the best bot I’ve ever used.

Features such as Electro Water Sterilization, auto-cleaning with heated water and heated air dryers, auto-detergent dispensing, and the very materials used to make the bot all add up to a superb experience.

Down to the very motors used to drive the bot, the unit feels and sounds premium. Just the other day a competing bot was running across the tile floors in my kitchen and my wife remarked that the noise was annoying, a bang and clank sound as it rolled over the gaps between tiles. The Freo Z Ultra ran the same route later that day, it did not sound like it was falling apart as it managed the gaps.

Those preferences I mentioned? I prefer the dust compression system of the Freo X Ultra over having dust storage in the base station, and I didn’t want cameras on my bot. But I have to admit that those two features do improve the longevity and efficiency of the Freo Z Ultra.

The bottom line is that the robot vacuum market is iterating quickly, but after spending weeks testing it, the Narwal Freo Z Ultra is a winner. Yes, it’s quite expensive, but after testing so many vacs, from the budget to the ultra-premium, I can say that this is the bot I want to help clean my home for the foreseeable future.