Narwal Freo Z10 reviewed: a diligent cleaner

A cute and futuristic base station draws the eye with the Narwal Freo Z10. Can it keep you there, and keep your home clean?

Automation on the whole is beginning to make more of an impression in our lives, what with so many appliances doing the work that hard labour had us do previously, and the same is happening for vacuuming.

While you still might need a stick vacuum for the big messes, the automatic world of robotic vacuums can help with the maintenance of the home, working in the background with an auto vac on dirt patrol, and generally helping keep those floors clean.

In the past few years, the addition of mopping has helped turn the robotic vac into a bit of a floor cleaning superstar, though there is a lot of competition in this category.

Finding a cleaner that cleans well and cleans to the point where the floor is practically spotless may be one of the main sticking points, and it could be where relative newcomer to Australia Narwal is looking to be different.

We’re still not sure we understand the naming convention, but the Narwal Freo Z10 looks to impress based on just how hard it cleans, making it distinct from everything else out there.

What is the Narwal Freo Z10?

Like many other robovacs, the Narwal Freo Z10 is a bit of an all-in-one for home cleaning. An automated robot that will cover the vacuuming of your home, as well as the mopping of the floors.

That’s part and parcel of pretty much every robotic vacuum these days, as the technology moves from simply sucking up the gunk in your home to also wiping it down, as well. Anything to ease up on your chores and make life a little easier overall.

Narwal’s Freo Z10 isn’t any different in what it can do, though it does look different, at least, offering a more enclosed design with very intuitive approaches to plugging things in and maintaining the vacuum.

The base station looks a little like a box from the future, allowing you to open the top and see two containers, purple for clean water and clear for the dirty water your robo mop will send back. At the front, you only need to pull off the cover to find the dust bag that will eventually need emptying and/or replacing, while another compartment has you plug in a cleaning product.

It’s easily one of this reviewer’s favourite base stations, and feels like it does a better job of blending into an environment than pointing out where the individual compartments are and what they do. Sure, it’s not as slim as some of the other models, but it looks nice, too.

Under the base station is the robo-vac, which is both robo-vac and robo-mop, as noted earlier. The Freo Z10 uses a 15,000Pa suction vacuum, side and roller brushes, a dual-pad mopping system, and a base station which claims to use AI, but is more likely for the mopping system.

Also, this robo-vac brand isn’t spelled like an actual “narwhal” animal, which meant a lot of fun for spellcheck in this review. If you see the “h” in the name in this review, that’s why!

What does it do?

Back to the robovac, because what it does is help you, or that’s the idea, anyway.

Cleaning is such a literal chore that robo-vacs have found a way over the years to make life a little easier, doing the background maintenance we don’t want to do, with the past few years adding water tanks to deal with the mopping, as well.

Narwal’s take on the category isn’t dramatically different from others, using a combination of a sweeper to push items into the line of a vacuum underneath, a water tank to clean the floor, and places to store the debris and dirty as the system cleans, before coming back to the base station, emptying it out, and continuing on with its work.

Very little about the Narwal Freo Z10 is all that new, and more just continues what every robotic vacuum does today.

There are some notable differences, though, because unlike much of what we’re seeing, this model doesn’t have AI onboard for its camera, losing the ability of insights as it moves.

Does it do the job?

It can still do a solid job, however, though we found the vacuum wasn’t always as great as the mopping, which can feel like it’s on another level entirely.

One of the hardest working robo-vacs this reviewer has seen, the Freo Z10 tries really hard, so hard that it’s reminiscent of a character in Disney’s Wall-E: M-O.

The robot that mops everything diligently, taking on that task as if it were the only thing that matters, the Freo Z10 is very much like MO because it’s never satisfied and just keeps on mopping.

Its vacuum isn’t always the best, but its ability to mop is basically second to none. It will keep mopping and keep cleaning until its sensors say the floor is actually clean, and that can take a seriously long time in some instances.

This house isn’t a dirty house, but apparently the kitchen rubbed the Freo Z10 the wrong way, and it just cleaned and cleaned and cleaned some more, resulting in an hour worth of kitchen floor cleaning at one point during the review.

Nothing could convince the Z10 that the floor was clean, and so it just kept on pacing the floorboards, mopping line after line, back and forth, to the point where we ended up emptying the dirty water tank just from the kitchen itself.

The Freo Z10 is a diligent cleaner. It just keeps on cleaning until it’s done.

What does it need?

That’s not to say it always gets it right, though.

At one point, the mop pad got stuck and came off, while other times have seen it easily get stuck on small debris that some AI smarts would have likely just ignored. Another time, it decided to add to the map by going outside, which surprised us greatly.

When the Narwal works, it does a great job, but the lack of AI and means it might just run over something it shouldn’t have, and then get stuck. You’ll find error after error at times, often to the point where you’ll just want to send it home and come back to it later. We sure did.

Part of the problem is that by itself, the mapping doesn’t account for furniture. That’s the sort of thing AI smarts add to the package, like what we experienced with Roborock’s Qrevo Edge, which uses a camera and AI to work out what’s ahead of it and intelligently add it to the map.

The Narwal Freo Z10 doesn’t do that for you, so if you want to make sure it doesn’t go wandering under your TV unit with a bunch of cables or try to find its way to the side of something it shouldn’t, you need to spend some time in the app and do it yourself.

Is it worth your money?

One of the bigger problems with Narwal’s Freo Z10 is the price tag, because it’s $1999 Australian price just doesn’t match up to what else is out there.

At the $2K price point, you’re talking AI smarts and better reliability. The Freo Z10 performs more like a $999 or $1299 vacuuming mop-bot.

It’s just too expensive for what the machine is doing. Narwal has built a capable cleaner, but it’s not one that should cost anywhere near this much.

Yay or nay?

Narwal’s Freo Z10 is definitely one of the more interesting approaches to robotic cleaners simply because of how it’s different.

The base station is futuristic, which we love, complete with little touch-based controls up top, but that’s not really a major differentiator.

Rather, it’s the need to keep cleaning rather than go with a simple pass. We’ve not seen that level of arduous activity from a robo-vac before. It’s new.

We’re still not sure why the cleaner felt the need to do just that — spending more time in some rooms than others — but it definitely endeavoured to make the floor even cleaner than before, and that’s worth something.

As for the rest of the package, there are clearly things Narwal can do better on, like adding onboard camera AI for understanding the environment and ultimately improving the mapping, not to mention the price which feels too high for what it is. But in terms of a first impression, the Narwal Z10 is a solid little entry.