Introducing the Narwal Freo 20: the Chinese company is raising the bar in the mid-range market
FlowWash technology is coming to the Freo series: the robot unveiled in Berlin costs 999 euros. We tested it for a month
Narwal unveiled the Freo 20 at IFA in Berlin – a robot vacuum and floor-cleaner set to launch on the European market at €999. It is the first model in the Freo range to feature FlowWash, the cleaning system previously reserved for the Flow series – the top-of-the-range models in the catalogue. This is a clear positioning move: taking the technology the company considers its competitive advantage and bringing it down a notch, where the Chinese competition is most intense.
A brief note on FlowWash: for those unfamiliar with it, this is a system that does away with the two rotating discs widely used across the industry and replaces them with a flat microfibre roller. According to the manufacturer’s figures, the contact surface area with the floor is approximately seven times greater. Whilst the roller rotates in the opposite direction to the machine’s forward movement, sixteen nozzles spray it with clean water heated to 60 degrees, whilst an internal scraper and an air pump extract the dirty water. The pressure exerted on the floor is 12 newtons. The practical result is that the cloth is continuously regenerated whilst the machine is in operation, without the need to return to the base – a step which, in traditional systems, interrupts the cleaning cycle every few minutes.
During the trial month, this difference was particularly evident in two areas. The first is its performance on dry, sticky kitchen dirt: sauce or coffee stains that have been on the floor for hours are removed in a single pass, whereas rotating mops tend to spread them around. The second is the odour. A cloth that is rinsed in real time with hot water stays cleaner, and the base does not become a reservoir of stale dampness – something that anyone who has been using these robots for a few years knows all too well. On stoneware and treated parquet floors, performance was consistent, with short drying times.
The stated suction power is 31,000 pascals, a figure that has now lost its meaning in technical specifications because no two manufacturers measure it in the same way. What matters more is how it performs in practice, and it must be said that the Freo 20 has performed as one would expect from a product in this price range: it picks up crumbs and sand without needing to go over the same area repeatedly, handles short-pile carpets by raising the cleaning roller, and struggles on long-pile carpets like all its competitors. The DualFlow anti-tangle system also seems to work without any problems.
The aspect Narwal emphasises most in its communications is NarMind Pro, the autonomous navigation system based on dual RGB cameras, a 10 TOPS chip and TrueView 3D mapping. The company claims it can recognise over three hundred household objects and, above all, has the ability to adapt its behaviour to the context: increasing suction power near the dog’s bowl, reducing noise levels near a child’s bedroom, and distinguishing between wet and dry dirt to decide whether to vacuum or mop. In testing, obstacle recognition proved reliable with cables, socks and slippers, though there were a few errors with dark objects resting on dark floors. Contextual adaptation is less developed than the press release suggests: it works when areas are defined within the app, but much less so as a spontaneous behaviour of the robot. It remains an interesting direction, though one that should be assessed in the light of future software updates.
