I’ve been renting robot vacuums for the past few years. In my previous place I used to have a Roomba Combo j7+. This was a pretty pleasant experience. It could handle the shaggy rug in my living room. It didn’t fall off the stairs. It mopped the floor. It didn’t require me to babysit it through everything, it just worked.

But its box was quite big, so when I moved I didn’t want to carry it around, instead returned and replaced it with a cheaper not-combo j7+. This obviously didn’t have a mopping feature anymore, but that was the least of its problems. It would sometimes stop in the middle of the room requiring rescue because it somehow sensed it was “stuck”. Then when it managed to somehow break its side brush thing on I don’t even know what (probably the edge of a rug), I decided to return it and find something better.

The two options were Narwal Freo Z Ultra and Eufy Omni E25. The Eufy cost twice as much though, so I decided to give the Narwal a try first. The very first impression was that it’s absolutely massive. The box is about twice the size of the Roomba’s (which was already big) and the base is bigger too. The machine itself isn’t that different in size.

Setting it up wasn’t hard. Attach the brushes, put water in the base, plug it in, go. The app is not exactly intuitive and since I assume it pings the cloud for everything instead of staying local, it feels very slow as well.

The initial mapping was done smoothly in a few minutes. The robot has a lidar on top, so it doesn’t need to go around bumping into things to map like the Roomba did. It’s not particularly smart about recognizing furniture, but it’s not like I need a thorough map of my chairs anyway.

Things only went downhill from there though. I started it on a vacuum-then-mop journey—I’m not sure it’ll ever be able to complete it. It starts all right, vacuuming around the room. Then it suddenly reboots (playing that obnoxious boot music full blast). Then again. The app claims “Unable to connect to robot” until the app itself is restarted. Firmware was updated just last night (right after it arrived).

Of course progress is lost: the robot sits ducks in the middle of the room and if I try to start it on another journey, the loop just repeats. After a few minutes it starts crashing for no apparent reason (needless to say my wifi is rock solid). The cleaning that was in progress isn’t recorded either, so it starts from zero again. It may go back to base to wash its mop, even though it never used it yet, crashing during vacuum. It would do that multiple times during the process of a single clean (again, before it ever even used the mop).

At first I thought it was because I edited the map (adding furniture roughly where it is), but even with a freshly auto-generated map the issue persists. I’ll keep trying (disabling “smart” features etc), but for sure this doesn’t feel like a very promising start. If by some miracle it manages to complete its cleaning routine, then comes the hard part: redo the whole thing on the second floor without access to the base. If the crashing proves to be a temporary issue and it works, that’s great.

Otherwise, I’ll have to return it way ahead of schedule. I don’t have the time or the patience to deal with a buggy robot vacuum.