Shark - PowerDetect UV Reveal 2-In-1 Vac & Mop - Black

I absolutely love it. Set up was easy. App easy to use. Mapped my house completely correct. Vacuum and mopping job is wonderful. Nothing like coming home to a clean home!!

Having one of these robotic vacuums is such a time saver! Being able to set a cleaning schedule in the app is very convenient but there’s a few things you need to do to ensure a good cleaning. First thing is that you need to treat your house as if you just brought home a puppy. Don’t leave shoes or clothes laying out on the floor, small toys need to be picked up on cleaning days too. Close the doors to any room you need to keep your robot out of, like my teen’s room who will forget to pick up the floor on cleaning days. I let him vacuum his own room or he can use the app to run a single room vac mission right after he picks up the floor. The body of the robot is about 13 1/2” in diameter so if your kitchen or dining room chair legs are not wider than that then you either need to put the chairs upside down on the table or remove the chairs to a different room otherwise the robot probably won’t be able to access the floor under the table. Just things to consider. Having a robot doesn’t necessarily replace regular floor care but it sure keeps the house cleaner day to day for us, our Shark upright hardly gets out of the closet any more. We already have a Shark Matrix robot vacuum so I can speak to how the Shark app works with two vacuums added. Each vacuum will create its own map and run on its own schedules. So say you have all carpet upstairs and a mix of hard floors and carpet downstairs, you can put a vacuum upstairs and a vac/mop combo machine downstairs and then configure the schedules so the upstairs gets vacuumed whatever days you’d like and the downstairs can get vacuumed on certain days and vacuumed and mopped on a different day or days. So we have the vacuum set to run M/W/F and the vac/mop machine set to vacuum Mon and Wed and then vacuum and mop on Fridays. The app doesn’t allow you to put mop or vac+mop on the same schedule with vac only missions but you can create multiple schedules for the same machine so if you want to vac three days a week, mop all the hard floors once a week, and mop the kitchen and/or foyer only an extra day a week it takes three schedules. Vac+mop missions are whole house only, if you want to mop less than the whole house then it needs to be a mop mission only and you’d want to run that right after a vac mission so you’re not trying to mop loose dirt. It will tell you in the app how long each mission will take to complete so you can schedule accordingly. We have a family room that is one step down from our kitchen. Our older Matrix vacuum will sometimes fail to detect this edge properly and drop a drive wheel off and become stuck. I added a no- go zone just away from the edge and kept adjusting it until it was in the right spot. This new PowerDetect machine appears to do a better job at following the step edge and hasn’t needed a rescue or a no-go zone there at all. We have new tile floors but the old carpet was cut back and hasn’t been replaced yet so there’s a substantial gap down to the subfloor where the floor coverings meet in some spots. The NeverStuck Technology worked so the machine never needed assistance there either. If you have two floors but only one vacuum you can’t create and save two maps, you would need to let it explore and create a new map each time you move the machine between floors. This takes a while to do so it’s not really practical. Much better to have a second machine in that case. It looks to me like the docking station air filters between the Matrix and the PowerDetect are the same so I only need one size to service both machines. They get washed and allowed to dry about once a month so I keep extras to put in while the others dry then swap them back in the next month. Dust bin is good sized, it looks to be larger than the one on our Matrix and I only emptied that once a month, our 1500 sq ft house is about half tile so if you have more carpet or pets you may need to empty it more often. I checked the cleaning water bin and it was down about 2” after running the whole house mopping mission twice. With the size of the reservoir I’d think I would easily get four or maybe five missions between fill ups. It does take 12oz of Shark VacMop Multi Surface Floor Cleaner per water refill so stock up accordingly. It comes with a 12oz bottle, the replacements at the store are 2L or about 6 tank refills worth if you don’t do metric. Lol. Note that the machine requires a 2.4GHz wifi network to connect. Our main wifi is 5GHz but I had configured our guest wifi at 2.4GHz when we setup the first Shark vacuum so I made sure to connect to that. After the initial setup the machine will run an explore mission to map the rooms and then a second mission to detect the hard floors, rugs, and carpet. After the map is created you go in and edit and name the rooms. The app will attempt to separate the rooms for you but you can merge or split areas as you need. You can add no-go areas if any are needed, like if there’s a pile of electrical cords at the back of your desk you can make that area a no-go zone so the machine won’t get tangled up. Then you add your desired schedules and you are ready to go. The mop pad is left on the docking station during vac missions, the machine will come back for it when it needs to mop. The docking station has heat and fan assisted drying for the mop pad, the app recommends at least 8 hours between mop missions to allow the pad to dry. The first time I ran a mop mission it mopped the floor and headed back to the dock. It announced that it was cleaning its mop pad and I thought it was done. It then loudly announced “I HAVE DETECTED STAINS AND I’M HEADING OUT TO AGGRESSIVELY ATTACK THEM!”. Which startled me to be honest. LOL. You can turn the voice off or turn the volume down if you’d prefer. It had marked three areas on the map in the kitchen that needed additional attention, one right in front of the pantry, one in front of the trash bin, and one spot right in front of our countertop convection oven. Pretty much every place we’d be likely to drop or spill something. I had purposely made a stain of dried meat juice over by the larger oven but it got that on the first pass and didn’t go back. It went and scrubbed the three spots until it was happy the went back to the dock. It cleaned our tiles well but I noticed that it’s not quite as able to clean a spot that is in a grout line. But I definitely like the job it did on the tile! I felt the floor right after it passed and it was just moist and dried quickly, it was not sopping wet and it doesn’t spray water anywhere so I don’t worry about damaging my wood furniture or cabinets. I believe it would be no problem on hardwood or LVT floors as dry as it was. I checked the toe kicks and baseboards around the rooms as it passed and they were completely dry. Our tile has a very busy pattern to it which includes some small white splotches on some of the tiles. The vacuum did not detect those as stains so I was glad to see that. I’m not sure how it tells the difference but it’s impressive. We have a carpeted runner in our tile hallway, vacuuming is no problem but it’s understandably not able to mop the 6-8” of tile on either side of the runner. It will mop the whole hallway for me if I roll up the runner ahead of its mission. It detects carpet and rugs as it goes along and is able to raise its mop pad about a half inch above to prevent dragging the damp pad over the carpets. That works pretty good, I did see it drop the mop pad too early as it was driving off a thin throw rug in the master bath but it always waited until it was clear of the carpets and the thicker rugs in the rest of the house. I think you would enjoy having this machine in your home, it does a really good job. Is it perfect? No, but overall it’s a huge time saver and it keeps our house cleaner day to day which is awesome!

The Shark - PowerDetect UV Reveal 2-In-1 is a very capable robot vacuum & mop system. To start off, I think it bears mentioning that I view these types of appliances as a maintenance product and in no way a 100% replacement for proper cleaning. Depending on traffic and cleanliness of one's environment, I still believe a good periodic deep-cleaning is essential to a clean home – done by hand. What any of these robots provide (some obviously better than others...) is an excellent, automated way to maintain an above-average level of cleanliness in a home but with compromise. No matter how often the system contends to "refresh" its own cleaning pads or re-run focused cleaning in detected areas, they do inherently push around a small amount of dirt, grime and what-have-you - trapped in the pads or brushes. That said, a system like the Shark - PowerDetect UV Reveal 2-In-1 will maintain a relatively clean floor which is MUCH better than a floor allowed to build up a higher degree of contamination, due to procrastination and/or neglect. Unboxing & Setup: The PowerDetect UV Reveal 2-In-1 is well packaged and comes with boldly printed quick setup instructions at the top of its box. The instructions are clear, concise and easy to follow. Other than peeling some protective film, attaching one of the corner brushes and inserting the dock ramp plate - there really isn't any major assembly required. Should be manageable for everyone. It pays to already have the SharkClean app installed on your mobile device, by the way. Access to the two reservoirs, one for clean water & cleaning solution... and one for dirty or "gray" water, is right at the top and below an easy to flip-up door. Those two bins have nicely engineered handles. There's also a freshener (odor neutralizer) puck that needs to be twisted into place on the top of the dock, that has a dial for intensity. All clearly marked and simple to engage. The App guidance is about as good as it gets, especially in conjunction with the included printed, setup instructions - again - inside the top of the box. Pairing with my mobile device went smoothly, for the most part, but did seem to take an inordinate amount of time - seemingly during what appeared to have been a firmware update - with no indication of what it actually was doing. I'd say that other brands are better at being verbose about what is going on, but I won't ding Shark any rating for the additional wait time. It wasn't frustratingly long... In Operation: Running the UV Reveal 2-In-1 Vac & Mop is pretty straight forward. With the initial setup, you have to let the robot map your room(s) or whole house - depending on the extent you intend to use it. For us, maintaining a moderately large, kitchen and dining area floor, with one rug but otherwise tiled throughout, was the logical choice. We want a system that has its cleaning solution and workload focused on/in an area that is prone to getting dirty fast due to the kitchen being a major "hub" in the house. Pets add to it too! Protip: Make sure to check the dimensions of the unit vs. where you plan on having it placed in your home; this thing takes up a good chunk of floor space and it's tall as well. The system is moderately loud and has good onboard, voice announcements. Following the initial mapping run, the UV Reveal 2-In-1 will proceed to vacuum the entire zone and then return to the base to prep the pads - and then begin mopping. We enabled the UV Detect function and it seems to add some unexpected twists & turns to the cleaning routine. From the limited time we've been running this robot, what we've noticed is that it keeps track of problem areas and intentionally revisits those areas on subsequent runs, to check for the return of messes. This is clever but adds significant time to the run cycle. What was most important to us was that the area became mapped correctly during both dry & wet runs, that the mapped area was completely covered or tracked out during cleaning excursions and that it didn't leave any puddles. On balance, the system met those basic expectations. Here's a small criticism: The way the SharkClean app displays/depicts the location of detected "hot spots" and its current location within the map (or room) - is both lagged by a good 20 to 30 seconds (so not real time by any stretch of the imagination...) and the depictions are oddly proportionally off, but just enough, to look semi-OK onscreen. It's sort of a nit but I figured it's worth mentioning - for completeness. Personally, I like the SharkClean app better than most the competitors I've tried or used - because it does provide all the Key functions one would expect, including stuff like a Do Not Disturb function and a logical Spot Cleaning option, that are easy to see and not buried or in odd places. But the reports this system generates and pushes out seem to be saved in a one-deep format and I think it would be better to have 5 or 10 "runs" worth of reports to be able to go back to, and review. I also think the logic behind some of the functions, deeper in the App, could be explained better - but I don't want to chase down that rabbit hole in this review. Suffice it to say, SharkClean needs some tendering loving care and tightening up - like most apps do! There are three levels of vacuum strength; Eco - Normal - Max and the same goes for the mopping. Max mopping leaves the floors noticeably wetter and adds to the dry time. It should also be noted that mopping has three levels of cleaning strength as well as three levels of suction - labeled the same. In Summary: The Shark - PowerDetect UV Reveal 2-In-1 Vac & Mop robot does an admirable job of cleaning, to the areas nearest the baseboards, pretty darn good into the corners and is smart enough to return to problem areas and put in a little extra elbow grease (robotically speaking ofc...) – where needed. At times it sort of appears to be lost but actually it’s just taking short cuts – is my best guess. My hope is this system really learns it’s assigned “zone” and moves within it more precisely, as the weeks & months progress. Pros: Easy to setup and pair to the SharkClean app Good depth of settings to customize both the operation & saved cleaning routines Not too terribly loud in operation apart from the voice announcements - which could benefit from a volume slide control - inside the App. Max suction is quieter than competing models with similar price points. Bagless design -- which is a plus! The fluid reservoirs are ample in size, for our intended use. Expect to be refilling/emptying these frequently if you're trying to conquer your entire home with one device and your square footage is on the larger side The Shark branded cleaning solution is competitively priced per fluid ounce. Overall, I’d say that the build quality is reflective of the price point and generally up to Shark/Ninja standards. Shark/Ninja is a brand we trust. Cons: The mapping function seems a touch imprecise. Perhaps that will naturally get dialed-in over time. Can't' say for sure considering the short time of ownership. Because of this level of inaccuracy, the edges of the rug in our kitchen did get a little bit wet. Not sopping wet but just enough to notice that the mopping zone was off a bit, after multiple "calibration" runs performed by the unit. We’re going to keep an eye on that!