Shark POWERDETECT NeverTouch Pro Robot Vacuum & mop

Robot floor cleaners have got to have a gimmick these days, and this one has THREE… it can both pop a wheelie, and it can stash its own tools when it doesn’t need them. Plus it has built in air freshening! If you’re shopping for a robot vacuum or floor cleaning bot I feel a bit sorry for you…with so many choices out there it’s hard to know where to start let alone which one to pick. Shark has added its new robot to the fray with the new Shark POWERDETECT NeverTouch Pro robot vacuum and mop.

Like most new floor cleaning bots these days, you’ve gotta have a couple features that make you stand out from the crowd, and on that Shark doesn’t disappoint. In this review I’ll take a look at what makes this robot floor cleaner different from the rest, what it can do and how exactly it cleans. I’ll run it through my full battery of cleaning tests and then I’ll wrap this video up with the pros and the cons of this device so you can decide if it’s going to be right for you.

I would like to thank Shark for gifting me this robot. While the company did send one to me, it did not ask for or receive permission to have any any input whatsoever into this review. So you can consider these thoughts my own.

What’s in the box

Let’s unbox this robot so you can see what you get.

The charging and self cleaning station is the biggest item in the box. Right on top you’ll see the special reusable cloth mopping pad.

Next up is a box holding the robot itself. There’s also two small corner brushes packaged in red plastic that you want to make sure don’t get lost or accidentally discarded. These simply clip into place on the robot; just one to begin, and the second one is an extra.

You’ll also find an odour neutralizer cartridge in here which is going to be installed in the base station shortly.

The robot comes with another mopping pad already installed.

There’s a sample size bottle of Shark cleaning solution which is a nice extra touch.

Lastly you want to remove and unwrap the base station. A plastic floor protecting plate that doubles as a bit of a ramp is also in here.

Flipping the robot over to get a closer look, you’ll see the mopping plate with cloth preinstalled, and the small single roller beater brush underneath.

Getting a look at everything all laid out, the only thing you really can’t see is the water tanks which are hidden under the lid of the base station.

This robot floor cleaner set has a pretty utilitarian look. While a lot of brands are opting to try to get their substantially sized robot floor cleaners to blend in to homes a little better, there’s no hiding what Shark POWERDETECT NeverTouch Pro robot vacuum and mop is all about.

Set up & assembly

Before you can start using the POWERDETECT, it needs to get a bit of a charge and you’ll need to connect it to the Shark Clean app.

Situate the base station near a plug and then dock the robot inside. You can also twist in the special odour neutralizing cartridge now, and fill the clean water tank with clean water and a couple ounces of cleaning solution.

Once it powers up you can open up the Shark Clean app and follow the instructions to get it connected to your Wi-Fi network. I was set up and ready to go in about five minutes.

The next order of business is to get the bot to map your home. The app will prompt you to do this and the robot will roam around your house at low speed until it generates a full map of the space.

Mapping took about 10 minutes, but it created a very accurate map. The robot will go out a second time to do what it calls carpet detection and then it will draw out all of the carpeted areas in the house —and it got them bang on.

The map is going to come in handy when you want to tackle room specific cleanings, have it clean certain areas within a room, or if you want to automatically schedule cleanings each day or each week.

One thing I should point out fairly early in the game is that when you call for a clean, you need to choose whether the robot will vacuum or whether it will mop; it’s not going to do both at the same time—at least not effectively. It seems like it might use a teeny bit of suction while mopping, but I wouldn’t expect it to clean thoroughly.

If it vacuums it’s going to leave the mopping pad in the base station, and if you ask for it to mop it will put it on like a pair of hammer pants.

Special features

Pad Drop

One of the chores associated with certain robot floor cleaners is that you may have to swap a vacuuming plate for a mopping plate. This can be tedious and kind of grungy. Shark solves the problem by having the robot manage the mopping plate for you. In essence, if it is programmed to mop, it will back into the base station and lock the plate in place. If it’s only going on a vacuum run, it will leave the plate behind. The technology is rather ingenious and I’ve never seen this in action before. But I can definitely say it works and I like the idea of letting the robot figure out what it needs to do on its own. And at the same time you should never have to worry about carpets getting wet.

Odor neutralizer

Shark is one of the only brands I can think of that uses an odour neutralizing cartridge in its filtration system. This is a unique concept since as it pulls air through the system to help evacuate the robots dustbin, filters keep dust from re-entering your home, and then as it’s exhausted back into your room, the odour neutralizer freshens it so that it doesn’t smell stale or musty. It’s extremely subtle but it is a nice touch and it does add a bit of freshness each time the vacuum empties itself.

Never Stuck Technology & Lifting

Shark POWERDETECT NeverTouch Pro robot vacuum and mop has a feature which shark refers to as “Never Stuck” technology.

How you’ll see this working is that if the robot encounters taller than average flooring transitions, thresholds, or obstacles, it can actually lift itself up to cross over or avoid them. This same technology can also lift the bot up and skate over carpets to avoid dampening them with the mopping plate in use.

Self cleaning

Once your robot has completed a clean it will always return to the base station for recharging. It will empty it’s onboard dustbin first, then automatically wash and dry the mopping pad with the fresh water and cleaning solution in the tank.

Shark says the POWERDETECT NeverTouch Pro robot vacuum and mop should only need maintenance and attention from you about every 30 days or so, but of course this will depend greatly on how dirty your home is and how often you’re running the robot. My testing period only ran about two weeks so I’m not yet able to say if it is actually this effective or not.

Cleaning tests

Now that you’re familiar with all the special features of this robot vacuum and mop, let’s test its cleaning power. I run all my robot vacuum devices through the same sets of cleaning tests. I will spill dry goods like rice, flour, and oats on both carpet and hard floors, and to test the mopping I’ll spill some wet messes and let others dry to test the scrubbing power.

Starting with its performance on hard floors, I was fairly impressed with the job it was able to do.

It was able to be extremely thorough; seeming to almost see spills and zero in on them, then spend a minute or two going over and over and over the same area until it was incredibly clean—I’d say it probably got about 100% of the dirt I left for it.

I will also note that this vacuum appears to run at a much quieter volume than some other competing models.

Scrubbing mop

The mopping is quite different on this robot. That’s because the robot will determine on its own whether or not it needs it’s mopping plate, and retrieve it if it does or leave it behind if it’s going to vacuum.

With the mopping feature, preparing for mopping does take some time. The robot fills it’s on board water tank and this takes about 1 minute and 15 seconds. It happens relatively silently so it shouldn’t be a bother.

The mop has a unique way of scrubbing the floor with a small back and forth motion.

I had it tackle a particularly difficult cleaning test which is dried on coffee. I was actually quite impressed that even on regular mopping mode it was able to tackle about 95% of this spill, leaving only the thickest and most dried on portions of the edges. This is a cleaning test that even extremely expensive and advanced floor bots can struggle with, but I’d say the shark NeverTouch matched them in cleaning prowess on this.

Unfortunately that back and forth mopping motion also resulted in a repetitive tap beat. The mopping pad makes an incessant clicking sound as it’s going around the house which I found rather annoying and distracting.

When in mopping mode if the robot detects carpet, rather than avoid it altogether, it pops its back up about an inch to create clearance and then continues over the carpet.

This is a bit of a strange way of doing things… particularly for a product that has the word “detect” in the name. Many bots simply recognize and avoid carpet when in mopping mode, but this one is determined to show off its lifting abilities I guess. And circling back to the topic of the noise, there is also a pop squeak noise every time the robot lifts and lowers itself which makes this robot in my opinion one of the noisiest floor cleaning bots I’ve ever tried, not even taking into account the vacuum motor sound.

There’s also quite a bit of water used on the floor. This didn’t bother me so much, as it seemed to help it do a more thorough job, but I know some folks with more dainty floors who wouldn’t want it to stay damp for as long as this one did.

I also tried out the spot cleaning feature, but I only got it to work once which allows you to clean about a 6 ft.² area. The single time I got it to work I will say it seemed the robot does an incredibly thorough job with this; essentially spinning itself in never ending circles across the floor to really power away anything that might be there. As it is extremely effective it does take a little longer, which is probably expected.

I realized something else while doing this test. If you have anything like large boxes on your floor while your robot is doing the mapping or you move furniture or other objects around, you’ll need to re-map your house. I had a large box sitting in the corner of my kitchen when I did the initial mapping. And later when I created a test spill in that area, the robot simply would not go to that spot to do any cleaning, despite the fact the area was now free and clear. It wasn’t until I had the robot re-map the entire house that it was able to fill in the holes.

For that reason I can’t emphasize enough to make sure your floors are clear of any objects even temporary ones, or there’s a high chance the Shark robot may never get to some areas.

Back to trying that spot cleaning…I tried this again so I could really have it tackle a tough spill, however the robot simply wandered all over the room, and then the house, multiple tries.

When it’s done the robot will return to the base and wash its mopping pad. In another minor annoyance with this, the mechanism makes a buzzing and repeated whaaa-whaaa-whaaa whining sound while it’s cleaning. Then it follows that up with much sloshing and plumbing noises as it drains the excess water into the dirty water tank. Since the cleaning cycle lasts for several minutes, it definitely does get annoying after a while.

I also didn’t see an option for cancelling the self-cleaning or being able to shorten it at all. So I had no choice but to wait it out.

Battery life & runtime

A typical cleaning cycle lasts for about an hour, but this will depend on the size of your home and if you’ve asked for a room specific cleaning.

The Shark POWERDETECT can take up to four hours to fully recharge from an empty battery.

A Recharge & Resume feature lets the bot return to its base to recharge if it reaches low battery charge (under 15%) during a cleaning mission, and still has area left to clean. When docked on the base, the robot recharges until the battery is 100%, and then resumes the cleaning mission.

Recharge & Resume is automatically activated on your robot by default, but it can be turned off in the Settings section in the app. You should also turn on Do Not Disturb if you’re going to use this feature, since the robot could decide to resume its clean after you’ve already gone to bed.

Overall review

The more time I spend with this robot the more conflicted I am about it. It does a great job at cleaning, but it’s both noisy enough and has enough small quirks that it might scare you off.

Let’s go over the pros and the cons so you can see if these may be dealbreakers for you.

On the pro side it both vacuums and mops incredibly well and was able to ace all but the most challenging cleaning tests; and even then it got about 95% of the dirt.

I also like the fact the dust bin doesn’t require a bag so I never need to worry about replacements, and it holds a lot of dirt so I also don’t need to tend to it constantly. While the robot has interesting lifting capabilities that do allow it to clear very tall thresholds and obstacles, I am a bit puzzled about why it needs to lift on carpets when it’s mopping at all; the smarts and carpet recognition in this bot should really mean that it simply avoids carpet in the first place when it has the mopping plate attached. And in another puzzle, the device couldn’t seem to recognize obstacles like cords and cables and tied itself up in them pretty good…though it was able to untangle itself after a couple of minutes.

That brings me to the downsides…two of my biggest complaints were about the noise level; both the click clacking of the mop while it was cleaning, the lifting mechanism, and the ultra loud and sloshy cleaning cycle were a major annoyance.

I’m not thrilled about the fact that it doesn’t vacuum and mop at the same time like a lot of other floor bots in this price range do. While I do think the mechanism and the leave behind plate are quite clever, sometimes there are times you just need to get everything done at once.

And on a more minor note, the mapping process during set up could be a lot more efficient; covering not just the mapping but the carpet detection too in one drive around the house.

I also struggled with getting it to do a proper spot clean, and I do find the design of this device to be pretty utilitarian.

I have to say for me, this is not one of my favourite robot floor cleaners. There are just too many things that put me off about it that would mean I’d take a pass on it.

The other deciding factor for me is the very high price. Selling for $1299 CAD/$1000 USD this should be a top of the line robot floor cleaner package, and I feel like it has enough knocks against it that that price cannot be justified. I’m kind of disappointed about that because I really like Shark as a brand.

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