Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal review: impressive hardware laid to waste by software issues

While impressively powerful and pretty well specced, Shark's Power Detect UV reveal can be a little, well, stupid. When it's on top form, it'll vacuum and mop your floors within an inch of their life, using UV to detect even invisible stains and offering impressive, albeit occasionally oversensitive, object avoidance. Some mapping issues and its lacklustre app, however, left me wanting a greater focus on software. Let's dive into the full review to find out if this is a robot vacuum for you. But before that, make sure to scan this QR code to learn more about becoming a TechRadar insider. Membership is completely free and gives you access to exclusive perks, rewards and more. Now, let's get on with today's video. The Shark Power Detect UV Reveal comes in at $1,299 or £999. While it's far from cheap, it's pretty good value for what it offers. That being said, there are other robot vacuum cleaners with equally impressive features and better software at a similar price. Plus, you'll need to maintain some parts of the vacuum. In particular, refills for the multi-floor cleaner and the odour neutralising puck, as well as the usual replacements for things like side brushes, mop pads and beyond. Over time these costs can add up but you'll scarcely find a robovac that doesn't come with similar added costs these days. In the box you'll find the vacuum, base, power cord, an anti-odor puck, one refill bottle of Shark's Multi-Floor Cleaner, two side brushes, plus the usual array of instructions and warranty documents. The base stands at 17 by 18 by 14 inches and it comes in either black or white. Mine was the latter and I think it looks a lot more premium than the tackier black colorway. Enclosed in the lid of the base are the clean and waste water tanks, which lift out easily thanks to the retractable handles, as well as the bagless dirt compartment. I really appreciate that Shark opted for this, so there's one less thing to routinely replace. You can remove the container with the press of a button situated on the side of the dock, and it's also HEPA-filtered. There's also a set of two filters that you'll need to clean every one to two months, depending on how often you use your robot vacuum, as well as a slot for one of Shark's anti-odor pucks should dusty smells be an issue for you. Moving on to the vacuum itself, it's a fairly standard, rounded, two-in-one robot vacuum. But it is a little tall and hefty. The top of the robot vacuum houses its raised puck for lidar sensing. These all work in tandem to navigate your home and spot messes ripe for cleaning. If you'd rather not use the app, you can also use the four touch-sensitive buttons to activate mop and vacuum modes, send the vacuum home, and connect to Wi-Fi. There's a soft bumper that surrounds the edges of the vacuum to prevent damage from any collisions, but these are actually remarkably rare thanks to some top-tier object avoidance I'll talk about later. You can also remove its dustbin and mop plate from the rear of the device. On the underside, you'll find the wheels, brush bar, side brush, and a singular flap mop pad. These aren't my favourite type of mop pad. A rondelle will typically offer a deeper clean, better post clean drying and a lot less water waste. However, Shark has designed the robot vacuum to wiggle this mop pad to agitate dirt, which goes some of the ways to make up the difference in performance. Speaking of which, let's talk about performance. Setup for the Shark Power Detect UV Reveal is pretty simple. Using the app, you'll connect the vacuum to your Wi-Fi, give it a name , and after that the robot vacuum will run its first mapping pass. Broadly, mine was pretty accurate, and it's really fun to watch it spin around your home. My apartment has a slightly tricky layout for robot vacuums, including a half-tiled, half-carpeted kitchen living room, and there's also a lot of doors to dodge. But I think it handled it quite well. After this first pass, the app will offer you a second mapping run, this time to detect floor types. If you plan to regularly mop hard floors and you have carpets or rugs to avoid, you must make sure you get this out of the way during setup, because there's no way to update the map after the fact. All right. I performed my standard pick-up tests using oats, cornflour and brown rice to compare performance to other robot vacuums I tested, and the results were pretty good, but a mixed bag. When setting the Shark Power Detect UV Reveal off for a standard vacuum-only clean, I was immediately impressed as it zigzagged across my floors, leaving them visibly refreshed. On hard floors, it excels even more, thanks to a combination of its high-performance side brush, solid suction, and the jet of air it blasts at hard-to-reach debris, ensuring floors are spic and span post-clean. On carpet, however, it's slightly less impressive, especially in the edge cleaning department. But it does still do a decent enough job. Its pickup of larger debris was very impressive on carpet, leaving little to nothing behind. But powdery debris did leave a small amount of residue on my medium pile rugs. Next up, I tried a regular combination clean with vacuum and mopping. And that's where my experience with the Shark Power Detect UV Reveal became a bit more mixed. The robot vacuum starts by filling its water tank at the base, proceeding to concurrently vacuum and mop your floors rather than splitting out into two tasks. This helps to save time and battery, however it does risk the chance of soggy carpets. To avoid this the robot vacuum will lift its hind to keep the mop pad from drenching your carpets but this then reduces its effectiveness at cleaning on carpets as it crushes the side brush and sometimes while navigating it'll also spin around and spit water across the floor anyway. However, once it reaches hard floors, the results are pretty impressive. The mop pad agitates spills and stains with a back and forth scrubbing motion, lifting them with ease. And if you go for one of the higher power settings, it's even quicker and more effective. Regardless of the setting, it does use a lot of water. And especially if you're cleaning up larger spills, that means the Power Detect UV Reveal can leave a streaky mess in its wake. I noticed this even more so when there was a lot of debris to vacuum up during the clean. One time the Power Detect UV Reveal left a clump of soggy oats behind like a little owl pellet as well as white streaky marks across my floor. But then I wouldn't typically recommend regularly using your robot vacuum to collect large volume spills like I was doing anyway. I have especially reflective kitchen tiles so I noticed the streaking a lot more. However on my less shiny bathroom tiles it wasn't as much of a problem, so worth noting depending on what flooring you have at home. When the Shark Power Detect UV Reveal works, it really works. But I encountered a fair few bugs and limitations that do impact its overall effectiveness. For example, when doing a combination clean, it sometimes skips cleaning certain areas and rooms, or neglects to clean areas that I've specifically asked it to when choosing room-by-room cleaning. Its object detection, on the other hand, is incredible. Perhaps too good, as the robot vacuum avoided my low-hanging but not floor-length curtains like the Plague, giving a wide berth to even the most inconsequential of obstacles. Generally though, I'd rather have that problem. However, improved smarts like object detection by item would mean there's slightly less preparation required pre-clean to ensure your entire floor gets cleaned properly. I was also massively impressed by the ease with which it lifted itself up and over obstacles like thresholds, chair legs and the like, leading to quicker cleans. After its standard cleaning cycles, the RoboVac will return to its base, but the job's not over yet. It'll issue an ominous warning once it's refreshed itself. I detected stains. I'm heading back out to aggressively attack them. Here's where the magic of the PowerDetect UV reveal is really on show, because as it's cleaning, it flares a blue UV light with which you can see for yourself the stubborn and sometimes invisible stains on your floor. The robot vacuum will then return after a standard cleaning run to clean these up. It was pretty cringe-inducing to see which areas I hadn't cleaned recently and just how much grime was left behind. Once it's done with its aggressive attack, it'll return for a final time to the base and begin the mop pad drying process quietly in the background with just a low humming noise. In my testing, the RoboVac lived up to its estimated 3 hour battery life too. A 45 minute clean on standard settings dropped the battery by just 25%. That's pretty good for a robot vacuum and the recharge time seemed really quick too. The app is quite restrictive when it comes to home and schedule customisation. You can only have one map, which means multi-floor cleaning isn't possible. No-go zones are always rectangular, and you can only create two schedules per day. That's not on a par with many other robot vacuums, especially those at a similar price point. I also noticed that the robot vacuum would often get confused when it initiated a clean, meaning it often forged straight into the corner of my living room and spun around there for a good few minutes before figuring out its path to the hallway and onto the next room On closer inspection, this happened most frequently when I sent it to clean somewhere other than its homeroom. For some reason, it thought it could head straight through my wall instead of around and through the doorway. These issues, among other software quirks, make for the primary complaint I have surrounding the Shark Power Detect UV Reveal. Its app and onboard smarts hold back an otherwise high-performance robot vacuum. I personally liken it to giving a power washer to a caveman. So, what do you make of the Power Detect UV Reveal? Let us know in the comments down below and make sure to hit the subscribe button for more tech news, reviews and how to's.