Review: Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal

At some point, many, many months ago, a glass of orange juice that was sitting on my living room bookshelf fell and spilled. I cleaned up the spill fairly quickly and was thrilled that no books were harmed, but a few weeks later, I realized just wiping away the juice hadn't stopped it from becoming a sticky patch on my floor. I eventually used a bottle of multipurpose cleaner to wipe up the sticky residue and debris, and thought the spot was all cleaned up.

But as I type this, the Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal robot vacuum has just finished spending several minutes scrubbing the area that I knew was once the site of a glass of orange juice and gravity gone wrong. It turns out, a girl and her favorite bottle of multipurpose cleaner aren't as powerful as I thought.

The UV Reveal is Shark's brand-new robot vacuum, and the name gives away its flagship feature: a built-in UV light to spot stains that would otherwise go unnoticed. It's a handy thing to have if your home has primarily hard floors with dried stains that need a good scrub, and your basic robot mop-vac won't stop to focus on these spots. The Shark UV Reveal is made to return to scrub at spots after detecting them with its UV lights. It's a feature that makes me question if any robot vacuum I've had before was actually doing a good job.

Light Show

Photograph: Nena Farrell

Initially, the Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal cleans pretty normally. After it connects to Wi-Fi and maps your home, you can choose to vacuum, mop, or vacuum-and-mop your entire home or individual rooms. (You can choose multiple rooms at once, too, which I like for targeting the kitchen and the cat-litter-covered bathroom.) If you're choosing one of the mop options, you'll see an option that should be toggled on by default: UV Stain Detect.

This mode uses UV light with the Shark's built-in camera to spot stains that it needs to come back to and scrub. It doesn't stop and scrub these during its initial clean; it'll finish the primary mopping job, go back to the base to refresh the mop pad, and then announce it's going back out to attack stains it spotted. (It literally announces this out loud from the base's speaker.) The UV Reveal uses a back-and-forth mopping style that Shark calls HyperSonic Mopping to truly scrub at a stain, rather than just passing its mop pad over it. The Shark also has a single long pad with a shape similar to half an oval, covering the entire front third of the vacuum, and it will agitate that pad to remove the stains it homes in on.

Courtesy of Shark

I tested its abilities by spilling some maraschino cherry juice around my house. I let the spills dry before I ran the vacuum; the cherry juice left a faint red sheen, so it was easy for me to see whether the spot was gone or not. The Shark was able to clean up one stain with its initial pass, but it came back for the second spot after it returned to the base to scrub it away. It's also scrubbed all kinds of spots in my home where I wasn't surprised to learn there were stealthy stains, from the orange juice crime scene to the space around the cat's food station and floor where we're most likely to stand and cook in the kitchen.

If you're curious what the vacuum is doing, you can usually tell by the lights. There are LED lights on the side of the vacuum that flash a deeper blue to show it's searching with the UV light for stains, and the vacuum's light also flares blue while it scrubs stains away. Shark says it did this intentionally so you can easily see your vacuum and understand what it's doing.

Floor Report

Photograph: Nena Farrell

For a robot vacuum and mop that's got special features for hard floors, my husband and I were both impressed with how well it vacuumed our living room rug. My husband actually thinks the rug felt cleaner and fluffier than when I vacuum with a Dyson stick vacuum. The Shark fearlessly pushes against the grain of my rug as it chugs across it in a way my stick vacuums tend to resist, which gives the rug a more fluffed-up feel.

There's no carpet on my main floor, but I have some upstairs. To move the Shark upstairs, I had to move the base and vacuum and prompt the vacuum to delete its map and remap my home, since Shark's vacuums can only store one map at a time. It would be one thing if I didn't need to move the base, but having to move both makes it a pain; if you were hoping for a vacuum that can clean multiple floors of your home, this isn't it.

But if carpet is on the main floor of your home, the Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal will still do a solid job with it. At about 3 inches tall, it was able to vacuum under my large storage bed, and even more, the matted-down carpet seemed refreshed after a pass from this robot vacuum. I did spot some tufts of cat hair on the carpet still, though; it seems the Shark was able to pull these up from the carpet, but didn't capture all of them.

The UV Reveal also has some handy tools and features for cleaning and escaping tricky spots. It has what Shark calls NeverStuck technology, which lets the robot lift itself up to get over obstacles. The technology works, at least for the tricky flat feet of a side table that the Shark got stuck on for a minute at my house before lifting itself off of it. I never had to rescue the UV Reveal on either floor of my home, though I will say I did a pretty good job moving floor mats out of the way since I wanted the floors mopped entirely. The vacuum will also shoot a jet of air to dislodge dust, and there's a single side brush as well. That side brush does a good job reaching into corners, even tricky, tiny corners where I intentionally placed a Cheerio to see if it could clean it up. (It did.)

Base Game

Photograph: Nena Farrell

The Shark's base station has one of my favorite water tanks. There's an extendable handle for the clean and dirty water canteens, and it clicks into place around the tank when you place it back in the base. It makes carrying water around a little more comfortable. The clean water tank contains 2.74 liters (or 11.6 cups) of water, while the dirty water tank contains 1.18 liters (or just under 5 cups). After two full cleans of my downstairs hard floors, the dirty water tank was only filled up a third of the way. The vacuum itself only takes 0.21 liters of clean water with it at a time, or 0.8 cups, and it'll also use some of that clean water to clean the mop pad while at its station.

The base station also has a bagless debris container, so no need to worry about repurchasing bags. The bagless base is fully sealed with HEPA filtration to keep allergens from sneaking back into the air before you empty the container. Shark says that it fits about 60 days of debris, but that can vary depending on your home and vacuuming frequency. While the base will alert you about the clean and dirty water tanks needing to be filled or emptied, it won't alert you when it's full, so it's something you'll need to keep an eye on.

While the vacuum returned to the base during my cleaning sessions to prep for mopping or to process returning to spots around the house, the one thing it didn't return for was a battery top-up. Shark says the battery should last three hours, and after 90 minutes of cleaning my entire main floor (including vacuuming a large rug and mopping the rest of the house), it had used 50 percent of its battery, putting it on track to be able to vacuum for three hours.