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.