There is no carpet on my first floor, but I am upstairs. To move the Shark upstairs, I had to move the base and vacuum and prompt the vacuum to remove its map and remap my house, since Shark vacuums can only store one map at a time. It’s one thing if I don’t have to move the base, but moving both hurts it; if you’re hoping for a vacuum that can clean multiple floors in your home, this isn’t it.

But if the carpet is on the main floor of your home, the Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal will still do a solid job of it. At about 3 inches long, it was able to vacuum under my large storage bed, and what’s more, the matted-down carpet seemed refreshed after one pass from this robot vacuum. I found some cat hair on the carpet, though; it looks like the Shark managed to pull it out of the carpet, but they didn’t get it all.

UV Reveal also has some handy tools and features for cleaning and escaping difficult areas. It has what Shark calls NeverStuck technology, which allows the robot to raise itself to overcome obstacles. The technology works, at least for the tricky flat legs of a side table that the Shark was stuck in for a minute in my house before it was lifted off of it. I’ve never had to rescue UV Reveal on any floor of my house, although I must say I did a pretty good job of moving the floor mats out of the way because I wanted the floors to be thoroughly washed. The vacuum also fires a jet of air to remove dust, and has a side brush as well. That side brush does a good job of getting into the corners, even the hard, little corners where I purposely put a Cheerio to see if it would clean it. (It did.)

Base Game

Photo: Nena Farrell

The Shark base station has one of my favorite water tanks. There is an expandable handle for both clean and dirty water canteens, and it clicks into place around the tank when you return it to the base. This makes carrying water around more comfortable. The clean water tank holds 2.74 liters (or 11.6 cups) of water, while the dirty water tank holds 1.18 liters (or just under 5 cups). After two full cleans of my hardwood floors below, the dirty water tank was only a third of the way full. The vacuum itself only takes in 0.21 liters of clean water at a time, or 0.8 cups, and it also uses some of the clean water to clean the mop pad while at its station.