About Robot Pool Cleaner Picks

Every page on this site is written by Mike M., the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media.

Here is the honest version of a bio, because the alternative is the kind of invented credential this category is full of. Mike M. is not a pool-industry professional, holds no trade certification, and does not run a service business. There is no expert panel behind this site and no team of testers. There is one person who got interested in why this category is so badly served online and decided to do the research properly.

What that means in practice: this site competes on method rather than on credentials. Every figure is attributed to a source you can check, the scoring rubric is published with its weights, and the thing most sites in this category hide — that nobody is actually testing these machines — is stated on the most prominent page we have.

If a sourced spec on this site is wrong, that is a fixable error and we want to hear about it: contact@robotpoolcleanerpicks.com.

Search for a pool cleaner and you get three kinds of result, none of them much use.

Manufacturer blogs. A large share of the top results for the money queries in this category are pages on brand domains explaining why that brand’s machine is the right one. They are well-written and structurally incapable of telling you to buy a competitor.

Dealer publishers. Sites that look independent and are contracted to one manufacturer. They can rank machines within a range; they cannot answer a cross-brand question, which is the question you actually have.

Sites claiming to have tested everything. The leading independent in this category claims thirty-plus robots tested — and on the pages we examined published no test data, no measurements, no methodology, and no cons at all. Not one “who should skip this”.

The gap that leaves is a site that reads across every brand, shows where each number came from, names who each machine is wrong for, and admits what it has not done. That is what this is.

The second gap is structural. Almost every guide in this category is organized by brand or by price — both of which tell you nothing about whether a machine solves the problem in front of you. This site is organized by the debris you are fighting and the pool you have, because those are what actually determine the answer.

We do not physically test pool cleaners. No test pool, no owned units, no first-hand use. You will not find “we tested”, “in our test pool” or any first-person account of using a product anywhere on this site, because none of it would be true.

What we do instead:

• Read and attribute published manufacturer specifications.
• Verify every product against the live retailer listing, including whether it is new or factory-renewed.
• Characterize owner reports as owner reports — never as our own experience.
• Write “not published” wherever nobody publishes a figure, rather than estimating one.
• Score every machine by a published rubric you can check.

There are currently 113 content pages here covering 37 machines and parts, every one of them verified as currently sold at the time of writing.

Five rules, and they are the reason the rest of the site is worth reading.

1. No invented figures. No estimated runtimes, no approximate micron ratings, no “about 90% coverage”. If it is not published, the page says so.
2. No testimonials. We hold none, so there are none here. Not a grid of plausible quotes, not aggregated star ratings.
3. No invented credentials. See section 1.
4. Prices from the live data layer only, with the date attached, and they disappear rather than going stale.
5. Every product page names who should skip it. Including the machines we recommend most, and the ones that earn us most.

The methodology page has the long version, including the scoring weights and the four evidence tags.

Robot Pool Cleaner Picks is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. When you buy through a link here we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That is the whole business model.

There are no sponsored placements on this site. No brand pays for a ranking. No manufacturer sees a page before it publishes. We have no relationship with any brand here beyond buying from the same retailer you do.

The test of that is whether the site ever recommends against its own interest, and it does, repeatedly. Several pages recommend the cheaper machine, or two cheap machines instead of one expensive one, or doing the job with a net and a brush and buying nothing. One page exists specifically to tell some readers not to buy a robot at all.

The full disclosure is here.

Robot Pool Cleaner Picks is published by Iron Mako Media, which owns and operates this site.

Corrections, questions, a spec we have got wrong, or a model that has gone out of production: contact@robotpoolcleanerpicks.com. There is no phone number and no postal address for this site — email is how to reach us, and we would genuinely rather fix an error than leave it up.

The contact page has a form if that is easier.