Pool Cleaner Questions, Answered Straight

For most inground pools, the Aiper Obsidian on published specification: 6,600 GPH, 3-micron filtration, 180 minutes of runtime and a charging dock, for under $800. For a pool over 40 feet, or if you want a machine still working in year nine, the corded Dolphin Nautilus CC Plus. The master roundup has all seven picks.

Measure your pool’s longest dimension and its floor area, then match against the published rating — Dolphin rates by length (33, 40 or 50 ft), Aiper, Beatbot and WYBOT by square feet. A 16 × 32 ft pool is 512 sq ft of floor and roughly 900 sq ft including the walls. This is the first and least recoverable gate: a machine rated too small never finishes.

Cordless under about 2,200 sq ft if you want the best current specification and are buying for four or five years. Corded above that, or if you measure value over a decade — a corded machine has no battery to degrade and every wear part is a cheap stocked component. The full comparison.

Only for specific capabilities. Camera mapping and debris detection earn their price on freeform, multi-level and beach-entry pools and earn nothing on a rectangle. Surface skimming matters under trees. A published fine micron rating matters for silt. If none of those solves a problem you have, the $450-900 band is where capability per dollar peaks.

A micron is a thousandth of a millimeter. Pool sand is 100-500 microns; silt, pollen and dead algae are 2-50. A 180-micron basket passes all of the fine fraction. But finer is not better in the abstract: a 3-micron filter blinds within minutes in leaf litter, leaving worse suction than a coarse basket. Match it to your debris.

Buy basket volume, not suction. The Beatbot Sora 10 publishes 5 liters for under $500, which is the best leaf capacity per dollar here. Better still, add a solar skimmer: a leaf caught floating never sinks, never stains and never loads your filter. The leaf roundup.

If it is rated for it. Check the listing explicitly — many inground machines are too heavy to lift over a pool wall and too aggressive for a thin liner. On a soft-sided pool, wall climbing physically cannot work because the wall deflects. Above-ground and Intex have their own pages.

Two to three times a week in swim season, daily during heavy leaf fall or after a storm. Frequency beats duration: once the basket is full, flow collapses and the rest of the cycle collects nothing, so two short runs with an emptied filter beat one long one. The scheduling guide.

Very little directly — on the order of 150-200 W for a couple of hours per cycle, so a few dollars a season. The real saving is pump time: a robot cleans with your pool pump off, and the pump is one of the largest electrical loads in a home. The cost guide has every consumable price.

Corded machines commonly 7-10 years with brush, track and filter replacement. Cordless machines are usually battery-limited to 3-5 seasons — longer where a replacement pack is sold, as it is for the Aiper Scuba S1 (~$80) and WYBOT C1 (~$69). What fails, in order.

Only if it has a charging dock and the manufacturer says so — the Aiper Obsidian and Scuba V3 are designed for it. Otherwise take it out: continuous submersion accelerates seal wear, and a warm battery held at high charge is the worst condition for lithium longevity. The full answer by type.

After every cycle, while the debris is still wet, rinsing from the clean side outward. Dried debris cements into the mesh permanently, and never use a pressure washer — it stretches the weave and silently destroys the micron rating. The method matters.

Yes, but far less — five or ten minutes a week on the places no robot reaches: steps, benches, behind ladders, light niches, the skimmer throat and tight corners. Those are also the low-circulation spots where algae establishes. The seven places.

Almost always a front brush worn flat (about $23), worn track tread (about $35), or a blinded filter killing the suction that holds it to the wall (free). Check in that order — it is rarely the motor. The diagnostic.

Probably not. Test the charger first — it fails far more often than the pack and costs about $10 against $80, with an identical symptom. Then check for corroded contacts, and whether water is bridging the port (a safety interlock, not a fault). The cheapest-first diagnostic.

Not on its own. Algae is a living biofilm anchored to your plaster or liner, and it is killed by chemistry. What a robot does is break the film open so chlorine can reach it, then filter out the dead cells — which is genuinely useful and is not the same thing. The correct order of operations.

No. A robot filters only the water it moves through its own basket during a cycle; your main filter processes the whole volume continuously and your pump distributes sanitizer. A robot reduces the load on both — it does not replace either.

Generally no. Rigid debris does not fold, so it bridges or jams a robot’s screened intake. That is a geometry limit no amount of suction fixes. A pressure-side cleaner with a wide bag throat is the machine for that debris — compared here.

Partially at best. Machines with platform or shallow-water modes — the Beatbot Sora 30 and Sora 70 — do more than most, but steps and benches remain largely a manual job. A cordless handheld vacuum handles them in two minutes.

No, and this is the distinction listings blur. A climb drags a brush vertically through the grease film once and generally smears it. A waterline pass travels along the line. Only some machines publish the second. The waterline roundup separates them.

No. We do not own a test pool, we do not own these machines, and nothing on this site is written from first-hand use. What we do instead is attribute every figure to a manufacturer specification, a retailer listing or characterized owner reports — and write “not published” where no figure exists. The methodology page is explicit about all of it.

Five metrics — debris capacity, surface coverage, filtration, runtime and coverage, and value for spec — derived from published figures and weighted 20/25/20/15/20. The weights are published so you can check the arithmetic. The score is visible content only and is never emitted as structured data.

They come from Amazon’s API with the date they were checked attached — currently shown beside every price on the site. Anything older than 48 hours disappears and the button reverts to “Check price on Amazon”. We never fall back to a remembered number.

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