The Robot That Cleans Your Pool

As much fun as it is to own a swimming pool, most long-time pool owners will admit that the routine maintenance gets to be a chore sometimes. After all, even when you’re too busy to enjoy swimming in the pool, you still have to clean it. 

Some people actually enjoy skimming the surface of a swimming pool. It can be relaxing, even meditative. But, vacuuming the pool? By hand? Not so much. 

It’s a lot of work

Unless your pool is tiny, manually vacuuming and doing an adequate job of it takes a lot of effort. You’re going to be pushing and pulling a long, telescoping pole — with attached hose and head — over every square inch of your pool floor. For an average 24-foot round above ground pool, that’s over 450 square feet you need to cover, inch by ever-loving inch. 

Then there’s the filter flushes, and breaking clogs as they happen, not to mention the delays caused by your sore shoulders and back. And, speaking of delays… 

It takes a lot of time

The first time you vacuum your pool, you’ll go for the speed record. Everyone does, so don’t feel too bad about it. 

What you’ll quickly find, though, is that the faster you go, the longer it takes you. At least, if you want to do it right. That’s because you’re pushing that vacuum under water. Every move you make sends currents spreading out along the floor of the pool in whatever direction you’re moving. 

In other words, if you move too quickly, everything you’re trying to suck up is running away from you. Most of it floats up into the water and lazily hangs around until you think you’re done. Then, you look back at the spot where you started, and it looks like you were never there. 

So, experienced pool cleaners expect it’s going to take several hours and they don’t try to rush it. 

That’s why we made robots to do it

Considering all of the above, it’s not surprising that some enterprising pool owner invented the automatic pool cleaner. 

It started out with suction-side pool cleaners, which are powered by the suction created by your filter and wander around the pool floor randomly sucking up everything it comes across. (Here’s an example of a suction-side automatic pool cleaner.)

Next came pressure pool cleaners, which are powered by the pressure of your pool return, or, in some cases, by a separate booster pump. They’re more powerful than the suction-side versions, but they’re quite a bit more expensive, especially if you need to retrofit your pool to accommodate one.

The latest option is truly a robot vacuum for your pool: The robotic pool cleaner is a tiny, self-contained, battery-powered vehicle that vacuums and scrubs your pool liner without any complicated hookups or monitoring. You basically set it in the pool, plug it in, and walk away. Later on, you lift it out and empty it’s canister into the garbage. 

While all these automatic pool cleaners are head and shoulders above cleaning your pool manually, the robot vacuums are the real game changers in the list. And, as with all great technology, they just keep getting better. 

The ultimate robotic pool cleaner is here

No matter the size, shape or type of pool, nothing cleans like a Dolphin.

The Dolphin is the first robot for above-ground pools. It was designed for effortless handling and emptying: Put the Dolphin in the pool and walk away. Let it do the work to keep your pool water sparkling clean.

The active brushing action scrubs away algae and bacteria from all surfaces — including the bottom of your pool and up the walls.

While some pool-cleaning robots have a random pattern, the Dolphin uses CleverClean technology to learn your pool’s layout and systematically scan every inch of your pool, leaving no spot unscrubbed.

You can also connect the Dolphin cleaner to your smartphone and use Bluetooth technology to spot dirty areas of your pool and polish them off.

Browse our selection of Dolphin pool cleaners here.

Bottom line: if you own a pool, you should own a robot vacuum. There are just too few hours in the day to spend them manually vacuuming your pool.