Our Pool Roomba

After using this all summer, I am very happy with this robot. It does a great job at cleaning our 16'x32' vinyl in-ground pool, even with the solar cover on. I've only found a few minor drawbacks. Yes, if you don't snap the bag in just right, it can pop out while cleaning, making it have less suction. If the filter is left on while vacuuming, the robot can't clean around the return jets. And you must keep that bag clean when you are done vacuuming.

We store it in A Rubbermaid Patio Storage Bench, Dark Platinum #3764 and it just fits. The bench looks great and we can keep the robot by the pool.

[Wednesday, January 02, 2008]

Sometimes faster isn't always better

I have a fiberglass pool and the robot does a nice job of cleaning the bottom and sides. It does not do well at negotiating the 3 steps, (gets 1/2 way up the first step and comes back down). Cleaning the included pouch style filter is a royal PIA with muck getting stuck in the corners of the pouch. A little cheap and plasticy. Otherwise a valiant effort.

[Friday, October 05, 2007]

Great technology, poor build quality

I bought this directly from irobot and ran it every 3 or 4 days for about 3 weeks before returning it to irobot. The technology is great and when the filter bag didn't fall out, the pool was incredibly clean - it really does sparkle, I was able to cut back on the number of hours the filter ran, and I noticed that I had to add less chemicals. The amount of slime that collects in the filter bag from an apparently clean pool is proof of how much it's picking up. My pool never looked so nice and I only had to drop it in, go have dinner, come back and put it away.

Unfortunately, the build quality from irobot is poor. The tabs that hold the filter bag in place are too loose and the filter often falls out when you lift the robot out of the water - dumping everything back in. The plastic protective cage between the filter and the motor has the same problem.

After some web research, I discovered that irobot licenses this technology from Aquabot. I returned this to irobot, and purchased an Aquabot T2 which I found for about the same price after shopping around. The T2 is nearly the same robot, but appears to have a much better build quality and a few enhancements over the irobot model (for instance the scrubbing pads don't soak up water like the irobot's causing it to smell funky between cleanings). In addition, my local pool store is an Aquabot repair shop, so I won't be shipping it out if something goes wrong and I need it fixed under warranty.

I really wanted to like irobot's version - I like some of their other products and this simply looked friendlier (we dubbed it scrubby). Unfortunately, for this cost, I wanted three or more years of trouble-free use out of it, and I didn't see that happening.

[Tuesday, September 11, 2007]

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