Corded vs. cordless
Dolphin’s Nautilus CC Plus impressed us with its cleaning power and the anti-tangle cord worked as advertised.
A corded robot vacuum offers some compelling benefits — chief among them is freedom from battery anxiety. You’ll never need to monitor charge levels or watch performance degrade as the lithium battery ages. For pool owners especially, corded models are often the safest choice: they’re more mechanically reliable, less susceptible to motor issues, and won’t need to be hauled out of the water for recharging after every single use — a chore that every cordless model on the market demands.
Most robot pool cleaners will filter out the large debris but the finer stuff requires a nanofilter.
All robotic pool cleaners should catch large debris such as gravel and leaves. To sift out finer debris and keep your pool water from getting cloudy, you’ll need a nanofilter. Your pool’s main pump and filter are meant to catch much of this finer stuff, but a powerful robot with a nanofilter will help.
Size and type of pool you have
Brushing the walls and stairs of your pool manually doesn’t require a ton of effort so we didn’t weigh those cleaning modes as heavily as we did floor cleaning.
About half the models we tested could clean the sides of the pool, and some even had modes to clean stairs. This is a nice feature to have, but brushing the debris on the steps or side of your pool down to the floor, where it can more easily be cleaned by the robot, typically takes no more than a few minutes. For that reason, we weighted the robot’s ability to clean sides and stairs less heavily than its ability to clean a pool floor.
If you don’t want to do even that small brushing chore before activating your robot, choose a model that has a side-cleaning mode.
