Aiper Seagull SE robotic pool cleaner review: An aquatic Roomba

Cost When Reviewed

$249.99

Very best Rates Right now: Aiper Seagull SE

Not Offered

Someplace in the very last 10 years or so, swimming swimming pools obtained the Roomba therapy. Consumers no longer want to offer with a cumbersome Polaris and its snaking white hose to cleanse their pool. Now they can fall a battery-powered robot in and send out it on its way to pick up leaves and debris. Luxe products can expense effectively into the $1,000 vary.

Aiper has been in the robotic pool cleansing small business for many years, with a 50 %-dozen robots on the sector, some a lot more tasteful than some others. Its most streamlined to day is the new Seagull SE, a sleek product that ditches the WALL-E aesthetic of its prior types in favor of a gray colour scheme and a a lot more angular visual appearance.

Aiper

Like most of these products, the Seagull SE is made to be charged on land (charging time is about 2.5 hrs), then dropped into the pool when it’s all set to go. The robotic operates about for about an hour and a fifty percent, scooping up what ever debris it finds and depositing it into an interior keeping tank. Clear it out, dry it off, cost it up, and you are good to go again the future working day.

Like a terrestrial cleaning robot, the Seagull SE doesn’t take a great deal work to get heading, and guidelines are largely self-explanatory. A pair of brushes must be snapped onto the base of the system, but usually it’s completely ready to go out of the box help save for charging it up with the incorporated cable.

Christopher Null/Foundry

Aiper involves some essential caveats—your pool simply cannot have gently sloping corners at the base (lest the robot try to travel up the wall and tip about), and max floor space is approximately 850 sq. feet—but otherwise the pointers are fundamental. You can insert a chlorine tablet into a unique container on the unit if you’d like it to do double duty as a chemical dispenser, but this is strictly optional.

As it transpires, a wheel fell off my classic Polaris cleaner the working day in advance of the Seagull SE arrived, so I had a fresh pool comprehensive of leaves in which to exam. Just after a entire charge, I enable the robot get to do the job, and found it was very productive at receiving about the pool, creating huge arcs and sweeping up about 90 % of the debris in its 90-minute running time. The machine struggled a bit with bigger leaves that my Polaris doesn’t balk at, but by and big the pool was what I’d take into account “clean” when it was completed.

Christopher Null/Foundry

Finding a robotic cleaner out of the pool is a little bit of a trick, and the Seagull SE is supposed to park by itself in close proximity to the edge when its battery is about to die. Unfortunately, this did not perform out in my tests: The Seagull finished up near to the dead centre of the pool. The good thing is, it was still effortless to access with the included hook, which snaps on to the end of a common telescoping pool cleaning pole. (A pair of spare wheels are also incorporated in the box.)

Cleaning is a little bit of a headache in comparison to the nominal maintenance and large holding bag of a standard Polaris cleaner, involving disassembling the unit, scooping out the collected leaves, and hosing off the filter to get it ready for the next time out. When things are damp, this is a instead messy work (and figuring out how to reorient anything when you reassemble it can be puzzling), but there’s most likely a considerable flattening of the finding out curve when you do this regularly.

Christopher Null/Foundry

At just $250, the Seagull SE is a a lot more cost-effective choice to a lot of robotic cleaners—and regular h2o-run cleaners—although it isn’t as adaptable as a long lasting in-pool remedy. It cleans just about as perfectly, but the need of day by day alternatively of weekly servicing is a massive 1. In the end, I changed the wheel on my Polaris and put it back again to get the job done as a comparative: There are zero leaves in the pool when I get up in the morning soon after just a couple hours of working time. That, nevertheless, depends on the weather and by the way, I’ll probably use the Seagull SE in the extended operate as a backup for the times following massive storms when I wake up to a pool complete of leaves, putting the robot to use as a secondary cleaner in lieu of manually scooping up the leaves the Polaris did not get to.