Recommended Robotic Cordless Pool Vacuums

The Beatbot Sora 10 had the best pool coverage, strong runtime, good waterline cleaning, excellent leaf pickup with a giant debris bin, and a slightly finer filter mesh than most of the other robots in the video. If you combine that with the fact that it is very affordably priced and is made by Beatbot, who is known for their excellent customer service and warranty support, it’s probably the most confident I’ve ever felt in a pool vacuum recommendation. The only downsides I can tell are that the Sora 10 didn’t pass the 8” water depth sun shelf test, but according to Beatbot it can clean in as little as 12” of water. Also, the 150-micron filter basket won’t trap algae or fine sand and silt, and it appears that Beatbot’s optional 3-micron filter is only compatible with the Sora 30, not the Sora 10 for some reason.

At a slightly higher price point, the Aiper Scuba V3’s intelligent debris hunting is one of the coolest features I’ve seen and makes on-demand cleaning possible, so you can just toss the robot into the water a few minutes before you want to swim and come back to a completely clean pool. The V3 also passed the 8” sun shelf test, making it an excellent option for cleaning even the shallowest areas of your pool, and that makes it my recommendation for people who are looking for more advanced features than the Sora 10 offers and are willing to spend a little more for those options. But even with its secondary floss filter, the V3 struggled with sending fine silt into the water column.

If your pool’s primary issue is fine sand and silt or pollen, the Ecovacs Ultramarine P1 is my budget pick with a very effective secondary floss filter, great waterline cleaning that reached over 3” out of the water, and the ability to climb onto very shallow ledges. But as I mentioned earlier, I am slightly concerned that it would climb out of the pool if given the chance, and the filter basket on the Ultramarine is extremely small, so it’s not a great option for pools that get a lot of leaf litter.

My higher end recommendation for a pool with sand, silt or pollen issues is the Dolphin Nautilus EON 100, which comes with a high capacity 60-micron primary filter and also had excellent waterline cleaning, but had better overall coverage than the Ecovacs and a much larger debris bin.

At $559 the Poolmate Hydro 3S was also a surprisingly good cleaner, with a 150-micron fine filter basket that opens at both ends for cleaning and extremely good suction, and the only reason it didn’t take the top spot from the Aiper S1 was that it struggled a bit with the sloped floor of my pool which caused it to have lower than average wall coverage, but for a flat bottom pool, I think the Hydro 3S would be hard to beat.