This Wizard of a Pool Robot Saved My Summer and It's $121 Off
CNET's key takeaways:
It's great value for $799, available at Amazon Best Buy Maytronics
It has excellent suction power and remote scheduling at a reasonable price.
Requires almost no effort or attention during the week.
The cord never tangles.
A pool is meant to be enjoyed, but hours of vacuuming leaves and bugs can really take the wind out of your summer sails. Sure, maintenance comes with the territory, but it doesn't have to become your life. Last summer was my first as both a homeowner and a pool owner, and I tackled vacuuming the old-fashioned way. Twice a week for five months, I spent about an hour each session. That adds up to 60 hours of my summer spent setting up and manuallycleaning the pool. That's 60 hours I could have spent floating, splashing or tanning on the deck.
This year, I'm set up with a wizard of a pool cleaner machine that vacuums my entire pool in under two hours with almost no effort needed on my part. In all, I tested 12 robot pool vacuums before I landed on the Dolphin Nautilus CC Plus Wi-Fi. It hits all the marks for cleaning and scheduling via its app, and it doesn't cost an outrageous sum.
Pool cleaning is now something I barely think about. When the warm weather hits, I can count on sparkling water and a clean pool floor.
My experience with the Dolphin Nautilus CC Plus Wi-Fi
The Dolphin deftly cleans the pool floor and sides in about 2 hours.
David Watsky/CNET
Out of the box, the robot requires no setup other than plugging into a power source and connecting to Wi-Fi, a process that took me less than 5 minutes. Once it's connected, dropped in the pool, and a cleaning schedule is set, there's not much else to do.
The CC Nautilus Plus Wi-Fi cleaned my pool in around 2 hours, picking up soggy leaves, dead bugs, gravel, and sand. It used its fierce scrubbing brushes and a suction rate of 4,500 gallons per hour to clean the floor and walls of my kidney bean-shaped pool.
The cord occasionally hooked my skimmer bot, but it didn't cause any serious complications.
David Watsky/CNET
The only function it doesn't have is a dedicated waterline setting, but I've found most waterline cleaning features to be just OK. Plus, it's easy enough to brush the waterline manually every few weeks if you notice buildup. For me, spending several hundred dollars more for a model with waterline cleaning just isn't worth it.
Being able to set a cleaning schedule from my device tipped this robot cleaner over the line for me.
David Watsky/CNET
The Wi-Fi and app connectivity are what tipped this model over the top. Through the app, you can control the robot's cleaning schedules, and I found it had far fewer disconnections and glitches than other connected robot pool cleaners I tested.
At 35 pounds, the robot is easy enough to pull out of the pool when it needs to be emptied and rinsed, roughly once a month. Its cord allows you to haul it in without a struggle. Speaking of the cord, the anti-tangle device with attached buoys kept it from looping around itself, although sometimes it gets caught up in my solar robot skimmer.
A pool robot that filters water means far less stress on your expensive built-in equipment.
David Watsky/CNET
Pool filters are not cheap and can be difficult to clean, depending on the type. Having a robot cleaner that works daily will save your filter lots of work and prevent you from having to replace it as often. It'll also take some stress off your built-in pool pump and filtration system, sending less debris through the pipes to be filtered out.
You can bypass the app and use the control box to start and stop the robot.
David Watsky/CNET
Cleaner water also means you'll spend less on chemicals due to a reduction in algae growth and better water chemistry balance.
For a full breakdown, see my list of the best robot pool cleaners for 2025, tested for every type of pool.
The specs
Type : Corded
: Corded Suction power : 4,500 gallons per hour
: 4,500 gallons per hour Cleans : Floor, walls
: Floor, walls Weight : 34.6 pounds
: 34.6 pounds Cost : $799
: $799 Automatic daily cleaning : Yes
: Yes App control: Yes
CNET's buying advice
I've tested dozens of pool robots and learned a few things along the way.
David Watsky/CNET
I have tested more than 12 pool-cleaning robots, and the Dolphin is my top recommendation. It does everything you need it to, including deep cleaning of the walls and floor on a schedule of your choosing. It's easy to use and maintain, and costs half the price of competitors.
If you factor in how much time a robot pool cleaner saves or what you'd have to pay for professional vacuuming, this is as close to a no-brainer as purchases get for pool owners.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
4 minutes ago
- Forbes
You Want To Speak Memorably? Try These Smart Tips
In today's high-stakes professional world, the ability to communicate isn't just a competency—it's currency. Are you leading a team? Strong communication skill is one of your most important tools. Pitching a product? Ditto. Navigating a job interview? Ditto. In most every workplace situation, your presentation style can be the defining factor between influence and invisibility. Bill McGowan understands this better than most. This Emmy Award-winning TV journalist and bestselling author is a top communications advisor to leading names in business, tech, entertainment, sports, and finance. He's coached the founders of Amazon, Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Spotify, Snapchat, and Airbnb … as well as Oscar, Emmy, and Grammy winners and World Series, Super Bowl, and Olympic champions. McGowan's latest book is Speak, Memorably: The Art of Captivating an Audience. His experience in TV journalism underscored many of the lessons he now provides as a coach. For example, when McGowan worked on ABC's popular '20/20' show, the executive producer would share the minute-to-minute ratings of a segment. Any time an on-camera personality told a story, viewers' interest spiked. Stories, McGowan learned, are much more compelling than statistics. You want to break out of the conformity zone? McGowan recommends avoiding 'corporate speak' and communicating concisely with clarity and simplicity. And at every opportunity, use pertinent stories. While it's important that every part of a presentation be interesting and relevant, McGowan highlights what psychologists call the primary-recency effect: people tend to remember the first and last items in a sequence better than those in the middle. That's a clue on where compelling stories, challenges, or facts should be in a presentation. To underscore the importance and power of simplicity, McGowan tells of a CEO who was in a media interview about a struggle his company was experiencing. The interviewer asked the CEO, 'Why do you think your IPO underperformed vis-à-vis the other companies in your competitive space?' McGowan says that instead of blaming the market or a poor valuation or even suggesting that they didn't have the right financial institution leading the offering, the CEO simply said, 'We underperformed because we failed to come up with a narrative that could fit on the back of a cocktail napkin.' McGowan used that story to kick off a speech he made to a group of communication clients. Using a 'through line,' the connective tissue that helps explain the relevance of a story, he spoke on the subject of simplicity. Citing research studies, McGowan says factual information embedded within storytelling becomes 22 times more memorable 'than if you just fire hose talking points and data points.' McGowan coaches his clients to communicate the visual, the specific, and the anecdotal. When you speak abstractly and theoretically, it's pictureless, he says. 'We human beings have this movie reel spinning in our heads at all times. If a speaker doesn't give us imagery to work with, that movie reel keeps spinning in our head—only now it's spinning with the images we've created. That's what daydreaming is.' In what ways has the rise of remote work and virtual meetings affected the way people communicate? In addition to what many people now call 'Zoom fatigue,' McGowan talks about 'Zoomnesia.' That occurs when people attend a seemingly endless string of remote meetings in which they're sitting in the same room with the same potted plant on their desk and the same view out the window and with no contextual clues. That circumstance makes it even harder for people to retain information, and it underscores the value of well thought-out communication practices that engage people's thinking. McGowan frequently uses metaphors in his coaching. For example, he talks about what he calls the 'pasta sauce principle.' You put a pot of tomato sauce on the stove and cook it down for about three hours. You then have something with about half the volume but a lot more flavor. 'But it takes time and effort to get that reduction going,' McGowan says. 'The same is true for speaking.' It wouldn't be accurate to say McGowan has written a cookbook. But Speak, Memorably certainly provides the ingredients for welcome servings of appetizing communication. Whether you're giving a TED talk, speaking at the local Rotary Club, or just trying not to lose people in your Monday morning staff meeting, McGowan offers insight that will boost your communication mojo.
Business Insider
15 minutes ago
- Business Insider
'A Delightful Shopping Experience' Andy Jassy's Alexa Plans Sink Amazon Stock (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Chalk up another example of life imitating Dilbert. About 10 years ago, the CEO came to Dilbert with what he thought was an exciting plan: put ads on the 'little spot' that remains in your vision for a few seconds after someone takes a picture with a flash. Fast forward to today, where online shopping giant Amazon's (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy wants to slip ads into Alexa. This horrified investors, and Amazon shares plunged over 8% in Friday afternoon's trading. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. Jassy noted, not unfairly, that Alexa was commonly used as a shopping tool, telling it to add things to their shopping list or placing orders through it. Thus, Jassy noted, there was room for improvement here, and started breaking down the concept. Jassy noted that Alexa+ is already free for Prime subscribers, who pay $14.99 per month, and recently added a $20 monthly subscription fee for those who are not Prime members. Jassy then advanced the idea that there could be subscription tiers later…including an ad-supported tier. Admittedly, Alexa is not ad-free as it is. There are some ads inserted between songs via the smart speaker, or a visual ad that shows up on the display device. But Jassy wants to go farther, allowing for what reports call '…an AI-generated ad that Alexa+ delivers.' There is a certain logic to it; for those who have expressed an interest in a certain product, the opportunity to pay to have your product recommended makes sense. But the results might be inherently tainted, as customers would know the recommendation is bought and paid for. Bond To Come Amazon is also stretching its legs as a filmmaker thanks to its MGM connection. Jassy also pointed out that James Bond is now in Denis Villeneuve's hands, and that the legendary filmmaker should be able to do the project justice. Jassy noted, 'We cannot wait to get started on 007's next adventure.' Villeneuve was tasked with the project back in June, and a recent report revealed who has the screenplay duty: none other than Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. This was not the only advance Amazon had to offer in video recently, as it also showed off the Prime Video NBA broadcast team, featuring major names like Dwyane Wade, Kevin Harlan, and several more. Is Amazon a Good Long-Term Investment? Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on AMZN stock based on 42 Buys and one Hold assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 39.43% rally in its share price over the past year, the average AMZN price target of $262.10 per share implies 21.31% upside potential.
Business Insider
33 minutes ago
- Business Insider
5 things the AT&T CEO's sweeping memo says about where corporate America is headed
CEOs are done mincing words. AT&T CEO John Stankey didn't hold back in a Friday message to managers at the 140,000-person company: "Commit to adjusting your own behaviors." Stankey's message comes about seven months after the company issued a strict return-to-office mandate and amid what the CEO described as a longer-term cultural shift underway. The 2,500-word memo is a rare and detailed window into a CEO's thinking during a period of transition. It offers valuable insight for workers beyond just AT&T employees and reveals how a large, legacy company is working to adapt and innovate. Business Insider published the full 2,500-word memo here. Here are our top five takeaways on how Stankey's message reflects broader shifts in corporate culture. CEOs are done sugarcoating change The tone of Stankey's memo is direct, reflecting a broader shift in how corporate executives are communicating to staff. "If a self-directed, virtual, or hybrid work schedule is essential for you to manage your career aspirations and life challenges, you will have a difficult time aligning your priorities with those of the company and the culture we aim to establish," Stankey wrote. This sort of candid communication has become increasingly common among executives as they work to make change, whether return-to-office mandates or efforts to adapt to AI. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told his employees in 2023 that if they didn't embrace working in the office, they may not have a future at the company. "It's past the time to disagree and commit," he said at the time. "And if you can't disagree and commit, I also understand that, but it's probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week, and it's not right for all of our teammates to be in three days a week and for people to refuse to do so." Jassy later expanded the mandate to five days a week. More recently, Jassy didn't hold back in a memo posted to the company's website in June. He said workers should expect AI to impact staffing levels. "In the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company," he said. Company culture is no longer about loyalty, tenure, or family. It's about performance. AT&T is a nearly 150-year-old company that has long embodied a culture that celebrates loyalty and tenure. Focus on those values, however, is a thing of the past, Stankey said. He was upfront about this change in Friday's memo. "This shift can be characterized as moving away from an orientation on hierarchy and familial cultural norms and towards a more externally focused and competitive market-based culture," Stankey said. The shift reflects the performance vibe that has become so prominent in Silicon Valley in the last year. Amy Coleman, Microsoft's chief people officer, wrote in a message to managers in April that the company was introducing new tools to improve performance management. "Today, we're rolling out new and enhanced tools to help you accelerate high performance and swiftly address low performance," she wrote. "Our goal is to create a globally consistent and transparent experience for employees and managers (subject to local laws and consultation). These tools will also help foster a culture of accountability and growth by enabling you to address performance challenges with clarity and empathy." Stankey said performance would be employees' best metric for longevity at the company moving forward, and encouraged staff to get on board. "I know change like this is difficult and can be unsettling for some. However, as General Eric Shinseki so eloquently stated, 'If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more.'" Employees need to carry their own weight, and management is watching In this new era at AT&T, managers will have a new tool for evaluating whether employees are really meeting the demands of their job: data. "In addition to information garnered from performance reviews, peer feedback, assessments, work history, and certifications (to name a few), we analyze patterns of behaviors from broad cohorts (aggregated data)," Stankey wrote. "This allows leaders to identify behaviors that are obvious outliers, supplemented with the broadest set of information available, to determine if the behavior being evaluated is consistent with our stated priorities and employment expectations." Outliers in the data will be identified and dealt with, he said. "Addressing these exceptions is important to ensure we're fair to the vast majority of employees who support their colleagues and deliver for the organization every day," Stankey said. Amazon took a different approach to the same goal by cutting down on managers to "flatten" the organization and push individuals to pull their weight. "If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates' ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations' ability to make customers' lives better and easier every day," Jassy said. Some companies see returning to the office as necessary to compete Stankey said AT&T's push for change is driven by "efforts that require inter-departmental collaboration and coordination." That's because "collaboration and predictable presence improve each team's ability to execute effectively on large, complex projects," he said. To achieve that, employees must "work in person, together, during common hours." The idea that working together in an office is ultimately better for the company's success is a growing belief among executives. Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol told staff in an email last month that returning to the office allows employees to "share ideas more effectively, creatively solve hard problems, and move much faster." "We understand not everyone will agree with this approach," Niccol wrote. "But as a company built on human connection, and given the scale of the turnaround ahead, we believe this is the right path for Starbucks." Returning to the office isn't always without its problems Some employees previously told Business Insider that AT&T's return-to-office push has caused some practical problems, including a lack of desks and parking spaces. One employee at the company's Atlanta office said the company's working environment had "deteriorated" as more employees returned. Two others said finding parking in a timely manner had been a challenge for themselves and for colleagues. Stankey addressed these complaints in his message in a section titled "Capabilities to do your job." He wrote, "You deserve tools, processes, and capabilities that help you serve our customers effectively, without being hindered by internal process friction or system constraints." Dell faced similar issues following its own return-to-office mandate, which CEO Michel Dell issued in January. When the mandate took effect in March, it caused "lots of in-office politics," one program manager at the company told Business Insider.
