About PoolBotRanker

The rating on the box is a claim

Makers rate robots for a pool length or a pool area, and the figures are generous in ways the spec sheet hides — plan area rather than floor and wall, a floor-only runtime quoted beside a full-cycle rating. The limiting number is simpler: how far the cable reaches, or how long the battery lasts. So every robot whose maker publishes either gets the arithmetic done, and the 11 whose rating goes beyond it by more than a small margin are flagged in red on their own pages. The method, with the constants.

A blank cell is an answer

Every printed figure comes from the maker’s own page for that exact model — 67 source links across the catalog, listed on each robot’s page. Where no cited source states a number, the cell is left blank rather than filled from a sibling model, a dealer listing or a guess. That is why 94 figures are empty today: a weight nobody prints, a micron rating a maker leaves off, a cable length that only appears in non-US listings, which disagree with each other. Dolphin’s corded robots are the largest case: Maytronics prints no cable length on any US product page, so none of them can be given a corded pool-fit verdict.

Who is behind it, and who is not

Two people build and maintain this in their own time. There is no office, no editorial staff and no test pool, so nothing here is a measurement of ours. Specifications come from each manufacturer’s own US product pages and stores; the four derived figures are arithmetic on those specifications, and the arithmetic is published.

No manufacturer pays for a place in the catalog, a position in a list or a word of what a page says. What the site collects is one analytics tag and one browser key holding your filters.

Owner experience, kept separate

Some things only show up after a season of owning a robot: a cable that coils, a robot that parks on the main drain, a battery that fades by the second summer. Where public owner discussion was read for a model, it sits in its own section under its own heading, never blended into the specification copy. Coverage is 16 of 52 robots; the other 36 pages say so plainly, because an empty block would read as “owners had nothing to complain about”, which is a different claim.

What the site will not do

No star ratings, because none of these robots has a rating from a citable source that is not a shop. No list ordered by a judgement: every shortlist prints its rule at the top and must qualify at least three robots to exist. Prices are approximate snapshots from the last refresh; 1 robots carry none because no maker page states one.

How often this changes

The catalog was last refreshed on 2026-09-29, and that date drives the sitemap. Pool robot lineups turn over every season, so a refresh re-checks whether each robot is still sold in the US as well as its price. Robots dropped by their makers and robots left out on purpose are recorded with the evidence, so they are not re-added by mistake.

Corrections

A cable length a maker does publish somewhere, a runtime this site missed, a robot that is no longer sold — all of it is welcome. Send a correction, or write to chelsea@hagadornwebdev.com.