I had a great first year with BBB. Thanks so much TFP. Never had to even shock, much less any algae breakouts to deal with. However, I have lugged around and disposed of more bottles of 182oz bleach than I ever care to do again. In addition, the price of WalMart Great Value bleach recently went up fifty cents to $3 a bottle.

That said, this is probably going to seem like a dumb question...but hopefully the point will make sense.

I bought a POOLVERGNUEGEN two wheel suction cleaner based solely on the feedback folks have left on this board. It was cheap, effective, reliable, and has saved me tons of work.

I am very seriously considering shelling out for an SWG to go into next year. If I had one, my pool would be very nearly maintenance free.

That gets us to my rather unusual question: If you had to identify a Make/Model of SWG that was closest to The Pool Cleaner in terms of reliability, ease of use, affordability, effectiveness, etc. what would you recommend? I really trust the feedback and guidance of the folks on this board.

No SWG stands out from the others as being especially good in anything like the same way that the POOLVERGNUEGEN stands out from other similar pool cleaners. Nearly all of the SWGs work reasonably well most of the time and all of them have problems now and then. There are several common problems, each of which are relatively rare, but not rare enough to ignore, and universal across brands.

In my opinion the CompuPool, Aqua Rite, and Pool Pilot units are just slightly ahead of the others. However the differences between them and several of the other brands are small, and most of the other brands are also good choices. CompuPool is relatively inexpensive and has proven fairly reliable, but hasn't been around long enough to be sure of that reliability in the long run. Aqua Rite is mid-range and solid. There are many Aqua Rites installed and lots of experience with how to solve the occasional problems they do have. Pool Pilot is high end, with some nice extra features that others don't have, which are very cool but hardly required.

Thanks a lot Jason. I will start looking into those three brands.

I am considering changing from my present SWG Pentair IC40, because of poor customer support and short life time and high cost of replacement cells (550+ just for the cell). So, while I can't recommend a specific model to consider, I can certainly recommend you stay away from the Pentair Intellichlor. I'm researching CompuPool models.

I've got a CompuPool CPSC48 and I've been pretty happy with it's performance overall. Couple of little hick-ups but that's mostly due to my lack of experience with pools. (Friends dogs in pool brought my chlorine way down. Needed to manually add bleach cause it dropped so fast). I know better next time.