- May 23, 2015
- 24,463
- Pool Size
- 16000
- Surface
- Plaster
- Chlorine
- Salt Water Generator
- SWG Type
- Pentair Intellichlor IC-60
It wasn’t in the water all the time or all year long.
Initially I only used it during the swim season when the pool was “open”, ie, kids out of school and swimming. So for the first 3 years I used it from May to Oct. And during those first few years, it always came out of the pool after cleaning, got hosed off and would sit under my porch awning. I would use it about 3 days/week or so. When “winter” arrived, the robot would go in my garage and sit there. It was really only the last two seasons that I left it in the pool a lot and that was because of family issues at the time (my mother-in-law and my dad passed away with in 4 months of one another). So the pool got very little direct attention while dealing with that. It’s too bad their units don’t have a “run time” accumulator on them as it would be nice to know how much use they actually get used. I suspect it’s NOT 10,000 hours …
But care and use matter with these robots. If you take them in and out and keep them dry in between use and don’t leave them out in the elements, they can last a long time.
It still makes no sense to me for Dolphin to not supply critical parts. By doing that, they are basically ticking off a small segment of their customer base that prefers to fix the things they have rather than buy new. The vast majority of their customers are going to throw broken robots away and buy new so it’s not like there’s a serious threat to their bottom line from tinkerers fixing their robots. All they’ve done is antagonize people like me which makes me (1) never want to do business with them again, and, (2) trash talk their product as much as possible. I suppose they don’t care but it gives me a nice little grin on my face every time I convince someone NOT to buy a Dolphin robot
. I’m up to three nixed sales … hoping to double that by the end of the season.
Initially I only used it during the swim season when the pool was “open”, ie, kids out of school and swimming. So for the first 3 years I used it from May to Oct. And during those first few years, it always came out of the pool after cleaning, got hosed off and would sit under my porch awning. I would use it about 3 days/week or so. When “winter” arrived, the robot would go in my garage and sit there. It was really only the last two seasons that I left it in the pool a lot and that was because of family issues at the time (my mother-in-law and my dad passed away with in 4 months of one another). So the pool got very little direct attention while dealing with that. It’s too bad their units don’t have a “run time” accumulator on them as it would be nice to know how much use they actually get used. I suspect it’s NOT 10,000 hours …
But care and use matter with these robots. If you take them in and out and keep them dry in between use and don’t leave them out in the elements, they can last a long time.
It still makes no sense to me for Dolphin to not supply critical parts. By doing that, they are basically ticking off a small segment of their customer base that prefers to fix the things they have rather than buy new. The vast majority of their customers are going to throw broken robots away and buy new so it’s not like there’s a serious threat to their bottom line from tinkerers fixing their robots. All they’ve done is antagonize people like me which makes me (1) never want to do business with them again, and, (2) trash talk their product as much as possible. I suppose they don’t care but it gives me a nice little grin on my face every time I convince someone NOT to buy a Dolphin robot
. I’m up to three nixed sales … hoping to double that by the end of the season.
