Re: HELP! Robotic pool VS. in-floor cleaner
I have the in-floor system. It has given me trouble. It hasn't been too expensive to fix because I had very good documentation regarding the set up. The most common point of failure is in the union. Inside the housing is a spinning turbine with many gears with lots of teeth. What you discover is that either no heads are jetting water and your pressure in the filter is obscenely high or one set keeps popping up when the pump turns on and never cycles to the next set. The floor of the pool gradually gets coated with dirt and leaves. Replacing the various gears or turbine isn't too difficult or expensive, but if the parts become unavailable it could require a replacement with a newer design rather than just a part replacement.
The next thing that happened to me was during the replaster. There are 5 pipes carrying water under pressure to the different zones. They tested all of them and one of them had a leak. Thankfully the leak was near the surface in the step, so it didn't require much jack hammering of gunite to repair, and there was plenty of gunite to spare in that area. However, the builder said it can cost $1,000+ to repair when the leak isn't so easily fixed as mine was. I dodged a bullet, but I always wonder with the piping all being about the same age: is another spot going to go?
Another thing I should mention is that the popup heads go bad. Mine had a lifetime replacement warrantee, so I don't much care about the cost, but without the warrantee, those would be about $22 a piece last I checked, and it does take a bit of talent to replace the ones deeper than arms length. I had some that were so old and brittle, that I had to hire a diver to get them out by pretty much destroying them and removing the pieces because I couldn't hold my breath that long to do it. Luckily, my neighbor is a diver and did the job for $50. How lucky is that?
Inspite of everything, I love the way it cleans, but if I had to do it again, I wouldn't.