Just bought one from NPS, tossed it in the pool, pretty impressed. Price was great, if you buy it before the end of May there is a $100 mail-in rebate. It comes with ten meter-long pieces of hose, as well as a bag full of adapters, eyeball diverters (to ensure your return doesn't push the hose away and prevent the vacuum from cleaning near the eye). Took 45 minutes to read all of the warnings in the instruction book, and about a minute to read the important stuff, plug it together and shove it into the pool.
Yes, it climbs walls, but couldn't make it up a two-foot wall and onto my shallow water shelf, nor up the steps (nothing one minute and a brush couldn't cure). It hasn't gotten stuck just yet, just rolls around, comes up to the tile line, then rotates and comes back down in a different direction.
We had a wind storm yesterday, so lots of dirt in the pool today. I cleaned up a bit this morning, what I didn't get floated back down to the bottom, forming a thin layer of dirt by dinner time. In went the Rebel, it left very clean path tracks through the pool, eventually hitting everywhere. There were some spots where it ran over dirt and didn't completely get everything, but it got it all on the next pass. (Yes, I was fascinated, sat and watched for a while.) To speed things up, wouldn't hurt to get a brush and help it out a little, but guessing if your filter is running 6-8 hours a day you won't need to worry about it.
Overall, it wasn't very expensive, and looks like it will save me a good deal of time vacuuming. I can see why people give their vacuums cutesy names, in no time my family was out by the pool cheering it on as it randomly tracked towards dirt.
Please forgive the stream of consciousness, if you have any questions or want pics, please let me know.
Ed
