Ok- New to this forum and have already read many interesting posts. I've had my pool for 32 years. It's a simple 18 X 36 oval liner pool and has been great. I received my Ariel about 1 month ago and would like to share my observations. I did not have the earlier NX version. I get a lot of small leaves. Part of my pool is shaded by a Shademaster locust tree which I have a love/hate relationship with. Love the shade on hot summer days, hate the leaves in the fall, and the blossoms in the spring. Shademaster leaves are about the size of a nickle, and there's millions of them that start falling in September. So, I purchased Ariel to reduce my manual skimming duties.
Upon initial inspection of Ariel, I thought How Groovey, sleek, colorful, and just generally cool looking it was. As promised it was charged and ready to put in the pool right out of the box. So, I put her in and let her rip. Again, very cool and kind of mesmerizing watching it paddle all around my pool. I was impressed so far.
Now to the review after about a month of service:
Battery life - Solar Breeze claims that Ariel can run overnight. That's just not the case. I get maybe 3 hours or so after the sun goes down. The good news it that the solar panel is large enough to keep her paddling about all day on a reasonably sunny day. If dark clouds set in, Ariel will eventually go to standby. It's all a matter of how cloudy, angle of the available sun, and time. I won't even try to run mine in rainy day full cloud cover, or at night.
Leaf and debris gathering performance - It did not take long for me to realize that "In my pool" with "my small leaves" , Ariel's ability to pick up anything was pretty much a failing grade and very disappointing. However, I'm a retired Mechanical Engineer, and a tinker'r for sure, so I set out to see If I could improve Ariel's capture efficiency.
First off the problems - Ariel's attitude and angle in the water put the tips of the front gathering paddle pretty deep in the water. The effect of this was that as Ariel paddled around, it created a fairly large bow wave that extend out about 8 to 12" in front of the pontoons. The impact of the bow wave is that anything in the path that should be captured, rides the bow wave out to the sides past the gathering opening. By the time Ariel gets to where the debris was, it's already out side of the gathering opening. So- there's nothing to pick up, it's already on the side or behind Ariel. The President of Solar Breeze suggested I add some weight to that back to raise the front paddle up. I did that and it did reduce the amplitude and effect of the bow wave. I would say the capture efficiency went for about 5% (of stuff that was in it's path) to about 15%. So 85% of the debris that should have been picked up was still being missed! It would paddle about all day and the leaf drop would very quickly overwhelm Ariel's gathering rate. Clearly the efficiency needed more improvement.
Pontoons - The shape of the pontoons (semi - blunted front) is such that the eddy current in front of the pontoon simply pushes leaves out and around the sides of Ariel. Plus the pontoons are tucked slightly under the sides of the white top housing and orange corner bumpers. The effect of that is that there is no way on gods green earth that Ariel will gather anything within 4 to 6" near the edges of a pool. You pool owners know that surface tension of the water tends to make stuff hang out around the perimeter.
So I designed and fabricated a pair of front winglets that create a much larger opening in the front, and extend out the sides far enough to contact to sides of the pool liner as Ariel rides the perimeter, This is not 100% effective at removing leaves that are stuck to the side of the liner but it's pretty good at getting stuff that's within 1/2" of the pool edge. This modification improved the capture efficiency from about 15% to 85% 'ish. With that Ariel can easily keep up with my Shademaster locust.
Now finally keeping the leaves and bugs in the tray - Now that I had good capture efficiency the next problem became obvious. It seems that as Ariel exercised it's timed reverse movement, the debris that had been captured would get expelled out of the front past the gathering paddle wheel. How disappointing is that?? Go to the trouble to gather stuff, then spit it all out.
My solution to this was to add a thin mylar flapper on the front of the gathering tray. The flapper just barely touches the tips of the gathering wheel. I kind of acts like a one way valve. Like the Hotel California - Stuff can check out any time they like but they can never leave. It actually works like a charm!
So- my Ariel is now an awesome leaf and bug eating monster! Your experience may be completely different than mine but I thought I would share.
My next improvement will be to add whiskers to the winglets to see if I can get those pesky leaves that stick to the sides of the liner.
Thanks for reading and sorry for the typos, wrong words, misspellings, and crappy sentence structures.
Regards,
Steve
