Thanks for the responses. Athflying I am looking forward to your comparison between the 9350 and the Active 20.
My Active 20 arrived yesterday. I did purchase from Marina and overall a great experience. My only complaint, it took 2 days to order because there phone always went to VM and it may be a day or two before they return your call. Unboxing and putting it together were pretty straight forward. You don't really get a lot of options on the controller, so that makes pretty simple to operate. I don't even own a hose and manual vacuum so there was a fair amount of sediment on the bottom after being without a cleaner for almost 2 weeks. I dropped it in and watched her go to work.
Initial impressions
1. It cleaned my pool!!!
2. The swivel cord setup seems to work, after cleaning it didn't appear at all twisted. This was an ongoing struggle with the 9350.
3. It cleaned my stairs. Even though it couldn't scrub them, just from climbing them the movement of water was enough to blow the sediment off that it later sucked up.
4. It got the walls and water line. This is something the 9350 struggled with. Mine would often get to the water line and seemingly not realize it was there and sit there to long eventually sucking air in, losing suction to the wall and then fall off the wall sometimes floating until enough air escaped that it sank again and resumed cleaning. Sometimes during this, it would tangle itself in it's own cord and I would have to intervene. It happened enough that I stopped using the wall function and only had it do the floors. An important side note, my unit was given to me as a demo unit and therefore I never attempted to contact Polaris to see if it was possibly defective, I just lived with it.
5. The blinking light is a bit out of control. I saw someone else complain and thought kinda silly to complain about, but then I tried to go to bed last night and it is so bright it literally lights up my pool deck and I have a big slider in my bedroom that goes to the pool. I am going to have to rig up a cover for the controller.
6. No caddy. May or may not be an issue. I liked the caddy for my 9350 and my try to somehow fit this on there for the times it's out of the water. I am going to attempt to leave it in except when actively swimming, so may not really be an issue. I just liked the caddy as it helped manage the cords and a place for the controller.
7. Drains - it did not get stuck on the drain. Maybe I got lucky and it will eventually, but first time out it didn't. That is something the 9350 occasionally had a problem with. I would say maybe 1 out of 3 times it would get stuck on a drain, I could usually give a slight tug on the cord and that would be it for that cleaning.
8. Timer - the 9350 is completely manual, no timer option. I like the idea I can set the Dolphin to clean every 1,2, or 3 days. I plan on leaving this in the pool so it gives me a degree of automation. I really have no use for the bluetooth/wifi functionality. I have quite a few smart devices in my home and I have found that sometimes a "dumb" manual timer just works better for certain things.
It's still way to early to say for sure but after only using for a single cleaning, I would buy the Active 20 again over the 9350 to save $200-300 (and why I didn't get another 9350). Other than the above issues, my 9350 was trouble free and cleaned well for the 4 years I got out of it and it was slightly used when I got it. I hope to get at least 5 years out of the Dolphin and I am happy it seems to have resolved the few annoyances I had with the 9350.
