Pool cleaners have come a long way over the years. And whether you manually vacuum your pool yourself, use a cleaner that connects directly to the filter or have graduated to a robot cleaner, every pool owner knows keeping your pride and joy clean can be a challenge.
We’ve recently been road testing the M1-AI series from iGarden.
This comes with a pretty hefty price tag – you’re looking at around $2,000, about the same as a quality robot vacuum cleaner for inside the home.
I’ve been a convert to robot pool vacuums for a while now. As someone who constantly used to deal with suction pool cleaners getting stuck or coming away from the filter, the ability to have a robot cleaner do the work while the skimmer box is still collecting leaves and what-not from the top of the water is the perfect experience for a pool owner.
The M1-AI series is a beauty of a machine. From a cleaning perspective it did a terrific job picking up your classic debris like leaves, while it left a sparkling finish clearing all the dirt after recent rain.
It did find larger items a challenge – some trimmed off-cuts from the nearby garden fell in the pool and it struggled to pick those up. That’s not to say I’d expect it to – it’s beyond what you’d fairly anticipate a robot cleaner to achieve – but I have had robot cleaners that have achieved it in the past, so that was just a slight disappointment.
The unit itself is fairly easy to operate in terms of getting the basket out and cleaning – in fact there’s no tricks here, just an easy process. It’s also reasonably light-weight so the average person won’t have any trouble getting it in and out of the pool.
Like with most robot cleaners, you use a hook connected to a pole to retrieve the cleaner once it’s done. Getting the hook into place to retrieve the cleaner in this case was really easy (that’s not always the way) and I felt it didn’t hold as much water as other cleaners so the weight on exiting the pool was not over-bearing.
You can run the cleaner without its supportive app, and to be honest I found the app a little confusing and difficult to operate.
I would recommend reading the instructions with great detail – it’s not that the unit is hard to understand or use, but it does have a range of features and options and just trying to guess probably isn’t the right approach.
Overall, I wouldn’t say the M1-AI is the best robot pool cleaner I have ever used, but it is a mighty improvement if you’re using any of the manual pool cleaning options.
And it certainly deserves to be in the conversation when it comes to picking a robot cleaner – you won’t be disappointed with the job it does overall.
Troy Dodds is Parra News' Managing Editor and Breaking News Reporter. He has more than 20 years experience as a journalist, working with some of Australia’s leading media organisations. In 2023, he was named Editor of the Year at the Mumbrella Publish Awards.