Should Pool Vacuum Cleaners Climb Walls?

[nacixemle]

Is it necessary to have vacuum pool cleaners climb up the walls in your pool? I have something similar to the AquaNaut® Series vacuum cleaners sold by hayward that has 4 wheels. I read in there that it needs to turn 11-14 rotations on the wheel to be able to climb walls, which is recommended by the manufacturer, problem is i want to cut back on my PG&E bill in running the pump at 3300 rpms just to achieve a 11 rotation on that thing. It also states in the manual as well that if i get it to rotate 8 times, it will just clean the bottom but not climb walls. So i find that if i run it at a 2700 rpm speed I can achieve the 8 rotations required, but again my question comes back to: Do I need to have the vacuum climb the walls? Or is cleaning the bottom all i really need a vacuum pool cleaner for? I have a pool guy that comes once a week to brush the sides, so would that be enough reason to not have the vacuum climb the walls?

 

[thebombardier]

Well, there's really two questions here. Should a pool cleaner climb walls? That's up to the user. If the user finds it is necessary (for whatever reason) for the cleaner to climb the walls, then it absolutely should.

However, is it necessary for the cleaner to climb the walls? No, not really. If the design of the cleaner or its programming (or lack thereof) allows it not to climb the walls and still cover the whole pool, then it really shouldn't need to. The only reason cleaners even really needed to climb the walls in the first place was not to clean the walls, but to navigate the pool. The old Aquabots and Dolphins in the 80s and 90s had no other method of laterally navigating the pool other than climbing the wall, then scurrying along the wall and coming down in a different spot in the pool. Most modern Aquabots still function this way. Dolphins however either have directional water jets or dual drive motors so they can make actual turns, so that's why modern Dolphins are only programmed to climb every 4 "bumps" of a wall or can be set to not climb walls at all. This cuts down drastically on run time as it's not spending a whole 1-2 minutes on a wall when it gets to one.

Commercial pool cleaners like the Gemini actually have infrared sensors that tell it when its approaching a wall so it turns around. When you have 6 hours to cleans an Olympic size pool, you need all the floor time you can get. Dirt isn't generally on the walls, it's on the floor.