Beatbot AquaSense X Review: The Self-Cleaning Water Robot

Photo: Chris Null

Naturally, the AstroRinse also requires electricity, so if you don’t have a regular electricity supply near your spigot hose, you’ll need another way to add a cable here. The unit must be balanced in order to run smoothly, and it has flexible feet and a stable spirit level to help you achieve this.

All told, you need to think carefully about where you’re going to install the AstroRinse, making sure you have water, power, and drainage — and that the location isn’t too far from the pool. Since the AquaSense X robot itself weighs 29 pounds (and more when it’s pulled fresh out of the water), you probably don’t want to drag the thing half a yard to clean and charge it. Unfortunately, due to the availability of the above three services behind me, that’s what I had to do.

A Famous Friend in the Water

The Beatbot AquaSense X robot is almost identical in appearance Beatbot AquaSense 2 Ultra except for some changes to the design of the basket (which is one piece here instead of two). Installing it is easier than AstroRinse.

Changing the body involves installing two side brushes – these are used by the skimmer function – but this is a quick process. Once the brushes are attached, the robot must be placed on top of the AstroRinse cleaner so that the two devices can be connected together wirelessly. (The quick start guide lays out the buttons you need to press to complete the process; don’t get lost.) Finally, the system must be connected to the Beatbot mobile app; you need Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz Wi-Fi to complete this task. A small bug I encountered: After completing the whole process, all the devices downloaded firmware updates, which messed up their communication. It was easy to reset, however, by simply repeating the reconciliation process.

After fully charging, I put the cleaner on its parts in the pool below and above, and as I expected, I did not see a real difference in performance against the AquaSense 2 Ultra. When testing the floor with organic waste and synthetic materials, the device collected about 97 percent of the test material, performing best on stairs and platforms. On the surface, this section was notoriously bad, collecting at least half of the floating debris and sinking most of it. This unit is too slow to pick up much material on the surface, although its rotating brushes help, to a small extent, to pull leaves into its nose.

At the bottom of the pool, the fastest time is about 4¹/₂ hours, supported by a 13,400 mAh battery—the same as the AquaSense 2 Ultra battery.

A snapshotBeatbot app via Chris Null

As with other AquaSense robots, operating modes are available in the Beatbot software, allowing you to choose from several modes that can include floor, wall, water line, and surface cleaning, each with two cycles per unit and different run times. AI Quick Mode turns on the location camera so the robot can search for debris instead of randomly encountering it; It’s great for quick cleaning when you don’t have much to pick up but more than you can easily pick up with a net.

Again, most of this is different from how the AquaSense 2 Ultra does it, and aside from the poor performance, it works very well.

Charging and Cleaning

Move on to the main event: cleaning. With each run, the AquaSense X would park itself in the waterway to await retrieval, and I bravely dragged it across the pool where I had set up the AstroRinse station. Although it may take a bit of trial and error to get the robot in the right position, once you do, the cleaning process will start in seconds.

When the washing machine starts, the upper arm swings and connects to the mouth of the robot that it uses for swimming. Then, a stream of high-speed (loud) water starts to shoot out of the hand and into the filter basket, which is placed in the bottom of the hole. The water pump runs continuously for three minutes before the arm returns and the system is turned off. (A quick mode, which runs for one minute, can also be selected in the program.) After that, the arm returns and the unit is done. Garbage is collected in a net-covered basket built at the base of the treatment plant. Any remaining water drains through the mesh screen at the very bottom of the unit.

Photo: Chris Null