Dolphin W20

The Dolphin W20 was announced by Maytronics on 30 October 2015 alongside the Wave 200 XL and shown at the Aquanale trade fair in Cologne the following week. It is the smallest and cheapest machine in the company's commercial catalogue, and the only one whose brief is not a swimming pool at all. Maytronics designs it for fountains, wading pools and reflecting pools, and states that it works in water as shallow as eight inches - about 20 centimetres. That single number explains the whole machine. Municipal ornamental water is a maintenance problem nobody builds robots for: too shallow for a standard cleaner to submerge its intake, too large to hand-brush, and usually surrounded by paving where a crew cannot easily lower heavy equipment into place. At 24.25 lb, roughly 11 kg, the W20 can be carried in one hand and set down in a basin a person could stand in. The specification is correspondingly modest. It runs on mains power from an 80-foot cable on a caddy, moves 4,500 gallons an hour through a bottom-loading filter bag, drives two standard brushes and covers pools up to 65 feet. Its cleaning coverage is the floor only: it does not climb walls, does not scrub the waterline, and has no full-filter indicator, no delay start, no timer and no app. The cycle is fixed at three hours. At $1,399 it costs less than many of the company's own residential robots, and the comparison is instructive. A homeowner's Dolphin will do more of everything except the one thing the W20 exists for. Maytronics nevertheless keeps it in the range: the US store card promises a three-year warranty, the same term as the $15,499 Wave 300 XL, while the company global card for the identical model states two years. We quote both rather than choose one.

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