I have posted this before... Depends on how you want your pool? To me anyway. I have the very pricey Aquabot and it regularly watches me vacuum my pool from the garage window. I prefer clean to "picked up." I know that auto vacs are hugely popular and I am the very, very small minority opinion, but vacuuming by hand allows me to brush my liner too. Once I have the pool in maintenance mode I do the bottom and one side wall completely each week (maybe veery 5 or 6 days is more accurate). I use major filter pressure on my VAC head, which I am aware has liner damaging potential. I have come close. That said, between testing and adding Cl and cleaning out the skimmers and vacuuming I don't spend more than 2 hours each week on my pool. And that 2 hour average is taking into account start up and storm cleaning (in the avarage). Without those, knock it back to a bit under an hour and a half.