My Dolphin: Now I'm getting rid of it

[CarlD]

About 12 days ago I shipped my Dolphin Dynamic back to SmartPool for servicing. It's been NOT cleaning the pool, leaving the shallow end untouched even after 8 hours. It's not climbing the walls, either, and in one direction it's only moving at 32fpm and the other 40fpm. It's supposed to move at 50fpm.

My water is clean, no algae, the walls and bottom aren't slimey or anything like that.

As per their directions, I removed the floats, added a weight, even ran it without a bag to no effect.

Now, of course, Smartpool is saying they cannot find anything wrong with it--in their tests it works "perfectly". Sorry if I'm skeptical.

Then they threw the wild one at me: "What's your pH?" says she "7.5". "Well, you need to lower it to 7.2"
7.2??? you have to adjust pH to 7.2 to get the cleaner to run? I told her it's not in the manual and it ran for nearly 2 years with pH at 7.5. Of course they also wanted to know if I laundered the bags in the washing machine. Yes, I said, so they don't have that as an excuse, either.

They are sending it back to their techs to test it again, but I gotta tell you all: I AM worried. I spent $1200 on this cleaner and if their response is to say there's nothing wrong with it and I need to continue to do bizarre things when it USED to work, I will withdraw my recommendation to all of you to purchase Dolphin products.

I find it truly odd that a cleaner that worked fine for years, with no visible signs of wear, now needs floats removed, a lead(!) weight added, and now a pH that is generally too low for normal usage.

I also generally dislike companies that always assume all problems are user error, even as you try all of their solutions and they don't work. I'm getting the feeling that they are trying to avoid actually doing ANYTHING to fix my machine.

But, we shall see. I will keep you posted.

In the meantime, I've un-retired my Polaris 165 and it's working fine. I put a handful of sheet cotton in the bag to act as a fine filter which works nicely. I do need to use my PoolBuster for a touch-up after, but the Polaris is doing OK. It's not nearly as effective as the Dolphin (when it's working), it doesn't brush the pool for me, and doesn't super-filter it either. But at least IT works!

Carl.