My Dolphin: Now I'm getting rid of it

[VOLDADDY]

Carl,

Good luck on the Blue Diamond. I have had an Aquabot Turbo for 3 years now and love it. If it gets stuck somewhere, it will back up in a minute and keep on cleaning. If you send your Diamond back, I highly recommend the Aquabot Turbo. Their customer service is fabulous as well.

[CarlD]

Right now, I pulled out the ladder and it seems to be working just fine. I cut one "picket" to clip on the ladder but it doesn't help--it tried to climb the vertical 1.5" PVC! I think with 2 it will work better--or a cheap 1/2" wrench hung nearby to loosen the two ladder bolts.

It has a weird pattern of only climbing the walls every ood number of times. But if that's how it's designed, that's how it's designed.

An Israeli mafia for pool cleaners? Apparently that's the fact. But that's NOTHING next to the Taiwan mafia that makes EVERY motherboard in every PC in the world--all in a strip about 10 miles long and a few miles wide.

[cheshamjim]

I got my Dolphin back from a SmartPool repair depot. Put it in the water in the shallow end, and after a pass or two, it settled in the deep end and there it stayed. I tried ths thing for two days and it never came close to covering the whole pool. Just went back and forth across the width of the pool in the deep section.

I got the O.K. to return it and it is going back Monday.

I talked to a couple of guys at the pool store who have Dolphins and they love 'em. Oh well ...

-Jim

[cleancloths]

All these Dolphin problems are starting to sound like they have a problem in the microprocessor that they claim controls these beasts. I wonder if they go a batch of bad chips?

[CarlD]

It sure sounds like a bad microprocessor or a bad batch of ROM chips, doesn't it.

I'm sorry to hear the Smart Pool keeps sending people's Dolphins back without fixing the problems, claiming they are fixed.

Meanwhile I haven't heard from MayTronics in Israel. I will send the reference to this thread along and let THEM see what they think!

But I WISH I could catch a break..

The Blue Diamond works perfectly if I loosen the 2 bolts and pop the ladder out. I tried using just one picket on the ladder but that didn't work--I need to have 2 but I havent cut the 2nd yet.

So I let it run during the night with the ladder out. This morning I'm coiling up the cable--and there's a slash in it! Luckily it's not all the way through the insulation, just the surface, but it means when it came up the wall it gobbled the cable and damaged it! D*** thing is BRAND NEW!!!!! The cable does NOT uncoil as smoothly as the Dolphin's and does not get straight the way the Dolphin's does, and isn't as tough or as hard-shelled. The Dolphin NEVER did this.

The power supply stores UNDER the Diamond--How stupid is THAT??? and isn't nearly as sealed as the Dolphin's. For a device that costs a lot more, some more thought should have gone into parts of it.

But it works. Still, how come I can't catch a break???

[cheshamjim]

It wasn't too long ago that the quality (of all things!) of the Mercedes automobile was at a low point because of faulty and/or unreliable electronics components.

The process controller on my Sharp microwave goes out about every 9 to 12 months.

Ahhh, electronics ... can't live with 'em and can't live without 'em.

-Jim

[brent.roberts]

I still don't think these things have anything more than abosolute minimal procesing on board.

It doesn't add up. If it could calcualte it's path real well it could finish a 16 x 32 pool in less than an hour. The guys that make know it's dumb. That's why the program goes to 8 hours.

It's barely got any more brains than a Kreepy Krawly

[CarlD]

It wasn't too long ago that the quality (of all things!) of the Mercedes automobile was at a low point because of faulty and/or unreliable electronics components.

The process controller on my Sharp microwave goes out about every 9 to 12 months.

Ahhh, electronics ... can't live with 'em and can't live without 'em.

-Jim

Jeez, Jim.

Don't even get me STARTED on Mercedes and THEIR quality control! To charge what they charge for the unreliable crap they put out is the new definition of that fine old Yiddish word: CHUTZPAH!