Aiper Scuba S1 pool-cleaning robot review: Not cheap, not great

Price When Reviewed

$595.99 (sale price direct from Aiper)

Best Prices Today: Aiper Scuba S1

Low-cost pool-cleaning robots have their place—and that place is undertaking light duty in small pools. The Aiper Scuba S1 tries to thread the needle by promising the performance of a higher-end robot at a somewhat lower price. Unfortunately, meeting in the middle with this machine won’t float anyone’s boat.

Design

The Scuba S1 has a similar design to Aiper’s winning Seagull Pro, only a bit smaller and more compact at a weight of 16 pounds. Large treads allow the unit to cruise along the floor of the pool and climb its walls, too. That’s a feature you won’t get in lower-cost units, such as the Seagull SE. With a beefy 7800mAh battery that allows it to run for about 2.5 hours, the unit is rated to cover pools as large as 1600 square feet in surface area.

Operationally, the Scuba S1 couldn’t be simpler. There’s a single power button that turns the unit on; press this button again to toggle between one of four modes: floor and walls (the default), floor only, walls only, or an “eco” mode that cleans the floor for 45 minutes every 48 hours for a week, which is useful if you intend to leave the robot in the pool while you leave for a vacation. The mode indicator is easy to miss, so look closely for the icons near the power button to see which mode you’re in.

Christopher Null/Foundry

The Scuba charges via a standard A/C adapter and a two-prong connector hidden beneath a rubberized flap, which you must carefully secure before powering it up and dropping it into the water. Once underwater, the Scuba S1 moves very slowly and methodically, taking a traditional back-and-forth lawnmower pattern as it crisscrosses the floor of the pool before moving on to the walls.

Performance

It doesn’t take a lot of observation to notice that the robot doesn’t have the most graceful movement. It tends to get a little hung up in corners, and when it climbs walls, I found it often fell back down to the bottom of the pool rather than sticking to the wall surface so it can scrub them a second time.

But those issues are minor compared to its general lapses in coverage. In repeated tests both organic and synthetic, I found that the robot simply didn’t clean large swaths of the pool. More specifically, it wasn’t a problem of cruising over debris and failing to pick it up, the Scuba just failed to visit certain sections of the pool at all.

Given a running time that would sometimes approach 3 hours in the water, I found this to be surprising and problematic. In each of my testing runs, the Scuba left about 40 percent of debris in the pool behind. That’s one of the worst performances I’ve gotten from a pool robot to date.

Christopher Null/Foundry

When finished, the Scuba S1 parks itself near a wall—successfully, in my testing—where it must be retrieved with a pole and the included hook. The robot captures debris in a single filter basket with an attached lid that’s accessed beneath a large panel on top of device. This seems convenient as it helps to keep trapped debris within the basket, but the design isn’t the easiest to clean, as the lid closes too easily while you’re hosing and brushing it out. The input connector at the bottom of the basket also tends to trap leaves in its narrow crevasses, further making the basket tough to clean out.

Should you buy an Aiper Scuba S1?

Aiper bills its Scuba S1 as a more affordable pool-cleaning robot, with a direct-from-Aiper price of $596 at the time of this review. Comparing its performance to that of the Editors’ Choice-winning Aiper Seagull Pro I reviewed in July 2023 ($620 at the time of this review, also direct from Aiper), however, you’d be foolish not to spend the extra $24 to buy the vastly superior bot.