The great Australian dream is owning a house. Once you have that house, a pool is great for the warmer months. But do you know how much work it takes to keep that pool clean? The neighbour’s gum tree never stops dropping leaves, and as much as we love the jacaranda trees, the purple flowers, leaves, and spines they drop are just more work.
Is there a pool robot that can handle jacaranda litter and give you back hours of your time? I recently tested the Mova Rover X10 to find out.
Mova Rover X10 features
A robot pool cleaner with Wi-Fi and sonar technology, the Mova Rover X10 hunts grit and grime from all areas of the pool, including the surface. In the box, you will find the robot, a wireless charging dock, a retrieval hook that fits a standard Australian pool pole, and a sonar sensor.
This sonar sensor floats on the surface of your pool and keeps your robot connected to the internet and your phone at all times. Because of this, you can remotely change cleaning programs or have the robot return to the surface. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi don’t work reliably in water, making sonar an important technology.
The Rover X10 must be manually transferred between the wireless charging dock and the pool between each cleaning cycle. Mova quotes battery life of more than six hours of cleaning, but so far, with so many leaves in the test pool, I have not reached this figure. A full recharge takes 6.5 hours.
The Rover X10 has 15 motors, allowing it to manoeuvre on the surface to skim leaves, suck up leaves, sand, and grit from the floor, scrub grime and algae off the walls (including above the waterline), and clean steps and shallow sections of the pool. The unit is quite large and weighs almost 16kg. Compared to some other robots, it looks a bit like a tank, but with all its jets and scrubbing wheels, it manages to work its way around the pool like a ballerina.
The cleaning process uses 29 sensors and sucks 38,000 litres of water through its cleaning basket an hour. This waste basket can be configured in two separate ways: one where it filters at 180 µm (micrometres) and one where you add extra screens to the basket, where it filters at 3 µm. You would use the extra-fine filtration every few cleans; at this filtration level, it can remove algae, parasites, pollen, and fine sediments.
After setting up the robot with your smartphone and the Mova app, its laser scanner maps your pool to determine the best way to clean the surfaces. Combined with a camera, this also lets it hunt down leaves. If you leave your phone inside the house, you can also start the X10 and select different cleaning modes using buttons on the rear of the unit. Modes include complete, floor, walls, or surface.
There is no way of electronically tracking the condition of the paddle wheels on the X10, but they will eventually need replacing, and spare parts are available.
Mova Rover X10 specifications and price
| Cleaning area | Up to 500m² |
| Suction power | Up to 38,000 LPH (litres per hour) |
| Battery life | 6 hours + |
| Basket capacity | 5 litres |
| Dimensions | 54 cm x 46 cm x 32 cm 15.8kg |
| Price (RRP) | $3,699 |
| Website | Mova Australia |
| Warranty | Three years |
Using the Mova Rover X10
The Mova X10 will replace most of the manual vacuuming and skimming of your pool. The remaining work is lifting the cleaner in and out of the pool for charging. It’s a heavy robot and gets even heavier until the water drains out, so this is a job for a strong adult.
When you put the robot in the pool, it takes about three minutes to fill with water and submerge, and a similar amount of time to empty the water when finished. Charging is also required for the sonar unit. There is no solar panel, and a second charger is supplied to keep the sonar sensor powered.
Beyond communication, the sonar unit also reports temperature via an LCD screen and sends it back to your app. The sonar range is 15 metres, so it should be reliable for most Australian pools.
The cleaner has two tank-like treads to move forward, and three paddle wheels to scrub the pool surfaces and move debris into the cleaner’s strainer basket. When I first used the pool cleaner, I could see visible tracks on the pool floor where it had already passed. This showed clearly that this new style of cleaning the pool did a much better job than previous methods.
This cleaning was also effective in corners and on the pool steps. Other robots I have tested have not been as efficient in these tighter spaces. The Rover X10’s most impressive feat has been its ability to pick up jacaranda spines. Last year, the jacaranda litter was tricky to remove when the trees were in full bloom.
This robot is large, but it also has power. Enough power to lift itself above the waterline to scrub the walls where algae will grow with sunlight, water and air. And enough power to hover to a step to clean where other robots may fall off, and to pick up sand and twigs to ensure your pool is cleaned properly.
A feature I previously found lacking in other pool-cleaning robots unfortunately continues to be a challenge for the X10. The fact that an underwater robot can also skim the surface is a major accomplishment in itself. However, the effectiveness is just okay. Leaves tend to get pushed to the side. That said, it does skim leaves, and having an all-in-one robot is a big plus.
When the cleaning is finished, the X10 returns to a designated spot, most likely set next to where the charging dock is located. You can, of course, use the app through the sensor to finish the cleaning early or even manually control the robot to clean a specific area.
Plus, you can also change the cleaning mode mid-cycle and set up a cleaning schedule. Since the X10 requires charging between cleans, a cleaning schedule is largely irrelevant, as you must manually place the cleaner back in the pool.
Mova’s app also reports on each clean, including area covered, litres filtered, time taken, and battery percentage used.
Who is the Mova Rover X10 for?
The Mova Rover X10 is a highly capable robot pool cleaner that cleans large pools well. It is priced at the top end, so its users are likely to have a larger pool with lots of overhanging trees, where cleaning is a real chore. Mova also offers cheaper models for those who don’t fit into this category.
A word of warning: at 16kg or more (when filled with water), you need to be strong enough to lift this unit out of the water and into its cradle.
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