I thought this Zodiac Baracuda R3 Suction Pool Cleaner was going to be something of a luxury and unnecessary purchase, but it is actually an invaluable tool for keeping the pool clean with minimal effort!
It’s a nice bit of kit. Comes in a good storage box (although it’s cardboard so you need to dry the hoses etc before putting it away. And the hose sections (that easily click together) give you plenty long enough for our 12′ x 24′ pool which has the skimmer at one end.
This vaccum does a great job of chugging about the bottom and sides of our above-ground pool hoovering up the dirt at the bottom. It does have some drawbacks though, the main one is that it doesn’t always go where you want it to go, no matter how long you leave it. This is because it gets ‘blown’ in certain directions by the current from the water pump inlet to the pool which pushes the vacuum and its hose sometimes causing the hose to loop around – not really in a tangle, but just restricting the vacuum’s range enough so the vacuum just never gets to some parts of your pool. Despite this, you can still drag it to where you want it, or get the manual vacuum head/pole out, so we still rate it as excellent bit of kit and reasonable value too.
