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The cylinder is surrounded by four arms that help the device float and stay upright. One of the arms contains the power port and on/off button, as well as a Bluetooth button used to initiate pairing with the Bublue mobile app. The only additional component is a mesh filter located below the filter basket. This filter, in turn, is installed within a circular frame, which holds it in place. Finally, there are five parts to the machine, a fact that will become more important later when I discuss the cleaning process.
Put together, the robot is very tall, needing a full 1.5 feet of water to operate in.
Sorry, no solar
Your first order of business with the BuVortex V5 is to charge its 7,800 mAh battery, as – and this is essential – the unit does not have a solar charging function, which is a standard feature on traditional pool skimmer robots. It takes a solid four hours to charge the unit and is scheduled to run for three hours. I got close to four hours of runtime during testing.
Photo: Christopher Noll
The lack of solar power alone may be a drawback for most people. (That’s for me, at least.) When I use a pool skimmer, I usually drop it in the pool and let it run for a week or so, letting it sleep overnight when the battery dies and turning it back on in the morning when the sun comes up. The beauty of skimmer solar is that you don’t have to think about it. I can’t remember the last time I connected my device. The only time I took the skimmer out of the pool was to clean it periodically.
Even with four hours of runtime, operationally, the device doesn’t make any sense. Imagine the occasions when you need a scraper most – during the fall, especially when the leaves are constantly falling. Four hours of scraping won’t make a dent in a day’s worth of debris landing on your pool surface, and even if you faithfully retrieve the robot, recharge it, and turn it back on, you’re still only accounting for a third of the 24-hour period. While no skimmer is perfect, with BuVortex, there is no way to prevent most leaves from ending up on the pool floor, or at best, in the wall skimmer.
