Seauto Shark robot pool cleaner review: Speedy dirt picker-upper

Seauto has been producing pool robots since 2021, with a smattering of similar options currently on the market. They’re all cordless, battery-powered units, with parallel designs and modes of operation: Two large treads powering surprisingly fast movement, sandwiching a pair of scrubbing cylinders that dominate the front face of the device.

The Seauto Shark was released in 2023 and is an iconic example of the Seauto formula, weighing in at nearly 20 pounds and specified to manage pools up to 2,150 square feet in size. A 10400mAh battery allows the unit to run for up to 3 hours or even more, depending on settings.

The Shark is at its most powerful—at least its most fun to watch—when it cleans the waterline.

Operationally, the Shark offers four modes: waterline only, wall only, floor only, or “all cover mode,” which handles all three parts of the pool. In floor-only mode, the unit uses less power and can run for up to a lengthy four hours, traversing the floor back and forth, back and forth. A single power button lets you turn the device off and on while also cycling through the various modes. The mobile app (more on this in a bit) can also change the mode as well as specify the amount of time you want the robot to run.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best robot pool cleaners.

Christopher Null/Foundry

In testing the unit on organic debris, the Shark was effective but not perfect, picking up about 85 percent of the debris in the pool at the time, but leaving some areas untouched. Dirt on the bottom of the pool was still visible in the form of wide tracks that the Shark had somehow failed to go over, perhaps a side-effect of its somewhat random, haphazard approach to pathfinding. In my synthetic test with artificial leaves, the unit was more successful but still not perfect, picking up more than 90 percent of the test debris—but during a floor-only test that ran for more than 3 hours.

The Shark is at its most powerful—at least its most fun to watch—when it cleans the waterline. After climbing the wall of the pool, the robot angles itself slightly to one side, then grinds away at the tile while slowly moving laterally along the top of the wall. It’s a loud process that churns up a ton of water  until it encounters an obstacle and retreats back into the depths of the pool.

The Shark’s debris filter basket is contained beneath a clear panel that dominates the rear half of the device. This in turn is a two-piece affair with an additional cover panel; arguably this design is more complex than it needs to be, leaving you with a lot of pieces to clean and dry when it’s finished running. The filter basket also features a few too many nooks and crannies; getting debris—especially dirt—out of the unit can be difficult and time-consuming. Debris that managed to bypass the filter basket also got trapped in the top-mounted exhaust ports during my tests, and I found this difficult to clear.

A unique feature of the Shark is its inclusion of a “high filtration system,” which is a fancy word for an additional filter component that sits inside the standard, mesh-covered filter basket. This component includes a second basket plus a piece of foam that sits snugly within that basket. Stack all these pieces together and the foam works like a fine-grained filter that, based on my testing, does indeed capture significantly more dirt and grime than the robot can do without the high filtration system installed.

That said, the additional components make for a much more complicated cleanup. The mesh does not dry easily, and it traps grime inside that’s impossible to loosen. Once it’s used, it will probably never be “clean” again. Note that the high filtration system is intended for use solely in floor-only mode, as it can increase the weight of the robot too much, preventing it from climbing walls effectively.

Upon completion, the Shark docks itself near a wall—successfully in each test run I initiated—and must be retrieved with the included pole hook. The unit drains quickly, so it’s easy to return it to its charging cable.

Seauto’s mobile app isn’t the most robust I’ve seen, buggy to the point that, when I first connected it to the robot, the product showed up in the device list as a ceiling fan. I have yet to be able to get a firmware update to complete successfully. After some trial and error, I was able to connect it to my home’s 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network, at least. As noted, the app can primarily be used to set the cleaning mode and the duration of the cleaning time.

Seauto’s chatty voice prompts can be turned off here if desired, and there’s a “speed” setting that lets you toggle among “quick, standard, and enhanced.” “Enhanced” actually means slow. The app works best once the unit is in the pool, but for the most part I found it more convenient to control via the power button, ignoring the extra duration and speed settings.

At a list price of $800, the Shark is a bit costly considering its performance and quirks, but the unit’s typical street price of about $650 is more in line with expectations. Seauto does seem to be in the process of replacing the Shark with newer, cheaper models. We’ll check back with reviews of its new gear when we get a chance to see it.