Pool cleaner budget calculator

Short answer: a planning budget combines purchase and setup costs with electricity, wear parts and a separate major-repair allowance. A cheaper result is not a cleaning-performance ranking or a prediction of product life.

No product testing is claimed. Our method · Affiliate disclosure. This tool has no shopping links.

Enter one candidate's budget

Every field starts blank and is required. Enter 0 only when you deliberately assume no cost or usage—not when a number is unknown. Costs are in US dollars. Nothing is transmitted or saved by the calculator; copy your result before changing candidates or leaving the page.

Which numbers belong in the inputs?

• Purchase and setup: use an exact-SKU quote. Include shipping, tax, installation and missing equipment, such as a separately required booster pump. Do not count an included component twice.
• Incremental electricity: enter the extra kWh caused by a cleaning session, compared with the same pool's adequate baseline filtration schedule. For a robot, include wall-side charging or power-supply consumption. For a pressure cleaner, include booster electricity plus any additional filtration-pump operation. For suction, include any extra pump runtime or higher-speed energy—not automatically zero and not automatically all filtration energy.
• Sessions: use a comparable cleaning workload for each candidate. Equal sessions do not prove equal debris pickup or coverage; repeat runs may change the budget. Enter your own annual count, not a manufacturer's runtime maximum.
• Wear and repair allowances: include brushes, tracks, bags, filters, hoses and paid service where applicable. The annual wear amount repeats each year. The major-repair or replacement amount is added once over the whole period; it is an allowance, not an expected failure rate or a warranty promise. Avoid double-counting the same repair in both fields.
• Planning years: choose a common comparison horizon, not a lifespan prediction. A longer horizon may need a replacement allowance; the calculator does not assume that the original cleaner survives it.

Safety: do not open equipment or improvise electrical measurements. Use suitable documented running-energy information or a qualified professional. Nameplate amps, horsepower and maximum watts are not measured session energy. Do not reduce required filtration or sanitizer operation to make a budget look better.

Formula and an explicitly hypothetical example

Period electricity cost = kWh per session × sessions per year × $/kWh × years. Period wear cost = annual wear allowance × years. Planning total = purchase + setup + period electricity + period wear + whole-period repair/replacement allowance. Full precision is used internally; displayed dollars are rounded to cents.

Example only—not a product quote or measured performance: $700 purchase + $100 setup, 0.4 kWh/session, 200 sessions/year, $0.15/kWh, $40/year wear, $250 whole-period repair allowance and 5 years gives $60 electricity + $200 wear + $250 repairs + $800 acquisition = $1,310. These numbers are not presets or a recommended schedule.

Use scenarios, not a single confident forecast

Calculate each candidate separately using the same horizon and rate. Then recalculate with a higher repair allowance and any additional cleaning sessions you think may be needed. If a small assumption change reverses the order, the apparent price advantage is fragile. An unknown input remains unknown even when you enter zero.

This simple, constant-dollar budget excludes inflation, financing, discounting, resale value, time-of-use or tiered electricity changes, and your unpaid labor. It includes only the costs you enter, not all possible ownership costs. Fixed utility fees are not incremental cleaning costs.

First check pool compatibility with the cleaner-fit worksheet. For the underlying trade-offs and labeled cost scenarios, read robotic vs. suction vs. pressure cleaners. Review exact-offer coverage in the equipment warranty guide.

Source and method

The U.S. Department of Energy's energy-use guide explains electricity consumption and cost arithmetic. This original tool combines that arithmetic with your explicit purchase and maintenance allowances; it does not use manufacturer performance estimates or assign a winning product.