The Beginning of the Smart-Yard Ecosystem is Here

Your phone, car, home – everything is becoming smarter year over year. The average American house has twenty smart connected devices, Europe is slightly lower with seventeen smart connected devices per household, and on average, a person has two and a half smart devices on them most of their day with projections that all these numbers will rise substantially next year.

Each of these devices is intended to provide either some level of security, automate a function of your home or work, or simply make a living a little more comfortable. Smart technology has, at times and with varying success, found its way into outdoor spaces, from our watches, and smart camping gear, to portable solar panels hitting the market.

Our yards, the extension of our very homes, have largely gone overlooked. There are products out there that have smart functionality, these products, like smart lighting, largely fall into aesthetic applications, though. Smart-yard technology has been in the infancy stages, with emerging products, like any emerging technology, carrying a high price tag for entry.  Enter Aiper, who has promised to create an entire ecosystem of smart-yard devices to make your home life easier, and they’re starting with your pool.

The company has been improving and perfecting its cordless robotic pool cleaners since hitting the market in 2017. Just by looking at Aiper’s flagship Seagull Series and comparing it to other industry mainstays, two things immediately stick out before we even dive deep into some of the features. The Seagull SE, Plus, and Pro are all attractive, sleek, hydrodynamic devices with a sports car feel. Secondly, the price! The aforementioned SE, Plus, and Pro target your entry-level, mid-range, and professional-level cleaning needs and all come in at hundreds of dollars cheaper than most competitor models. That doesn’t mean they’re skipping quality, though, in fact, the Aiper Seagull Pro was CES Innovation Award Winner just earlier this year.

The Seagull Pro is, at the time of writing this, is Aiper’s most advanced cordless robotic pool cleaner. Looking at the spec sheet for the product, one of the things that immediately leaps out to me is that it provides up to three hours of cleaning on only a 90-minute charge. As someone who is terribly about plugging in their devices until needed, this is a big selling point for me as I won’t need to plan my day around charging my device only to wait longer to clean. Because let’s admit, nobody likes waiting and wants to wait to clean.

Moving onto some of the Seagull Pro’s other impressive features, the Pro bills itself as the first-ever cordless robotic pool cleaner to utilize a quad-motor design. Looking deeper into that, the device performs at 70w normally and a peak of 200w of power, with two motors dedicated to cleaning and two filtering up to 130 GPM of your pool’s water. While that all sounds impressive on paper, it’s hard to put into context without seeing for yourself, and if you want external references, YouTube is a great resource to find real-time comparison videos and time-lapses of the cleaning power of the Aiper Seagull Pro.

Is the Aiper Seagull Pro the cordless pool cleaner for you? If you want a complete cleaning, then yes, the Seagull Pro not only cleans your pool’s floor but also its walls and waterline and does so for pools up to 3200 Square feet and pools with a 30-degree slope. Aiper also boasts about its own in-house WavePath™ Navigation Technology, which reportedly increases cleaning coverage by as much as 30% compared to most other robotic pool cleaners.

But, now the big question is, is the Aiper Seagull Pro worth it, and will the smart-yard become a reality? Retailing at $899.99, the Seagull Pro is hundreds of dollars cheaper than most of the competition, and Aiper holds frequent sales to snag one at a discount, similar to Amazon, Aiper has its very own Aiper day sales which saves up to $200 off at aiper.com/aiper-store. Even at retail prices, any product that can eliminate the chore of pool maintenance for me has my attention. I spend three to five hours cleaning my pool each week, even if I’m not using it! Let’s average that, and, say, four hours every week over the course of the year is 224 hours. In just one year, that means the product would cost $4 per use (I won’t count electricity since that amounts to $5 for the whole year). $4 a week, $1 per hour to buy back my free time? Absolutely. I can easily get to the gym and have lunch with time to spare in four hours, assemble something from Ikea while my pool gets cleaned, polish up on my wife’s native language that I’ve been secretly learning, or write a chapter or two in my next novel. For the return on investment, I think it’s a hugely beneficial purchase.

Now, about that smart-yard, here, time will tell. I’ve been researching robotic lawnmowers for both efficacy and safety recently, but the price point for the upper-end models is still in the thousands! If Aiper can replicate the success of their pool products in terms of quality and price and apply that to lawn care, it will shake up the whole ecosystem of smart yard products. Beyond that, I’m encouraged to take the wait-and-see approach – anything that can eliminate a chore from my to-do list as the Roomba did for millions will get me to look closer. Our yard is a luxury, after all, and we should care for it, but with so many things to do, yard maintenance falls into that out of sight out of mind category. I welcome my chores being automated and can’t wait for the next Aiper industry innovation, but for now, they’re mastering the pool and making fans out of pool owners everywhere as they increase their global presence with the mantra “Bring Vacation Home.” As a remote worker, that, no pun intended, hits home.