The Best Pool Accessories to Upgrade Your Summer

Pools are hard. This is not news to anyone who owns one, but an inordinate amount of daily labor and chores lie behind that clear, sparkling, perfectly chlorinated (or salted) water.

Luckily, pool tech has come a long way in the past decade—gone are the hours spent scooping leaves and dead bugs out of the water with a long-handled net, laboring over pH strips, and trying to relax on floaties too small for your adult-sized behind. We've now got robots that clean your pool, apps that monitor water quality from your phone, and even a slushie machine for proper pool-party margs.

With gas and plane ticket prices soaring to astronomical levels, there's never been a better time for a staycation at your own pool. (If you don't have a pool of your own, you can always rent one nearby on Swimply.) My colleague Chris Null has a 12-by-36-foot, L-shaped in-ground pool lined with PebbleTec, and I have a 20-by-12-foot above-ground pool lined with vinyl. Between the two of us, we have pretty much tried it all, so whether you've got a custom-built in-ground complex or an Intex pop-up from Walmart, these time- and life-tested favorites are sure to level up your backyard pool game.

For more yard tech, check out our guides to the Best Pool Cleaning Robots, Best Smart Sprinklers and Irrigation Systems, Best Robot Lawn Mowers, and Best Smart Bird Feeders.

As someone who manually fished leaves and dead bees out of their pool with a net for years, I can attest to the utility of an automatic skimmer. It's not cheap, but if you have a large pool that doesn't have an in-wall skimming system, a robotic skimmer is a must-have, and this is the one pool-cleaning robot reviewer Chris Null likes best. It's solar-powered, so you never have to take it out to charge, and it's got sensors that help it avoid damaging itself by running into your pool walls. Read the full run-down in our guide to the Best Pool Cleaning Robots.

Cleaning out debris is only one part of regular pool maintenance. Equally important, if not more so, is keeping chemicals in balance. If things get out of wack for even a few days, you can be left with a green, algae-ridden mess that can be a major challenge to remedy. Test strips and kits have long been standard, but they're a hassle to use and only give you a snapshot of your pool’s chemistry at a specific moment in time. Smart technology offers a much more elegant solution, letting you keep tabs on chemistry in real time and alerting you if something’s amiss. Of the handful of smart-pool chemistry monitors I’ve tested, I like Iopool’s EcO Start the best.

This floating gadget monitors temperature, pH, and ORP (a stand-in for free chlorine), together giving you a solid picture of your pool’s disinfection capabilities, automatically updated every 15 minutes. While many chemistry monitors require replaceable supplies (quite costly) and regular battery replacements to work, Iopool’s solution is solid-state, needing no maintenance at all except for storing it out of the pool in winter months. I used mine for two full swimming seasons until it died (at which point it must be replaced)—and I like it so much I just dropped its successor into the water for the summer. —Chris Null

When our first 90-degree-Fahrenheit day popped up on the forecast last month, I immediately started searching for a floating cooler for drinks that had a canopy to block the sun and would not cost a fortune, and ended up buying this Funboy one off Amazon. It can easily handle a six-pack of cans on a raft of ice, the canopy is removable, and there's a drink holder on either side so you and your buddy can push it back and forth between your floats. The striped design with the fringe is very St. Tropez (or ’80s-era pool umbrella, depending on your age and station), and I ended up liking the vibe so much I have since added its companion matching pool rings, which come in 16 colors on Funboy's site or six on Amazon. I've had the rings in my pool for a couple of weeks now, in direct sun, and while I wish they had handles for easier on-and-off, they have held up great. The 48-inch size is big enough for most adult butts, and also comes with the requisite cupholder. However, note that the cupholder design is shallow, so if you're using skinny cans like hard seltzer or Celsius, you may want to stick with the more forgiving holders on the cabana bar.

No pool party is complete without some tunes, and this is our favorite Bluetooth speaker, which is touted by JBL as being “life-proof." As someone who owns one myself, I can confirm they mean it. Our family's long-suffering Flip 7 has been rained on, splashed with water, strapped to the back of my son's mountain bike while he did jumps, and survived all manner of falls and other misadventures. It's fully waterproof and IP68-rated, so you don't even need to worry if it falls into the pool. I have not tested this, but JBL says it can survive being submerged in about 5 feet of water for 30 minutes.

WIRED reviewer Chris Null has been testing pool-cleaning robots for four years, and this one from Beatbot, he says, is the best he's tried. It not only excels at its prescribed cleaning tasks, but its battery charge is also phenomenal at six hours, and it's got AI-powered debris detection and a great app. It can also skim your pool's surface if needed, and best of all, it floats when it's done, so you don't have to retrieve it from the bottom of the pool. (Which is good, he says, because it's quite heavy.)

If your household or neighborhood engages in real water fights, you need a top-of-the-line water weapon, and nothing hits quite like a Spyra. Literally—this thing is strong enough to dent cans. My son received the SpyraTwo ($200) as a gift some years ago, and he found it fun for target practice even when there wasn't a water fight going on. I like that it sucks up the water automatically, so you don't have to worry about awkward filling. The SpyraFour is Spyra's newest version, which offers a more detailed screen and special gameplay modes like Ultra Rapid Fire and Scattershot. In fact, WIRED commerce director Martin Cizmar has deemed it the new best water gun ever made.

You haven't properly pool partied until you've languished in your floatie on a hot day with a frozen margarita. Or a cup of frosé, frozen lemonade, or just about anything else you can think of—it will probably slush in one of our favorite slushie machines. High-sugar drinks work best, but you can even slush diet drinks by adding allulose. If you want to keep two drinks going at a time, Ninja just released a dual-reservoir version, which WIRED reviewer Matthew Korfhage is currently testing. It can auto-adjust temperatures to make sure even drinks with different consistencies are ready at the same time.

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