Seauto Seal Filter Extender Thingy!

Description

Dear gentle reader, So hear me out, you dropped a few benjamin's on the [Seauto Seal SE (Amazon affiliate link)](https://amzn.to/3SxwB2b), turn it on, listen to it ramble on non-stop about how lucky you are for purchasing it until you hurl it into your filthy-as pool to suck up all the leaves and stuff so you don't have to listen to that annoying sniveling whiny voice any more. Why does it do talk so much? It does its thing, and you come back a few hours later, and the pool is so friggin' clean you can't believe it. You go to retrieve it with the handy hook on a stick, pull it out of the water, and watch as the horribly designed filter basket dumps half of the debris straight back into the pool as it drains the water from its guts, just like you do when...never mind. It then yammers on non-stop, not with an apology for puking all over your pool, but with constant demands to be recharged. I mean obviously you need to be charged, you're a bot. When you finally manage to get it to shut off it tells you to enjoy your pool! The nerve! Swimming pools aren't for enjoyment, they're merely for propping property values up and eating away your weekends with constant cleaning and maintenance. This bot was supposed to change all that, and you thought for one brief moment that it was going to free your weekend up, but now you have to get the skimmer on a stick thing and go spoon up all that bot vomit. Seriously, wtf? You had one job robot, and you poop the bed with it, quite literally. You don your monocle for closer inspection - you do wear a monocle Mr Fancy Pants pool owner, right? So you examine the mechanism that should trap every particle in the filter, only to discover that they probably tested everything except for that silly flap. Turns out it never really closes as intended, and the resistance of the mesh being higher than the open hole in the bottom of the filter causes the water to leave at a higher rate from where? Yes! The giant open hole with the too rigid flap that never fully closes. Surely the flap would always close when pulling the bot from the depths, but it does not, because it is a bad flap design. It is far too rigid at the pivot point to stay closed when it should, and probably so rigid it minimizes the ability for it to suck as well as it could (in a positive sense...no, come on, get your head out of the gutter). Even worse, sticks and leaves can become lodged at the flap, propping it open even more. If someone were to redesign this thing properly, the water would travel up through the central body of the bot, round a corner, and enter the filter from the tippity-top so that when it is pulled from the water, gravity pulls the water out through the filter's mesh with nary a chance to go back out the suction hole. Now I'm no Product Design Engineer, but if Seauto wants to pay me to be a consultant, and test products out, I will gladly help them fix their verbose little chat bot - starting with a speech limiter so it can only say one word per button press. We don't want to hear about how it's day is going, am I right? Next I would tell them about that central hole idea...and they're just going to read this and steal the idea. I mean it is pretty obvious if you think about it for a few seconds. Anyway, they're not going to listen to me, because they can't hear any ideas over their robots constant yammering. So fortunately for you and I, we have 3d printers and can come up with mediocre solutions to our own problems! Well, for the bad filter design anyway, we can't 3d print our ways to a less chatty bot. I mean you can just turn off voices altogether, but then there is zero audio feedback, and that sucks, almost as much as this bot sucks debris up when it cleans your pool. Let me introduce you to the Seauto Seal Filter Extender Thingy! So I have two variations for you, one gives you some screw holes so you can mount the same flap that is too rigid to do its job effectively. I mean, if it gives you some feeling of security that this stupid flap has any effect on keeping debris in the filter, feel free to print that one. The second one is slightly taller with no flap to limit the stuff that can make it into the filter. Let's talk downsides: this takes up more space in the filter, but unless you really never clean your pool, this isn't likely to be a big issue, additionally it makes cleaning it out with a garden hose a necessity, and slightly less efficient, but the pool is much cleaner. Now you're still going to get some debris coming out when you pull it from the pool, but in my testing it is significantly less. This is an improvement, not a fix mind you. Installation: Obviously, unscrew the flippity flap and remove it. You should use a drill to widen the screw holes out to accommodate the size of screw you are using. These aren't doing much, so err on the side of making it easier to screw in, otherwise you're just going to break that part you spent 6 hours printing. Reminder, I am not a Product Design Engineer. When you go to put it in the filter, it should be a snug fit, the critical points for the fit are the slots the filter's screw mounts fit through. A little jiggle should get it in, then screw it back down with the screws you took out in step 1 and you're good to go. Now you can enjoy your pool (a little) more! You're welcome.

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