// WIRED US/UK — HARDWARE & GADGET
The Best Pool Accessories to Upgrade Your Summer (2026)
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, i