It got stuck on diabolical things like small twigs and grass dropped from a weavers nest that would wind around the paddles. My primary reason for buying was to be better at clearing debris. leaves / dates from a palm tree / grass from a weaver that might be the worst nest builder in history.
Yes, long strip leaves (like palm fronds) are its Kryptonite, tending (as you rightly say) to get wrapped around the shafts.
As (bad) luck would have it, I
only have palm trees around my pool, although fortunately not that many.
Fortunately I find it to be fairly tolerant of them, in the sense that it keeps on running for quite a while even with a few in place. When I open it up to clear it (or for a full service), I'm often amazed that it's still been able to keep running with so much crud tangled up inside it!
That said, the MX-8
is very dependent on good suction and decent flow rate.
Now aside from getting stuck on the things I had hoped it would be better at, it's a nice machine, the random way it moves meant that it got to places my other pool cleaner never even saw.
Yes, in terms of coverage and the short time in which it effects a good clean-up, it is unmatched, IMHO. It also never, ever gets stuck in one place.
My previous Zodiac X7 Quattro tended to clean a perfect "figure 8" and always used to get hung up at one particular corner of the pool where the steps met the walls. But it was far lower maintenance.
It coped fine with leaves and smaller things like nuts about the size of a pea filling the basket quickly when hitting the patches the genius didn't.
Yes, that it does.
On this point, it's worth noting that the yellow plastic insert in the throat on the underside of the MX-8 can be removed to give a significantly bigger opening. This is not made all that clear in the manual.
.... webdev ?