Robot mowers

[Declan52]

Has anyone any knowledge of a robot mower. I'm looking to get a new mower and was originally looking at a ride on and went to see a few but during one of these visits to a garden centre I had a look at a robot mower and was initially impressed.

Price wise the few I seen are coming in around £1k while most ride on mowers up at least double this for a decent one. Apart from the obvious initial cost savings the sales rep was also stressing the difference in running costs. With no petrol to buy and no real moving parts to service each year these really seem to make buying a robot mower a viable option. 

My garden is just over 600m² with a fairly simple L shape so the boundary wire is straightforward. 

[PNAmble]

We’ve got a garden about 190m2. We have a Worx Landroid about 5 years old now.  Does a brilliant job but ….

 

I still use my old petrol mower at the end and start of the season as it gets a bit wet for the robot to go out (ie it rains too much).  This year (we live in Northumberland) I’ve just put the robot out.  Main reason is that it’s been a really wet April here and for some reason the dogs have dug some holes in the lawn over winter where we’ve had ‘critters’ which needed fixing which I’ve only just done. 
 

The robot goes out for about an hour a day.  
 

if you want stripes then forget it and you’ll still need to strim edges (even with the worx close to edge system) 
 

main reason I got mine was that we worked away and I got fed up of having to do a ‘major’ cut when I got home which was occasionally every two weeks during summer. 
 

hope that helps. 
 

 

Edited May 2, 2023 by PNAmble

[Nick Thomas]

I had a Yard Force SA650ECO back in 2020. The garden wasn't really suited to it - slopes, in particular, gave it trouble, but it also struggled to get between the two zones, through a relatively narrow corridor. It was great when it worked, but I had to rescue it from itself most days.

 

Neighbours and passers-by were absolutely entranced by it, though.

Edited May 2, 2023 by Nick Thomas

[Declan52]

25 minutes ago, PNAmble said:

We’ve got a garden about 190m2. We have a Worx Landroid about 5 years old now.  Does a brilliant job but ….

 

I still use my old petrol mower at the end and start of the season as it gets a bit wet for the robot to go out (ie it rains too much).  This year (we live in Northumberland) I’ve just put the robot out.  Main reason is that it’s been a really wet April here and for some reason the dogs have dug some holes in the lawn over winter where we’ve had ‘critters’ which needed fixing which I’ve only just done. 
 

The robot goes out for about an hour a day.  
 

if you want stripes then forget it and you’ll still need to strim edges (even with the worx close to edge system) 
 

main reason I got mine was that we worked away and I got fed up of having to do a ‘major’ cut when I got home which was occasionally every two weeks during summer. 
 

hope that helps. 
 

 

It was a worx landroid L model that I seen. Couldn't care less about stripes!!!

If it was only the first cut using my petrol mower and a tidy up round the edge I can happily live with that.

[elite]

Picked up a landroid L last autumn with an offer they had on their ebay store for about £350 - I think they have a new model due out, so look for offers. I've only just deployed it, but my findings so far:

 

• Cuts well, though it does a random pattern, so obvs no stripes
• Wire positioning has taken some tweaking, my lawn is on a slope and although wire was placed at required distance, it struggles at the bottom of the slope where there is a 5 cm drop to the path, so I have had to take the wire back a bit which means I will need to manually tidy up this edge, the other edges all work fine
• The stock wheels do struggle if our soil is wet as they clog up, the only problems this seems to cause is a) increased wheel slippage b) sometimes struggles to dock - our dock is on a slight incline (against manufactures recommendations) which probably doesn't help. I've ordered some aftermarket wheels that I hope will help, and will probably rellocate the dock

On the whole pretty happy with it, and much nicer to sit back with a beer watching it work than doing the graft myself

 

[ProDave]

You need a good lawn.

 

My neighbour has one and his "lawn" is not flat enough and has too many humps and dips and it frequently gets stuck.

 

He also has to prepare the lawn at the start of the season with the ride on mower.  The robot would not cope with the long wet winter growth.

[Declan52]

43 minutes ago, elite said:

Picked up a landroid L last autumn with an offer they had on their ebay store for about £350 - I think they have a new model due out, so look for offers. I've only just deployed it, but my findings so far:

 

• Cuts well, though it does a random pattern, so obvs no stripes
• Wire positioning has taken some tweaking, my lawn is on a slope and although wire was placed at required distance, it struggles at the bottom of the slope where there is a 5 cm drop to the path, so I have had to take the wire back a bit which means I will need to manually tidy up this edge, the other edges all work fine
• The stock wheels do struggle if our soil is wet as they clog up, the only problems this seems to cause is a) increased wheel slippage b) sometimes struggles to dock - our dock is on a slight incline (against manufactures recommendations) which probably doesn't help. I've ordered some aftermarket wheels that I hope will help, and will probably rellocate the dock

On the whole pretty happy with it, and much nicer to sit back with a beer watching it work than doing the graft myself

 

So your telling me that I can buy a new set of sweet looking wheels to pimp the robot up!!! Sold.

[Iceverge]

We have a Flymo that cost £522.in 2018. 

 

I think it's a rebadged version of the cheapest Husquvarna. I left it out all year and set it to run for an hour or two per night so no first cut dramas or issues with wet grass as it was always short. 

 

It will occasionally get stuck in a small hole if it can find it. Every time it did I used to take a spade of earth and fill it in. You'll still need to do the edges with a strimmer or something if that bothers you. 

 

I haven't installed it in the new house yet/ever. 

 

 

 

 

[jayc89]

Heard good things about the more recent Husqvarna Automowers. 

[JohnMo]

We had a Flymo for about 6 years, first few years great, then the battery charger failed, replaced, then battery went and a few other niggles needed fixing, basically became uneconomical to fix. Went back to a normal mower after that.

[bgmill]

I'm currently looking at robot mowers as I'm already getting bored of cutting the grass and it's not even June yet! We doubled our lawn since last year and it now takes me around 3 hours start to finish on my Stiga Park ride-on, plus some extra time strimming before and tidying up after

 

As the area is fairly large and I don't want to have to install boundary wire there are only really three that I'm looking at: Husqvarna 450X NERA, Kress Mission RTK 5000 and the Ammotion Luba AWD 5000.

 

I'm swaying towards the Luba right now as the reviews all seem great and it's half the price of the Husqvarna.

 

All three do 'systematic' cuts so leave parallel lines rather than the random cuts you get from non-GPS units.

[bgmill]

1 hour ago, bgmill said:

Ammotion

 * Mammotion

[Dave Jones]

they dont do stripes though!

[MikeSharp01]

4 hours ago, Dave Jones said:

they dont do stripes though!

No Apparently not - here are a few I did today and I just won't go without them, so no robots here, yet, - perhaps a slightly more sober mower driver, Sunday lunch don't you know! (Perhaps that also explains the slight tilt on the picture.)

 

[ProDave]

17 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

No Apparently not - here are a few I did today and I just won't go without them, so no robots here, yet, - perhaps a slightly more sober mower driver, Sunday lunch don't you know! (Perhaps that also explains the slight tilt on the picture.)

 

Not everyone has a railway in their garden.  So tell more (in a new thread)

[Temp]

Youtube served me this today... Open source robot mower with very high accuracy GPS so no need of perimeter wire..

 

 

 

 

 

[Temp]

If you built it around the right sort if mower it could do stripes.

[Dave Jones]

honda and husqvarna had stalls at the grand designs show in london couple weeks ago, asked them when the stripey version was coming out, nothing in works apparently...

[bgmill]

I ended up buying the Mammotion Luba and, although not 'stripes' as such, the parallel lines do look pretty good (plus they're actually straight, unlike when I manually mow!).

 

Edit: this was two cuts, one at 0 degrees and then another at 40 degrees.

 

Edited July 2, 2023 by bgmill

[RichardL]

Hi,
What sort of connectivity does it need?     Cloud/Wifi etc?

My Worx Landroid perimeter wire gave up after 4 years with an intermittent disconnect somewhere and I'm not re-laying it so looking for options.

[Temp]

I've seen a few people on YouTube building robot mowers that don't use a perimeter wire. Instead they use very accurate GPS. You have to train the mower by manual mowing the perimeter the first time.  I suspect it might not be long before we see commercial mowers do this.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Temp

[bgmill]

Yep, this one uses GPS so there's no perimeter wire to run or any of that faff. Setup is literally a case of mapping out your cut zones by driving it around the edge with the android/ios app like an RC car via bluetooth. It uses something called RTK (real-time kinematic positioning) to get down to cm level positioning so it just needs a good view of the sky.

 

You can access it on wifi but that only works for me when it's docked as my wifi coverage outside is fairly poor.

 

I'm running manually triggered mows at the moment as I've only had it a few days but I'll setup some schedules this week.

[SteamyTea]

20 hours ago, bgmill said:

Mammotion Luba

Similar to a Steely Dan?