How many of you have owned robot lawn mowers - post your experience please

1 Lucky Texan

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  • / How many of you have owned robot lawn mowers - post your experience please
I'm about to move to a home with more property, but it is very flat and has fewer obstacles and elevation changes than where I am now (and no cypress knees - grrrr). I'm considering a McCulloch or Worx robot mower for a large side-backyard area. I'll start with my Greenworks 40v twin force on the front and smaller 'dog yard'. I suspect I'll soon need to upgrade my mower though - know more after a season I suppose. property is listed at .39 acres - not nearly large enough for a rider, but pretty large for the twin force.....I'm reluctant to get a 22inch gasser but, it may be the best way to proceed - just thinking that money might do well going to a robot mower. Folks seem happy with them after initial set-up headaches.

it also seems to be Bermuda. I have St. A at the present house.

Anyone running a Worx or similar robot in a small-sh yard?
 
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  • / How many of you have owned robot lawn mowers - post your experience please
You've already got the right idea- do the set-up properly and most of the many possible problems won't even have a chance.

I did my own setup for my Robomow. I thought I did it right, by the book. Maybe I did and the book was wrong? Either way I had to re-do a few areas and change my charger base location before I got the performance I needed.

When you do the wiring, do it right. Solder & seal every connection. Use a measuring tape for proper obstacle clearance where applicable, and get it to the inch.

Cure lawn defects before you expect it to work perfectly. I'm still battling some kind of tunneling critter. It digs holes that occasionally trap the mower, being a 'tripod' wheel arrangement.
 

1 Lucky Texan

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  • / How many of you have owned robot lawn mowers - post your experience please
interesting comment about the 3-wheel issue, one of the reasons I'm attracted to the Worx model is the 4 wheels.

I expect I'll have low areas to fill-in and perhaps other issues. Extremely rough estimate (using google maps and their scale) of area is around 4145 sqft. about 40% of the area to be mowed, but some landscaping may reduce my part in the future. This is in the middle range suggested by Worx for the Landroid. There may be a way to include more of the other side of the property but that seems impractical at present.

I'll know more in about 2-3 weeks, I don't want to 'rashly' spend 900+ bucks, but it really seems do-able.
 
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  • / How many of you have owned robot lawn mowers - post your experience please
I'm really impressed by the "extraction" subroutine in the robomow. It will really fight hard, and use a lot of neat tricks to get itself out of a jam. The mowing deck is on a floating suspension with a cowl that always contacts the lawn. In effect, the rear wheels just sort of shove the deck/skid across the lawn. That is a fantastic feature in terms of cutting height consistency lending to the velvety smoothness of the finished lawn. The front caster makes it a lot easier to turn precisely, however.

But if the front caster drops into a gopher hole, it's done. The front caster is on a telescopic suspension with a sensor. If the sensor registers full extension, the computer assumes that the mower has been lifted off the ground or rolled over, and shuts down everything for safety's sake. I've had to rescue it from this situation about 5x in 2 seasons of use.

I don't think I realized that the worx machine has a fourth wheel. I had looked at that unit when I was researching robots, but back then the idea of using multiple units to cover my yard just seemed crazy to me.
 

1 Lucky Texan

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  • / How many of you have owned robot lawn mowers - post your experience please
well, if the Worx can be stopped by dropping 1 wheel, it isn't any better but, it 'seems' like it may be less prone to a small hole?
 
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  • / How many of you have owned robot lawn mowers - post your experience please
well, if the Worx can be stopped by dropping 1 wheel, it isn't any better but, it 'seems' like it may be less prone to a small hole?

You can never really guess with something as dynamic as a robot bouncing over terrain. I would expect the four-wheeled arrangement to be better suited to handling that particular type of surface defect. Getting a robot was a real eye-opener in terms of learning what it could and couldn't do. I should probably write a book about it; I feel like it would take a form that large to get it all across.
 

spectrum1c

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  • / How many of you have owned robot lawn mowers - post your experience please
You've already got the right idea- do the set-up properly and most of the many possible problems won't even have a chance.

I did my own setup for my Robomow. I thought I did it right, by the book. Maybe I did and the book was wrong? Either way I had to re-do a few areas and change my charger base location before I got the performance I needed.

When you do the wiring, do it right. Solder & seal every connection. Use a measuring tape for proper obstacle clearance where applicable, and get it to the inch.

Cure lawn defects before you expect it to work perfectly. I'm still battling some kind of tunneling critter. It digs holes that occasionally trap the mower, being a 'tripod' wheel arrangement.


I'm extremely interested in getting a robomow myself. Could you recommend a source to determine if it would work well for my yard? How did your figure out how tune your installation to get it to perform the way you wanted?
 
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  • / How many of you have owned robot lawn mowers - post your experience please
I'm extremely interested in getting a robomow myself. Could you recommend a source to determine if it would work well for my yard? How did your figure out how tune your installation to get it to perform the way you wanted?

Good question! The best I can offer is that if you have somebody with operating experience actually walk your yard, they'd probably be able to identify most of the potential trouble spots. In other words, a pro installer.

The manual that came with the robot really did have a lot of good advice, and the original Robomow support crew was fantastic! They were easy to get by phone or email, and they had lots of great suggestions for solving problems that came up along the way.

I would warn you though- Robomow is not what they once were. The company was acquired by a huge outdoor power tool conglomerate, and it's been a rocky marriage. The Robomow tech support squad was replaced, and now it's all people that support all of their brands- so it seems none of them are robot experts. Some spare parts vanished from the market and are only just now coming back into stock. It's getting better. And the fact is, the mower still works fine, 3 years in and a couple thousand hours on it. Original battery is diminished slightly but still cutting.

To sum up- if your lawn is easy for you to mow, then a robot is likely to deliver excellent performance. If there are things about your lawn that make it harder? Your robot will struggle too, though not necessarily the same way.
 
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