Buy it here: https://amzn.to/2wdF6DI
We’ve had ours for almost a year now and I deliberately waited until I’ve had it long enough to really get a good idea of what it can and can’t do. For what it’s worth, the negatives are far outweighed by the positives, and most of the negatives will be applicable to any other brand of robotic mower anyway.
We named ours “Billy” after a little cartoon billy goat that eats everything in an old Tex Avery cartoon.
We have a yard that’s a little more than a 1/4 acre front to back. It contains numerous trees, stumps, a garden surrounded by railroad ties, herb boxes, and other miscellaneous obstacles. In addition, a relatively narrow band of yard connects the front to the back. The boundary wire that came with it was insufficient to do the entire yard so for the first month or so it only mowed the back. When I spliced the remaining boundary wire to add the front, it had difficulty following it to the front yard as the line forced it to travel sideways on an incline and it kept wanting to slip. I finally had to move the line downhill some so that it could travel all the way to the front yard, which means there a narrow band of our yard it’s not mowing. Luckily, my neighbor just hits that patch when he mows. The literature for this says it only meant to handle 1/4 acre or less, but the truth is you can mow larger areas as long as you program it to spend more time meandering around your yard, and you set the zones so it makes sure to cover the yard evenly.
The manual recommends a complex system of creating boundary loops around obstacles. Instead of this, I used various landscaping bricks and judiciously placed spikes nailed in the ground to turn Billy around. This works fine.
The bad: No matter how much I try Billy just about always finds some way to get himself stuck somewhere once every few days. Sometimes he backs up just a little too far and gets caught on the fencing around the garden. Sometimes his treads fill up with too much mud and he loses traction and slips out of boundaries. Sometimes he figures out a way to hit an obstacle just the right way to flip himself upside down. Sometimes he gets mysteriously “trapped” in a reasonably open area. The upshot of this is, every day, usually a couple of times a day, I step out to see how he’s doing – an usually he’s doing his job. But, if I don’t see him working, I go looking. Usually I find him in some obscure corner somewhere munching grass, but sometime I find him stuck and I have to reset him. Maybe if your yard is simple and free of obstacles you won’t have this issue.
The good: The yard ALWAYS looks freshly mowed. This was something I’d not thought of when I bought this. Not only do you not have to spend hours & hours pushing your mower around in the heat, the yard never looks anything but freshly mowed. Not only that, but the dandelions we used to always struggle with never get a chance to pop their little yellow heads up very far before he chops them right off. The time spent monitoring him to make sure he’s not hung up somewhere is more than worth the small effort considering how much this has simplified our lives.
He’s entertaining and somewhat meditative to watch too as he slowly, aimlessly meanders about munching grass. When we first started using this it was amusing to watch people walking down the street pause to stare at it as it automatically mowed.
Unless you simply enjoy mowing your yard, and I know some people find it pleasant, you can’t beat this.
After finishing this review I stepped out back and snapped a pic of Billy doing his job.
Buy it here: https://amzn.to/2wdF6DI
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