A Hack For ThatFire Your Lawn Mower and Buy a Mow-Bot
I bought a robot lawn mower and used it all summer. It’s great, but it’s not for everyone.
Lawn Service is Expensive
A few years ago we moved to a property that was almost 1 acre, and that’s a lot of lawn. We kept the same landscaping company as the previous owner, but the price kept creeping up. Some weeks it was as much as $150, and that adds up (especially in 5-week months!).
Doing it Yourself is Expensive and Time Consuming
Taking it over myself would require a riding lawn mower and probably a push mower for tighter areas, and I’d still have to actually do the mowing, so a robot was appealing.
Can a Mow-Bot Know Where it Is?
I held off for a while since my property is long and narrow with trees towering over it, and the house and garage are tall, so I was worried about GPS signal. Modern mowers use GPS instead of a buried wire, which is way better, but only if the mower can actually know where it is. I took the plunge with the Mammotion Luba 3 AWD since it uses GPS, LiDAR, vision, RTK, and the clincher, Net RTK (aka cell towers).
I first mapped the property (driving the mower around the edge of the zones using your phone as a remote) with the default settings, which assume you’ve set up the RTK tower it comes with. I did not set up the RTK tower. It mostly worked, but there was drift. It would miss some edges, go over in some places, and get stuck. I switched to Net RTK and had to re-map everything, but now it sticks to its boundaries consistently.
You define zones, paths between zones, and no-go areas within zones (e.g. trees), and it basically works. I set up a schedule where it mows different zones on different days and mows each zone twice a week. It takes Saturday off.
The Problems
It has “AI obstacle detection” turned on by default. After the first mow, every dandelion had a 1-foot radius of uncut grass around it. The whole point is to mow the dandelions, not avoid them! So that got turned off immediately. Now it tries to mow everything in its zone. It still has a bumper on the front, and if it bumps into something it will try to go around it. However, if it can drive over the obstacle (it has all-wheel drive!) without hitting the bumper, it can still get into trouble. It loves tangling itself up in our soccer nets if we don’t move them in time.
If you set up an area that’s too narrow, say less than twice the width of the bot, it will simply skip that area and everything on the other side of it. For a narrow patch beside my driveway, I had to define a few feet of driveway as part of the area to mow to get it to work, so now it harmlessly tries to mow part of my driveway twice a week.
Sometimes it gets confused and quits. If the pattern you have it mow makes it try to turn around in a spot where it doesn’t have enough space to do so, it just stops. Changing the direction of the striping, adding more perimeter loops, or changing the outside/inside order fixed these issues for me.
It doesn’t cut as low or as well as I’d like. The grass definitely gets cut. I can tell which areas it cuts vs. the areas it can’t get to. But I’d like it cut lower. I have it set to the lowest setting (2.2" on mine), but the grass never gets that short: 3–4" at best. I changed it to move as slowly as possible and spin its blades as fast as possible so it catches more. It doesn’t do a perfect job every time, but with repetition it keeps your lawn looking cut and nicely striped.
The Good
It mows on schedule, consistently, relentlessly, quietly. It’s so much quieter than gas equipment. It returns to charge when it needs to and goes back out to finish. It charges during low electricity rate hours. It changes the striping angle each time so your lawn doesn’t get worn out. It’s way lighter than a riding lawn mower and much gentler than a zero-turn. It gets lots of attention. Dogs have varying reactions to it. It can mow after dark. I’m happy I got one and love not paying for lawn service each month anymore!
Should You Get One?
It’s still probably for early adopters. You have to be comfortable managing it via an app on your phone. It gets firmware updates. I had to map my whole lawn a few times to get it right. I still have to rescue it once every couple of weeks because it gets caught on a vine or tangled in a soccer net, and it’s heavy to pick up and move if you need to. I don’t have a fence separating any of my zones, so it can get everywhere by itself. That’s not true for many yards. I still have to string trim and leaf blow, as it doesn’t do that. It’s kind of dumb and slow, but that’s ok. It has all day to mow, and now, I don’t have to.