My autonomous lawn mower thread/blog

Slot the kerb too. Diamond in an angle grinder. Couple of minutes job.

Enjoy the beers watching it do it's business.

Not really cutting it up most road surfaces have tar separation. Really simple job tbh. Much cleaner than a speed ramp which would be far more damage tbh. 🤷

Hello there,

I'm looking for advice on a robot mower for a fairly large (circa 900m2 or so) lawn which is basically triangular in shape.

Along one side is a border to a flowerbed and along the other sides are borders to gravel.

I have an outside socket about 3m away from the lawn to use to power it and some level of Wifi signal which would be strong at this socket but less so as the mower is further from the the base.

I'm looking for somthing very reliable and with as little maintenance as possible.

My builder recommended an Husqvarna mower with guide line which seemingly they will come out and put in place.

I see there are also wireless options such as the Luba 2 mentioned here which in theory sounds better though I'm also wary of fancy tech that may be less reliable. I bought 2 x fancier Roomba models for cleaning the house and they are fiddly and don't work well.

Any advice would be much appreciated. I'm happy to pay more for a product if it will work well and be reliable. I'm not that interested in fancy options, just somthing I can largely set and forget.

Thanks!

I also finished setting up my LUBA 2 at the weekend and very similar experiance to WildWater above. Very please with it so far, the set up of bounderies was a lot easier than expected, thoough I still have to retrain the bounderies at a couple of places. One was where I has it going to close to some Laurel bushes and it got caught, and the other was at a curb next to the driveway where is felll and got stuck. But this is easily rectified. Very imppressed with how accurately it cuts the lines in the grass and leaves I nice look to the lawn. Great to now have a few hours made spare at the weekend, and also not having to wait for dry weekends to cut. As we all know, if you are only able to cut at weekends, you can go a month without cutting due to rain, now I can sit at work and just the LUBA out when ever we get a fine day

I believe all of the current 300s in Ireland are gone, and not due for another 10 weeks. For the extra money I just got the 5000 as I could not wait any longer.

Thanks for the replies. Maybe I'll try the LUBA one so.

Any thoughts in terms of speccing the size of them?

My lawn is under 1000m2 so in theory that one will be fine. But I've seen in some of the reviews that the mower will have to go recharge during the cut which makes it take a lot longer.

I'm wondering if I went for the bigger battery one (I think the 3000 and 5000 have the same battery) would it be able to cut about 950m2 all in one go to save time?

I know from running Roombas in the house it's annoying if it has to go back to charge in the middle of a clean for a few hours when ideally I want it running at specific times when there is nobody at home etc.

Some advice folks...

The area in along the fence is very spongy. I've balded it with the push mower and also strimmed tight to the ground around the trees but I'm still getting a lot of mower jams in there.

Any tips to improve it? Kress 101e nano.

It's not wedging against the fence no, it seems to be bogging down in the spongy soil & grass.

Letting it grow wild isn't an option.

I was wondering about scraping the surface down to the soil and then laying a few rolls of turf.

Can be a few things.

1. There is water ingress on your cable meaning it's weaker than before and can have intermittent connection faults. You'd need to check the resistance on the cable. Do you have any links on the perimeter cable. These can fail.
2. The base station connections aren't clean or loose and need a sanding and tightening up.
3. The PCB in the base station is shagged. I have and others have had slugs eat the pcb and short the board.
4. The base station isn't getting enough current from it's transformer meaning not enough current around the perimeter need to check the transformer output and also be 100 percent sure that it's connection into the base station isn't loose or has water ingress these can get loose and fail from environmental conditions.

I'd say after seeding and pin it in with the provider plastic stakes.

Leave those sections free of seed then put cable down then seed. Probably over thinking it though. You'll sort it 👍

Hi all

Still have not set up my Greenworks mower but plan on doing so soon…

Have a LIDL Parkside one working away so have an idea what needs to be done, but am still stumped on how to wire the narrow strip between relevant lawn areas..So, the initial area to mow is a back area where the charging station will be located but larger area to be mowed is a rectangular front lawn that is fairly straightforward (few trees etc). However, to get from the back lawn area that will be mowed out to the front lawn, the mower will travel along a narrow lawn part at the side of the house that has a laurel hedge and kerb either side of it…Its about a meter wide (at narrowest) and 60 feet long before it opens out into the large front lawn. The instructions state that you should use a Guide Wire (essentially the same wire) in such instances and Splice and Guide Wire connectors are provided.

So you would if I understand it correctly (I probably dont!) create 1 loop on the back lawn into the splice, then run the guide wire out from the splice along the narrow strip into another splice and also bring 2 wires out of the splice to create the front lawn loop….

Its the only way I can see it working…Does that sound feasible and correct??

Would I also have to run the guide wire from the splice back to the base charger I wonder?

Thanks in advance for help

Guide wire creates 2 loops as its attached to the middle of the big loop. Guide wire can provide power on a non connected cable it needs to be connected at either end.

Anyone have any recommendations for outdoor plugs for charging stations out of interest

Plenty on Amazon, haven't purchased yet but lots of reviews etc

Depending on the mower model you will have one or more guide wires, one for the main area and one for your secondary area.

Your loop wire should be continuous going from the base station around the main area, across the passageway around the secondary area, back across the passageway and back to the base station. Where the boundary wire crosses the passage way the outgoing and the return wire need to be at least 1 metre apart. The secondary guide wire goes through the middle of your passage way.

I just read the manual for the Greenworks mower and it says that the minimum passage width is 60 cm, it also says that the guide wire needs to be 30 cm from the boundary wire so if the guide wire goes through the middle of your 1m passage then it should work, although if it was me I would try to widen that passage.

Love those stripes !

The lidl mower would be ideal.