Lawn-mowing robot cool but pricey

Raise your hand if you enjoy mowing your lawn. You can’t see me, but I’m not raising my hand. I don’t have a particularly large yard, but mowing the grass is not something I look forward to, even though I love to look at a freshly mowed lawn.

I’ve heard of robot lawn mowers, but until last week, I had never seen one in action.

I was asked if I’d like to try out the Husqvarna Automower at my house. I’m a renter, though, and the Automower requires perimeter wires to be run around your yard. We have our share of flower beds, trees, outdoor furniture and a deck, so the wire installation was a little more than I wanted to deal with. And frankly, I wasn’t sure how the Automower worked, so I asked if there was a place locally where I could see one in action.

Husqvarna made arrangements for me to visit a suburban home where it had several Automower models up and running. My guide was Garrett Baker, who is the Husqvarna robotics installation and training manager.

Husqvarna has a variety of Automowers that range in price from $1,199 to $4,799. I concentrated on the $1,799 Automower 315X, which is designed for yards up to 0.4 acres.

How does it work?

The first thing I had to do was erase all my expectations.

I thought the Automower would work like my robot vacuum, which cleans the perimeter of my rooms, then makes passes back and forth until the entire room is cleaned.

Like a robot vacuum, the Automower is designed to run frequently. Instead of mowing weekly, it’s designed to mow often — even every day.

When it sets out from its base station, it shoots off in a direction and mows until it reaches an obstacle, like a tree, which will cause it to stop and take off in another direction. Same when it runs up to the perimeter wire.

If you sit there and watch it mow, you’ll go crazy. There is no pattern, no back-and-forth. There will be no stripes. The grass will just look freshly mowed all the time.

Automowers also run silently.

I’m not kidding. You can be 3 feet away and hear nothing. I had to ask if the mower was cutting. It’s that quiet.

The 315X has LED headlights, but only for you to see where it is. The mower itself has no need for lights.

Double-edged blades

The Automowers cut with three very small double-edged razor blades that are designed to take just a very little off the top of the grass. These tiny clippings are invisible on the lawn.

You can use it to cut longer grass, but it will take longer and will leave behind visible clippings.

The double-edge blades are easy to swap out with just a screwdriver, and replacements are $25 per set. The mower reverses the rotation direction every other trip, so you get twice as much life from a set of blades.

The blades are sandwiched between two metal disks under the mower, and exposed only when the disks are turning. When the mower finds an obstruction, the rotation stops, and the blades retract into the disks.

The 315X also has GPS (not all models do), so it knows what parts of your lawn have been mowed. The GPS can also help find the mower if stolen.

Living outside

Automowers are designed to live outside during mowing season. Getting wet won’t hurt it, although you will want to modify the schedule to not mow on rainy days or days when you water the lawn.

The mower charges on a base station that is placed in your yard close to a power outlet. It has to be able to get back to the base when the battery runs low and when it stops mowing.

The 315X’s battery can mow for 70 minutes before it returns to the base to charge for 60 minutes, then it takes off again to continue mowing.

The base station is also the beginning and end of the perimeter wire.

You can run the wire yourself, but after seeing what is involved, I think I’d spring for professional installation from a Husqvarna dealer, which starts at $500, depending on the yard.

The idea is to let the mower do its job unattended, and if you don’t have the yard wired correctly, you will have areas of the yard that don’t get mowed or places where the mower gets stuck.

You can have the wires placed on top of your lawn (held down by stakes), or you can have the wire buried a few inches deep.

Once the base is placed and the wire is run, you can charge the mower and set the mowing schedule, which you do through an app on your phone.

Mowing style

Setting the mowing times in the app is as easy as making an appointment on your calendar. Baker said he likes to give the mower ample time to do its work and to set it to run every day except when watering.

Baker says a lot of people set the mower to run overnight.

I asked Baker how the mower knows it’s finished, and he told me it’s never finished. That’s the beauty of having an Automower: It doesn’t mind mowing your lawn every day or every other day. You have to give it enough time to do its work, and you’ll be rewarded with grass that is never long again. If the Automower is set up correctly, your yard will never look shaggy.

The Automowers are some of the neatest gadgets I’ve seen in a long time. I’d love to have one someday when I own a home.

For more information, visit Husqvarna’s website or watch a few videos on YouTube.