I recently purchased the Ecovacs Goat A3000 robot lawn-mower (affiliate link). This is an in-progress review as I use it.
Should you buy it?
Maybe. I like a lot about it so far, but I’m still in the first week of setting it up and using it. Stay tuned.
If it can reliably do the majority of what it says it can do, and you can afford it (it was $3k!) it might be worth it. I have a third of an acre, so it’s a lot to mow. The interior of my house is vacuumed on a pretty regular basis by robot vacuums. There is a “wow, cool” factor already on day one, as I see it out in the yard taking care of my grass. Nifty!
Setup
The installation will take roughly an hour. That includes taking everything out of the box, putting together the charger, the associated RTK station, and connecting the lawn mower itself to the app.
The RTK station is the secret sauce that helps the mower understand where it is. I’ll add some pics here at some point. I didn’t understand that there was an RTK station until I put everything together. This means that you’ll need to have an ugly pole about six feet up in the air, somewhere in your yard.
Installation was very easy. You need a screwdriver and the included Allen wrench, and a bit of elbow grease. Connecting the mower and the app to your wifi network might be the hardest part for non-technical people.
Mapping
Mapping is the process of the lawnmower going around the boundaries of your yard - in mine, the fence line - to determine where it can mow. It uses LIDAR, so it’s actually pretty smart at avoiding obstacles. If you have a large yard, prepare to walk through your yard with the mower for a good amount of time. My backyard is 5400 square feet, and walking the boundaries with it took about fifteen minutes. Not terrible, but just something to keep in mind.
The LIDAR part is, as I understand it, why the mower is expensive. A lot of the last generation of these robot mowers used GPS positioning, which can be unreliable. There’s a lot of moving parts there (satellites, the clock servers, ECOVACS servers, etc.) that can go wrong. Having it all live in your own network and decent sensors being built into the mower helps it more reliably position itself, and avoid running into things.
One thing I haven’t done yet is stitching multiple parts of my yard together. I have a front yard, then my driveway, then one side of the yard, connecting to my backyard. So far, I’ve only done my backyard. I’m not sure if I’ll have to remap, or if I can just add to it in the future.
Mowing
I ran the mower for the first time with the default settings. This might change depending on your region, or if they update the app. But here’s what the settings are right now:
- Mowing efficiency: Delicate (1.31ft/s)
- Mowing height: 2.4in
- Avoidance mode: Normal Environment
In addition, I have the Change mowing direction by week setting turned on, which should do exactly what it says. I’ll report back in the future on how that goes.
I also have Edge Mowing turned on. Combined with the mower’s LIDAR sensor, it should be pretty smart at getting as close as it can to the edges of my yard.
Downsides
Here’s what I’ve found so far. Nothing major, just some notes:
- Bluetooth is annoying. When you’re mapping the yard, you need to be connected via Bluetooth, so there is a maximum range of probably 20 feet between you and the mower. It would be super cool (but probably with insane battery implications) to have 5G or something that helps it stay connected all the time. In larger yards, this could be even worse.