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.

The good news is that the RTK station is pretty small, and it’s not too obtrusive. The bad news is that it’s a pole in your yard. I put mine in the back corner of my yard, where it’s not too visible from the street.

Initial impressions

The mower is pretty cool. It’s a lot quieter than I expected, and it’s pretty fast. It moves around the yard at a decent clip, and it seems to be doing a good job of cutting the grass. I’m excited to see how it does over the next few weeks.

One thing I’m a little concerned about is how well it will handle obstacles. I have a few trees in my yard, and I’m curious to see how well it navigates around them. The app has a feature where you can set up “no-go zones” where the mower won’t go, so I’m going to use that to keep it away from my flower beds.

Conclusion

I’ll update this post as I use the mower more. So far, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s a cool piece of tech, and it’s fun to watch it work. I’m looking forward to seeing how it does over the next few months.