Game changer of a device but need careful planning
This is another amazing product that thinkassemble.co.uk sell at a price that can’t be beaten on the high street

When buying this, I knew that it would not be as simple as unboxing it and letting it whizz around the garden. There are mower models available elsewhere for 10x the cost that are capable of that with different guidance technology.

The setup is not all that hard, as long as you understand that you need to plan out where the boundary wires and the guide wires go. There are tutorials on the Gardena web site that I watched a few times before and during the installation. There is a template / jig for the wire distance placement. It is really not hard if you follow the instructions.

You can bury the wires in a shallow cutting (like with a lawn edging tool or a hoe) a couple of centimetres below the surface. I opted for pegging the wires to the ground, in case I had to adjust them. This is easy and intuitive. I may bury the wires in a few weeks once I see that the mower is hitting all the right spots without getting stuck in flower beds etc. In any case, after only a few days, the wires became invisible when the grass grew up over it.

In our case, we needed to give the lawn one final mow with a regular mower to get below the suggested grass height, since the robot mower doesn’t handle super long grass easily.

The kit comes with plenty of pegs and wire. It also comes with some extra wire connectors. Due to a slight mishap, we needed to repair one wire within a few days of installing. The repairs are easy to do. To account for that, I suggest you include some extra length of wire in loops in various spots around the boundary and guide wires. Look online for installation tips and you’ll see what I mean.

Working around permanent obstacles in the lawn is easy also, you just lay the wire offset from the obstacle all the way around it, while in a continuous loop. Again, tutorials are online on how to do that.

We have a front and a back lawn, and I was able to pass the wire down the side of the house in a continuous loop, and there is a setting where you tell the mower that it is not mowing the primary area (so it knows there is no guide wire to take it back to the charger at the end of the session). In this case, we carry it to the front lawn and it mows until either the timer or the battery expires, then carry it back to the charger.

As for grass clippings, it works on the basis that it goes out often enough (through the schedule you set on the app) that it is only clipping tiny bits of grass each time, and those tiny clippings fall to the ground and then become nutrients for the lawn in the mulching cycle.

Unlike me, the mower works in the rain too. You have the app on your phone and you can tell it to skip a mow if you don’t want it to go on schedule if the weather isn’t right.

We have kids and dogs and, yes, it can (and does) mow through poo, but it will stop at obstacles like trampoline, sleeping dog, kids’ toy etc. It is waterproof in case of poo accidents, so you just hose it down

It is a game changer of a device, and when working in the correct modes and the wire is safely under the grass surface, I can say that this is a brilliant thing to have in your house. It hands-down beats the feeling of being pressured into aligning the planets of: a) having time to do the lawn b) the right weather conditions and c) actually feeling like doing it.