Robin: The Low Cost Robotic Lawn Mower Alternative

Owning a robotic lawn mower looks, on the face of it, quite an expensive and time-consuming way to maintain a perfectly trimmed lawn. Even the sub-£500 Robomow RX series is quite a lot more expensive than the average manual mower, and most robot mowers come in at £1,000 plus.

As we reported in a previous article, however, the Dallas startup Robin has a solution that is in line with the usual US practice of paying someone else to cut your grass.

For as little as $15 (about £12 or 13 Euros) per month, Robin will install the perimeter wire using their accumulated experience, set up and maintain a robotic mower, and store it during the winter months. The bonus is that you only pay for the months during which your little helper is actually needed.

Advantages of Automatic Robotic Lawn Mowers

On their automatic mowing service page, Robin claim that being able to do this makes their lawn care cost lower than the more traditional service of sending people out with a noisy, polluting, petrol engine lawn mower, as well as being more reliable.

There is, as we noted in the original article, a certain security risk associated with so many unattended mowers driving around on people's front lawns.

Thus, the modern robotic mowers that Robin deploy include GPS location and extra security features meaning that the mowers can't be used anywhere else, can be located, and are less likely to go missing as people become educated as to the futility of stealing one.

All of this added technology makes the mower a bit more expensive, however. I'd estimate that the Robin mowers are of a class that edges up towards the £1,500+ category.

Based on their rental figures, and allowing for exchange rates and economic differences, a similar UK based service might hope to be able to charge a top-end price of, say, £10-15 per month.

That's about 100 months of payments just to pay for the mower. And, given that the UK and Continental European customers don't have a tradition of paying for lawn care, I would also hazard that the market would be quite resistant.

The Cost of Owning a Robotic Lawn Mower

However, the true cost of ownership, assuming that you plump for a robot mower with some basic security features such as a PIN lock is going to start out with a relatively expensive investment of around £750.

(Note that in a previous article, we pointed out that the Flymo 1200R has been sold for as little as £600.)

The electricity cost is likely to be negligible, even at the 17 hours it takes (per cycle) to charge something like the Robomow RX12U, but consumables such as blades can add substantially to the annual cost.

While Robomow blades seem to be relatively expensive (but long lasting), my own experience with the Gardena R40Li (a Husqvarna model identical to the Flymo 1200R) leads me to estimate that I spend about £15 on blades each season, as long as none get broken by bits of wood, children's toys, or other obstacles.

I've also had to replace the wheels, at a cost of around £20, so all-in all, having bought the beast at the top of the market, price-wise, I've invested about £1,500 in trouble-free lawn care. The lawn looks better (greener), I've got more free time (filled with chores invented by you-know-who), and the dubious pleasure of being able to tell people I've got one.

Over 4 years of ownership, that works out at £15 per month, assuming that it lies dormant for 2 months per year.

Now, assuming the same calculations at today's prices, that falls to about half that for the Flymo, and even less if you have a small, secure lawn, and opt for the Robomow. You can read a comparative article of sorts on this blog.

So, now the question you need to ask is: for £10 per month, do you want to let a robot mow your lawn  for you?

Robomow RX12U The Affordable Robotic Lawn Mower

Unusually for me, I'm going to lead with the price: £499 on Amazon.

I'll just let that sink in.

At that price -- which I'll admit is still a lot of money -- the Robomow RX12U begins to compare pretty favourably with a regular lawnmower.

It looks pretty good, the charging station is low profile, and you even get a natty app so you can talk to it from your mobile rather than having to bend down over a badly lit LCD screen.

Okay, so it won't mow the largest of lawns. In fact, it's limited to something between 150 and 250 square meters of grass.

Part of the reason for this limitation is that it can only mow for an hour and a half before needing a full 16 hours to recharge itself.

And, obviously, with these limitations, it also prefers a squareish lawn without too many complicated turns. Otherwise, it's going to miss areas repeatedly, and result in an uneven cut. The grass, in the growing season, can get quite unruly after only a few days.

Still, the result on a regularly shaped lawn of about 200 square metres is likely to be pretty good. The novel design means that it will go over the edges, too, so you'll get a crisp finish. Just make sure that you follow our Perimeter Wire Tips and Tricks, to get the best results.

Specifications and Installation

For the technically minded, the cut is provided by a single blade, and replacing it doesn't look to be a cheap: going purely on the price of blades for other models (the RM, for example) they seem to cost between £35 and £60. They do, however, look pretty solid, unlike the Indego and Automow (Flymo) variants.

Installation looks easier than most, too, since there's no return wire, and the docking station just sits on the perimeter wire. Now, when it comes to fault finding, I'm a big believer in using the return wire to test for breaks in specific sections (see The Perimeter Wire Revisited), but there's no reason that you can't use the perimeter wire loop instead, for small lawn areas.

One key drawback is that there's no anti-theft device fitted on the RX12 series, which will concern some people: especially as it doesn't seem to be locked to the base unit either, like some of the other brands, and doesn't need to be unlocked with a PIN, either.

Robotic Mower Alternatives

So, aside from building an Arduino based robotic lawn mower yourself (by the way, that's not a cheap option, which I'll explain in a future article), what are your alternatives?

It turns out that if you're willing to go with an older generation, admittedly bigger, bulkier (and uglier) than the little Robomow, for £100 more, you can get the Flymo 1200R.

Here's some advantages: the blades are cheaper to replace, there's a full anti-theft device (beeping, PIN codes and coded base station), it has a guide wire, so you can tell the mower to start at a specific place, and it can always find its way home, and it doesn't need 16 hours to charge.

In fact, our Gardena R40Li, which is the same machine, doesn't seem to need much time at all to recharge, and is almost constantly buzzing quietly around the lawn. Okay, so it's based on the Husqvarna Automower 105 style technology, but there's on big advantage that comes with it: Husqvarna invented the mass market robotic mower, and is still probably the market leader in Europe by some margin.

So, if you have a small, enclosed, secure lawn, go for the Robomow. Otherwise, that big orange robot represents a very good alternative, and at almost half price on Amazon may just be an opportunity that's too good to miss!

Replacement Blades for Flymo, Gardena, and Husqvarna Automower Models

Robotic lawn mowers are great, but they, like all mowers, have parts that wear out. As a result of their design, Husqvarna Automower based machines seem to need their blades replacing quite often.

Part of the issue is that they are smaller, lighter, and designed more for fine cutting than longevity. All it needs is a few errant branches and you will find that you need to buy replacement blades several times per season.

Original Blades Aren't Cheap

If you can find them, Flymo 1200r replacement blades (pack of 9) will set you back over £25. That's almost 30 Euros, and at that price, the compatible Gardena R40Li blade pack of 9 at 18.99 Euros begins to look tempting: all you'd need to do is hop over the Channel!

However, even these pale next to aftermarket blades available on Amazon.

For example, for less than £15 (excluding delivery), you can buy the pack on the right: 30 compatible blades, plus bolts, for all Husqvarna Automower models.

The seller is so confident that these are going to be a perfect drop-in replacement that they offer a refund if they don't. I would advise reading the small print, but there's also the suggestion that they would honour a refund even if you open the packet.

But wait! There's more.

From the same supplier, there's another pack of 30, seemingly supplied without screws (bolts), but with a rather fetching titanium coating, at an even lower price.

Now, I take pretty good care of my bolts, and it's fair to say that whenever I've replaced the blades, I've managed to stockpile quite a few of them over the past few seasons.

They're slightly special, as owners of any of these models will know, in that they have a kind of thread-less, slightly oversized shoulder, just underneath the bolt's head, which allows the blade to rotate freely.

So, if you haven't managed to hold on to them, it's worth keeping a note that next time you should do so, if only to give you access to the cheaper range of aftermarket blades.

Again, read the small print, but the manufacturer seems pretty confident that either pack will prove a decent replacement for the originals.

Source	Blade Price	Pack
Flymo	£2.70	9 + bolts
Gardena	(£1.82)	9 + bolts
Genisys	£0.48	30 + bolts
Genisys Titan	£0.43	30 blades only

It's also worth noting that Genisys also has a range of blades and accessories for all the popular makes, including the Bosch Indego, Worx Landroid, and Honda Miimo. If you go through their online catalogue at Amazon, you'll also find smaller sized  packs of blades so you can test out a cheaper pack before you commit.

See the whole range of robot mower spares from Genisys by clicking the link.