Quote of the Day
People will provoke you until they bring out your ugly side, then play victim when you go there.
- Internet meme. I have seen this play out many times. I first heard this from a friend of mine who is a marriage counselor. He said husbands and wives often argue this way.
Figure 1: My Worx Landroid Robot Lawn Mower. (Source: Me)
I am working today in my garage office at my cabin in northern Minnesota. From the office window, I can see a Worx Landroid robot mowing the lawn (Figure 1). I installed two of these mowers (one for the garage and one for the cabin) because I am not regularly at the cabin and wanted to ensure the lawn was mowed even when I could not be there.
Whenever I am not at my cabin, I can monitor what they do with some outdoor cameras I have installed. The mowers go out every day at a preset time and for a preset duration. They dutiful mow two areas that I have marked off with 1 mm diameter (18 AWG) buried wire. I installed the robots three weeks ago and have been delighted with the quality of their work.
The Landroids operate very simply:
- They mow a path randomly chosen straight-line path within the wire boundary.
- You can define where they start along the wire boundary.
- You can define different regions within the wire-defined boundary and specify the amount of time the mowers spend in each region. This works well when you have a lawn with two large areas connected with a narrow area.
- They work best when cutting a small amount of grass length daily.
- They are battery-powered and very quiet.
- They cut the lawn using a rotating cutter with three razor blades. You replace the razors when they become dull.
The only difficult part of the effort was trenching 750 meters (2500 feet) of wire to mark the mowing boundaries. Renting the EZ-Cable Installer TP400CL3 simplified burying the wire enormously (Figure 2). I buried the wire about 8 cm (3 inches) deep.
Figure 2: E-Z Wire Trencher. (Source: Eztrench.com)
With the E-Z Trencher, I was able to lay 750 meters of wire in less than 5 hours. I rented the unit from Sunbelt Rental in Minneapolis.
Robotic lawn mowers are completely different. The one biggest safety advantage robotic lawn mowers have over traditional lawn mowers is that you do not have to stand behind it or ride on top of it. By removing the person, this alone eliminates most causes of lawn mower injuries.
There are two general designs of automatic lawn mowers. One looks essentially like a lawn mower without the handle. You use a remote control to drive it into the yard and it can run for about 2 hours, cutting the lawn for you while you just watch. The more advanced robot mower recharges in a recharging "station" and senses when the charge is getting low.