LawnBott Installation Review
Installing the Lawnbot LB3500 (or any robotic lawn mower that requires perimeter wire) requires a little planning upfront. It’s best to draw somewhat of a map of your property and where you’d like the wire to go. Since the wire will be powered by a single source, you may have to get a little tricky to wire areas not connected. (If you send us your property diagram, LawnBotts.com will draw the best wire placement free of charge.)
The first step is putting down the docking base. It’s best to locate the docking base in the largest area; no longer than 30 feet from a plug.
The manual instructs to leave about 6 and half-foot clearance behind the base and to space the docking base several inches from the wall. I broke both these rules with no problems at all.
If you have an idea of where to lay the wire, installing the perimeter wire is no big deal. It’s recommended to connect one end of the wire to the dock base, and then start working clockwise around the lawn, pegging and pulling the wire as you go.
The pegs worked great until I reached sections of the yard in which the soil was very hard as described earlier. The hard clay soil broke a few pegs thus forcing me to shorten the length. After that didn’t work, I went for the hosepipe, which worked like a charm. You can use a screwdriver to “pre-drill” holes as an alternative.
The LawnBott LB3500 schedule is not exactly what you might think. Sure, you could set it to mow Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9pm-10pm and that will work fine. But to take better advantage of the auto-programming feature, it’s best to give your LawnBott a wide window of operation. For example, the default time window of operation is set from 8:30am – 10:30pm, Monday – Sunday. This means the mower will come out (or not) anytime during this timeframe depending on when your lawn needs to be mowed – yes it knows when.
Many averaged size yards (depending on how quickly your grass grows) will not need to be mowed every single day and surely without such a wide operating window, but it’s great to have the flexibility. The LawnBott can have two different time windows with about 4 hours separating them to recharge. Fast recharge times come in handy for very large lawns.
Setting the schedule is very simple and straightforward. If you have multiple areas, the mower will ask what percentage size the areas are in contrast to the rest of the lawn. It’ll also ask how far it needs to travel the perimeter (either direction) before it arrives in those locations. Once that’s done, the mower figures the rest out on its own. It only takes about two minutes to setup the mower.
To keep the LawnBott confined to each area without “leaking” may require creating a virtual gate with the perimeter wire in which is invisible to the eye, but very visible to the mower. We explain this in detail inside our exclusive LawnBotts.com Tips and Advice Guide that ships with every mower we sell.
In our test, the regular LawnBott LB3500 ran over five and half hours on a single charge, which I think is extremely impressive. Since the LawnBott can run twice a day, it could mow about 10 hours per day, every day of the week. And that’s without the additional batteries found in the LB3500X.
The LawnBott LB3500 has a feature called “Auto-Setup” which is enabled by default, but could be turned off. Here is an explanation of how this wonderful feature works: When the mower is cutting grass, it will sense how high or low the lawn is by resistance against the blade. The LawnBott uses this information, plus several other aspects to determine how long and how often it needs to mow the lawn to keep it looking its best. Once the LawnBott has “learned” your grass, it will adjust it is schedule (within your time window) to minimize the amount of time it spends mowing.
In other words, if your lawn hits a slow growing period due to drought or other reasons, you will notice the mower spending less time mowing. However, if the grass starts to grow rapidly, the mower will automatically maximize the amount of time it spends out mowing.
In our test the auto programming feature worked impressively well. This feature solidifies the LawnBott's independence and ability to manage the yard all season long without human help.
Once the wire is secured to the ground, connected to the base and plugged in, I put the LawnBott in the charging base then pressed the Start button to manually start it. Immediately it reversed a couple feet, turned right, paused to sync with the perimeter wire signal. Within a second it powered up the blade and off into the yard it went!
The LawnBott LB3500 managed to cut the perimeter wire a few times where it wasn’t pegged down properly. When the LawnBott LB3500 severes the wire, it reverses about a foot then stops with “No Signal” displayed on the LCD. It waits for the signal to come back before doing anything else. Upon repairing the wire, the mower proceeds mowing automatically.
After a few wire adjustments and cut wire repairs, the installation was complete. The LawnBott LB3500 is very good at finding its way back into the docking station after each session – too bad I can’t say the same for my Roomba’s self-docking ability. We’ll cover how it mows next.
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