Episode 235 - Automate Your Yard Work with Robot Mowers

Hey, everyone. I'm Adam justice from Grid Connect and welcome to the Smart Home Show. I'm joined, as usual, by my co host, Richard Guenther from the Digital Media Zone. Hey, Richard. Hey, Adam. And we're joined by a guest this episode, Brendan Doyle, author, speaker, and smart home youtuber, blogger and podcaster and real estate agent. You, you're not busy at all? I dabble in a few things, yes. Welcome, Brandon. Thanks for having me. This is the first in a series of episodes where we're going to focus on outdoor smart tech for the home. So as you, Brandon, just completed a pretty comprehensive series of videos and in depth write ups on robot mowers specifically. So today we're going to focus on smart outdoor maintenance devices. So looking forward to that conversation. But before we dive into that, as we always do, we're going to start the show with a random question for each other. And sometimes they're not quite so random, but my pseudo random question for Adam is, do you have any tech conferences coming up that you're planning on attending? I don't have any official engagements yet. Richard's trying to get me and others to come to CEDIA with him, which we generally enjoy. It's been a busy summer, so I'm going to have to look at my schedule still before I commit to that one, but try to make it work. If I can at least come for a couple days. Always good to see you, Richard, and anybody else who shows up there. And I think we've got back in the cadence of going to CES, so that's probably a definite in 2026. How about you, Richard? Well, I am planning on doing Cedia at this point. I've booked the time at work, I've booked, booked a hotel. I haven't actually booked flights yet because that's the true commitment. Right. I do want to go. I'm kind of hoping that those that we know in the industry are planning, I mean, that's the thing that really makes that show so wonderful for me is we know so many people in the installer space and so reconnecting with all those folks every year is one of my favorite things, and that's what makes that one of my favorite shows. CES is cool and fun and exhausting, but CDF feels like I'm going home every year, and so I'm hoping that we get a bunch of folks there this year. We'll see. How about you, Brandon? You know, we did CDA the last couple of years, but now Eric is trying to convince me to Go to IFA and then CES is definitely happening. Where's IFA or ifa? Ifa, I guess. I believe it's in Germany. Okay. Ifa. Berlin. Berlin. Oh, there we go. When is that one hosted? It's like, early September. Okay. So not quite in time for Oktoberfest. Oh, but that is, like. I think that does conflict with Cedia. Cause I remember our friend Jennifer Tuohy couldn't come to Cedia last year because she was headed out to that show in Europe, so. Oh, that's right. Yep. Very cool. All right, well, if you want to submit a question for us to open the show, you can mark that question on Twitter Macedon Bluesky with the hashtag AskAdam and Richard, or send it to us at feedbackmarthomes. All right, so we're going to look at this in two different segments, as we often do. And this first segment is just going to look at the larger smart outdoor maintenance space. What kinds of things are we talking about? What types of tasks can be automated with these sorts of devices? This is kind of a smattering of everything that I've noticed over the last. Geez, ten or more years, actually. But, Brandon, I think, think from the writing you've done on the lawn side, I'd say that it feels like this has kind of all just come to be real. Like be something to take seriously in the last year or two. Yeah, I would say this is the year of the robot mower. Yeah, it does seem that way. And in fact, I believe your article is titled exactly that. It is. We have a couple different types of work we're aware of that can be addressed oftentimes by what we would consider robotics. The one thing that I noticed probably more than anything at CES this past year was the evolution of the pool cleaning robots. You know, in the past, a pool cleaning robot was basically a vacuum with a big hose on it that had motorized wheels that would run around the bottom of your pool. Sometimes not even motorized, just pushed by the pressure itself. It would be random, and it would eventually clean the whole bottom of your pool. But there wasn't a whole lot of mechanics behind it and not a whole lot of smarts behind it. But wow, now these things are full fledged pool keepers for all intents and purposes. They can measure the water qualities and report on that. They can skim the pool by kind of floating on the surface and sucking in debris. They can actually use suction to climb up and down the walls and scrub stuff off the walls. They can clean things off the bottom surface of the pools. It's kind of amazing the way this technology has evolved. And of course, you and I commented at CES this year that you couldn't go 10ft without running into a pool cleaning robot company. I mean, it was like it blew us away. I think maybe it's just because of where we live. I didn't know this was such a thing. And then we get to CES and there were like 10 or 15 different companies doing this. The one was like a sponsor of the Arizona Diamondbacks. I'm like, holy moly. I had no idea this was such a market segment. Yeah. I would like to know about the logistics of bringing all that water into the convention floor. Yeah, right, right. Because most of these vendors weren't just displaying their stuff. They had these little pools that were like an above ground pool, or some of them look like a big fish tank that you could actually see through. Yes. That would have been very interesting to see. All right, we're going to go into a side story about CES and water in booths, just because we're going there. But we work with a smart sump pump company. And so one year we had a working sump pump demo in our booth, and more or less, there were kind of multiple pumps to it. And I didn't really know how it all went. And at one point, it went terribly wrong. And the one pump was too powerful and it started overflowing, and I forever banned water in any booth of ours ever again. It was on day one. There were people all in the booth. This thing just starts gushing water. We're like, hurry up, unplug it. So I was like, never again. No more water in booths. I feel for those people. Water in a booth is not for the faint of heart. Yeah. It seems from what I can tell, that there are kind of two versions of these robots right now. There's the kind that you basically take and drop into the pool, and then it does its thing, and when it's finished, it comes back to the edge and you pull it out and empty it and stuff like that. And then there are these others that have mechanical ramps that just live permanently along the edge of your pool. And they can basically dock there and charge. And then a ramp will extend out and down into the water just a little bit so that it can get itself into the water and get itself out again. Of course, this means that you have this thing along the edge of your pool with a power cord going to your big pool of water and kids running around the Pool in all likelihood. And I don't know just how practical that is. I feel like until it. Unless we start to see these things, maybe where there are cubbies along the edges of a pool to house something like this as part of the pool design, this still feels a little janky. As far as the built in versions of these, Agreed, it definitely seems like a safety hazard. What could go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? I think I could manage to drop it into the pool and let it do its thing and pull it out, but pretty cool technology there. Something that we've seen for quite a long time at CES also is these window cleaning robots. And they've evolved a lot too. Like we used to see them where they were magnets. There would be one on the inside and one on the outside, and it would drag the one on the outside along with the one on the inside. And now again, they're using suction power to climb up the outside of, say, a glass building, a commercial building, or even where you can place them on windows on the exterior of your house and they can then clean the outsides of the windows. Those are kind of promising. Although I have a hard time believing that you're really saving all that much time if you have to take this thing and put it on every single pane on every single window. And granted, we don't have mullions on the outside anymore, so there are single panel panes of glass now. But still, are you really saving time? And maybe a little bit of elbow grease. I think this is a good, like, in general topic for all of these. Like you mentioned having to drop in the robot into the pool to do the cleaning. And like, the more that you need human intervention in these, obviously the dream for any of these is they just run autonomously. You don't have to think about them. You just have a beautiful pool, beautiful spotless windows, clean gutters, a perfect lawn. But it still seems like here in 2025, these are helpers that still need a lot of human intervention off and on. And yeah, like you said, yeah, it might be better. But is it really getting to the vision of what you want these things to be? Right. Like the early robotic vacuum days, which is bounce around and get stuck and then you end up rescuing it in the same amount of time. You could have vacuumed yourself. The other aspect of that too is just the cost. Now you're buying this device, you're taking time to set it up. You could have just hired a service to do this for you. Yep. And then kind of along the same lines, we've seen a couple products out there that have attempted to deal with the gutter cleaning problem. I remember iRobot had a product that came out called the Luge. I believe I had an early generation of that. They've had a couple versions of that. I don't think they make it anymore. And I guess that means it never got any better than the first generation that I had because I didn't find it all that helpful. I still had to get up on the ladder. I still had to take this thing and plop it in the gutter and clean up after it after it threw all the leaves off onto the ground and everything. So I'm not entirely convinced that this was a problem that could be solved with a robot. Yeah. And I mean, I think other people solve this problem in other ways. We ended up just getting decent gutter covers because we had the same problem where I'd get up very dangerously in a storm, unclog my gutters. Yep. On a metal ladder in a storm, what could go wrong? Yeah, these are the type of deferred maintenance things we see a lot in real estate. So it's good that you address that. Yeah, yeah. The gutter covers thing, I think, you know, they're not perfect, but I don't really have the overflowing gutter issue that we had before. I've seen people with trees growing out of their gutters. Yep. It's insane. It's a problem everywhere, and I don't think it's one that's been well solved yet, but one that I think is particularly interesting. Not necessarily a direct to consumer thing, but I have recently seen a couple examples of roof cleaning using drones, which I think is just insanely cool. We have a company locally that actually has a drone that picks up poop. So similar concept, but different function. That's very interesting. Like you said, it's a company. Right. These are professional companies that come out and clean roofs where you typically can't get up on the roof or you can't reach the roof in any practical way. So why not put a drone on the task? It's a pretty cool thing. I Suggest Searching on YouTube if you're interested in seeing it at work. It's pretty fun then. I think the obvious solution here that we're going to talk the most about is lawn mowing and using robotic mowers to care for your lawn. And even big names like Segway. Yes, datsagway, make robotic mowers. The reality is these things have been around since 95. And Adam, I think you have a story about that original company. Yeah, I had a friend who was in the lawn maintenance business. He was kind of piloting this idea of having a professional solution where he would roll out and place mowers at businesses and homes. And so he used a Husqvarna run by wire mode. So you would have to go in and place the wires along the perimeter. And so we had one of these. We were kind of piloting it for him at our office and it worked pretty good. But you know, we probably would have needed another one to really cover our whole yard in the office. And we were on a major street, so this was probably four, five years ago. My goofy story is at one point somebody actually came and stole our robot lawnmower. And it was a fairly expensive professional model, so it had GPS and cellular. So it started beeping when this guy stole it. My friend of course freaked out because his multi thousand dollar investment is gone. And I think the guy realized at some point that this wasn't going to go well for him. So he brought it back and he was like, oh, it was beeping so I was going to fix it for you. Oh sure, whatever man. Like, are you kidding me? So yeah, so there's a theft thing in there. Ultimately, I think my friend had a good idea, but the amount of capital to really scale that. I think we'll talk about it further in the segment. There's still some things that need to be done. If you have one of these, I think it's an interesting idea for like a landscaping company to roll these out in mass and, and maybe it's something where their investment pays off over a year or two and you sign a multi year contract with them, yada yada, and they still come and do the stuff that the robot lawnmower can't do for you. So essentially they would be leasing the robot and then that would come with a maintenance plan, right? Yeah. So I think it was a good idea, but I don't think he was willing to take the risk and the cap like capital investment to make this happen. Because obviously you have a lot of upfront investment in the robot mowers, but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody else jumps on that idea at some point as these become more and more reliable and more appealing to people. We can talk about this later too. But like this is sort of the equation for people is if you already have a service, at what point does it make sense to get rid of your service and get A robot lawnmower. And what point does it become cheaper to do that? So maybe that's how some of these services kind of hedge getting replaced in the market with these robots is they become the robot overlords. Overlords of the robots. We have to be very careful about how we say that. We always want there to be overlords of the robots. Yes, exactly. I personally like to be nice to the robots because when someday they do take over, I would like them to experiment. Exactly, Exactly. I think that's a smart approach. Our friend Gavin at the Home Tech podcast is always saying that, be nice to your robots. Be nice to your digital assistants. If I have my facts correct, I think Husqvarna was the first company to actually have a robotic mower on the market way back in literally the last century. So that's kind of cool. Kind of cool that that company has had such a long history and evolution through the market. And we'll talk more about the different types of mowers and how they've evolved over the years. And then finally, I think the natural evolution that then has been this overall yard work robot concept. And Adam, you and I and Brandon, we've talked about this too. We were all really impressed with the Yarbo solution that I don't think it really debuted at ces, but it's the first time it came into my consciousness. I wasn't aware of this company before, and it has this modular system that you've tested, Brandon, where it can not just cut your grass, but also blow snow away, do seeding for you. It can haul stuff around your yard. It has all these different attachments that you can either purchase or get as a package that make this one robot be a pretty impressive overall solution for you, not just what you would be doing with a mower. I think one of my favorite videos that you've done, Brandon, were the videos where you showed this thing not just blowing snow, but then also plowing the remainder of snow off of your driveway. Yeah, it actually did a better job with the plowing than the snow blowing just because the blade can get lower. So who would have thought you just pushed the snow instead of throwing the snow? But either way, it was super impressed. I mean, we're here in Minnesota, so we get real snow. I really had my doubts, but I got to say I'm. I'm a believer. Now we can talk about the general price range of all of these options, but none of these are cheap. And so when you're talking about a multi thousand dollar Investment in general. What was appealing about the Yarbo to me is in climates like yours and mine where we have multi season needs, being able to get use out of this thing year round makes it a lot more appealing and worthwhile to me. Agreed. The first time I saw it was 2 cess ago and I was like, there's no way this company is actually coming to market. And then they came back the following year and I was like, I wonder if I could convince them to send me one. I did. You have to teach me your secret. Not just one. I got eight of them sent to me somehow. But it took years of asking. Persistence paid off. You had some mower reviews up already, so you know you had some cred out there on your channel for sure. Well, let's actually use that as a launching pad into our next segment and talk more deeply about mowers in general. Brandon, we're going to take advantage of your time here and really pick your brain with all the things we've been wondering and presumably many of our listeners have been wondering about. Smart robotic mowers. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I've tested eight of them so far and some good experiences, some not so great. You mentioned earlier you call 2025 the year of the robotic lawnmower. I'm wondering a little bit more about why, but in general, kind of on all of what we've talked about, what do you think has led to this and why, like we're finally seeing this kind of momentum in this space. Yeah. So they've really followed the path of the robotic vacuum. In the early days it was like a nice to have, fun to have, but not very practical because you bounce around and you'd spend so much time capturing them when they got cotton cords and stuff. And with the robotic mowers you kind of saw the same thing. There was a guide wire that was required to be installed, which is going to be a deal breaker for most people right up front. But then you had the ongoing maintenance issues where that wire could get cut and it needs repairs. Then there was also the financial side of things. And so if a mower is costing $10,000, you know that's not going to be in the realm for most people. But now we have seen where the technology is advanced, where they can navigate intelligently as well as the cost has come down, where you can get into a really good mower in that $2,000 range where, you know that could pay for itself in a year or two for most people. If you're already hiring a service or replacing existing mower. Or maybe you're even a first time buyer where you're kind of on the fence, do I want to go buy a push mower for my first mower or should I go this route of robotics? So I think we're kind of at that threshold where the numbers and the technology actually make sense. And there's just a ton of companies in the space. Vacuum robots walked so robotic lawnmowers could run nice. Obviously you have a challenge of having so many, but in general, where do you think is kind of the ideal place to keep them in your yard? And what have you kind of seen through your testing? Yeah. So if they're in the front of the house, expect to have gawker traffic, especially if you have four of them set up at the same time or multiple running. I've got a lot of fun security camera footage of people slowing down. And if I'm out there, there's obviously plan another 10 minutes to talk through what they're seeing. But in general, you actually want to keep it away from the house because a lot of them are going to rely on that RTK unit and it needs a good view of the sky. And so intuitively you would think you would want it to be really close to the house and just kind of come out of like the landscaping area. But in practice, if you have a unit that relies on rtk, you actually want to get it a little further away. So tell us a little bit about what that RTK is and what does it do? I believe it stands for Real Time Kinetic something or other. But basically it's a GPS unit. It needs to see the satellites in the sky and then it triangulates that as a fixed location. It communicates with a robot that also sees those same satellites. And so you're able to get a much more precise calibration. I suppose if you think about it in your car, if you're driving, you might experience where your GPS is slightly off. And you know that you can have a larger margin for that because the roadway is really big. But when we're talking about cutting, being one foot off is a real problem. And so we need that more precise gps. And I assume these RTK units need power. So if you want that away from the house, what challenges does that introduce where you need to run power to this thing? Most of them, as well as their base stations are going to require power. Just a standard outlet. Depending on the layout of your lot, that might kind of limit where you can place it. And of course we don't want the mower to run over its own cord. And so that can be another challenge. There is a company that's looking at making a solar powered RTK unit. That way you could put it out on a pole or a fence that's further out in your yard, which I think would really help alleviate some of the issues that people have been experiencing with those units. Yeah, I could see a world where eventually when we're building houses, we're going to start putting power out to other corners of the yard and things like that, which might make this simpler. That would be quite expensive. Yeah, yeah. You could see, like if you're doing power over Ethernet like the Yarbo uses, thinking ahead to put that in your attic, just like you would with security cameras, which of course, that is a big limitation of that unit. The other ones you just use an outlet, but the Arbo, it needs that power over ethernet. So newer homes, where your cable comes into your house, you might actually have an ethernet cable right there already. Otherwise, you know, you're going to be running it through like a window or up to your attic or paying a professional to come install it, which. That further limits the buyer pool for sure. Yeah. And kind of like you were talking about the, the ground wire solution with some of these previous ones, the more hurdles you have of things like this, the, the more challenging and less likely people are going to buy these. Yeah, there's a whole market of other styles of navigation as well, whether they're using lidar or vision. I think if you have a house with a lot of tree coverage or it's really close to your neighboring house, you may actually benefit from using a unit that doesn't rely on rtk. That way it has at least a backup method to navigate with. Now for these, are you having to kind of watch and monitor it like a, like a drone, or is it something that can kind of run mostly on its own? You don't have to monitor it, but let me tell you, you're going to want to because it's so fun to watch it go back and forth. It's nothing like just sitting out on the deck and just watching it do its thing. So. But no, if you set it up correctly, you should be able to just set it and forget it and then it runs automatically. Like mine is currently running in the backyard and I'm not out there. How often do you need to run these to like, maintain your lawn? The more often the better. Some people actually are going to run them daily. And so the big difference Here, between these mowers and a real mower, is that it's not cutting the grass, it's trimming it. So it has little razor blades instead of one big blade that could take your hand off. And the design here is really just constant maintenance. So it's just giving a tiny little haircut every day. And by doing that, it maintains that nice, perfect level. Yeah. That's kind of how the Husqvarna one we had, I think it basically kind of, if it wasn't charging and if it wasn't night, it was basically running like, continuously. And there are a couple of companies that are working on versions with real blades, like mulching blades. Yarbo has their Pro module coming out, and then I believe the company is called Limo. But I would really be careful with those. And with those, honestly, I would probably want to monitor it because even with the Yarbo, I witnessed it back into my neighbor's house. I watched it knock over a trash can. And the very first day we got it, I was like, well, this thing has sensors in the front and I put my foot in front of it and had my friend not yelled at me, I probably would have had my foot ran over because it wasn't going to stop. Wow. Yeah. They have since added those sensors in and are using them in their model. But at the time, apparently it was only using bump, so it had to have hit me first before it would have stopped. Geez. I just assumed that the cameras were functioning, but they are doing updates. They're constantly rolling out updates and the system is getting better. But that would have been a very negative thing for a review. Yeah. Let me tell you about how I lost my toes. Right. I had shoes on, so I feel like it would have just maybe cut my shoe up a bit. But still not. Not fun. No. So tell me a little bit about mower charging and how that works and kind of how you've set up some of the ones you've tested. Yep. So they're all going to come with a base station. Most of them just have contact sensors on them. And so the robot will come line itself up and touch those. If it's on a little bit of a hill, though, sometimes it might roll back. And so when you're installing it, you have to make sure it's nice and flat. And then if it doesn't quite line up, it might not completely charge. So again, we're back to those early days of the robot vacuums, where we kind of had that same problem. And then with the Yarbo, it's actually using wireless charging. And so that one, it's like a tank thing, but it has to be lined up perfect, otherwise it's not going to charge. But it mostly does it themselves. Sometimes you might have to give it a little nudge. So you said that they all come with a base. Is that within a certain price point, as in like the types that you had been reviewing or is that just table stakes now? It's just a general statement. Base station is included. That's really nice. I'm actually a little surprised by that. I'm surprised somebody hasn't tried to save some money by just saying, oh well, you know, it'll come back to some home base may be in your garage and you have to plug it in or whatever. Yeah. Only the Yarbo is actually able to be charged with a physical plug in. The rest of them only can be charged in their base station. Interesting. Tell us a little bit about like noise. How loud are they? Can you hear them from inside? What's your experience been? So it's running right now. I can't hear it. Neighbors can't hear it. You can run it at night. It's just like a slight buzz. It's more like just the sound, the whirling of it, I guess. Think like an electric vehicle or when it's going really slow, that's basically what you hear. So not much at all. So we talked a little bit about some of the early safety, but what's your general feel for how safe these are around? Pets, children, people, houses? What have you seen by the ones you've tested? They all have array of sensors and we have little puppies and I let them play in our backyard even when there was four of them running. And they would pause and go around and stop and stuff. And we didn't have any issues. We had some things out in the yard for avoidance testing and successfully able to go. All of them really did well with that, to be honest. The taller items, it would either stop and go around the items that are small and, you know, get hidden in the grass. It just kind of goes over them. But if it's lower than the grass, then it's lower than the razor blades and so they weren't getting harmed by it. Maybe a tennis ball gets a little bit of a haircut. That's about it. I always worry about like a hose that's still left on the ground. Are these devices typically programmed to look for certain types of typical yard things? Like would it recognize. Oh, that's That's a hose. If I don't see anything above a certain level, maybe it's okay to go over it or maybe I should avoid it. A lot of them are going to use like lidar or like visions cameras and they are kind of trained on that stuff. I would say that if it's three inches or less, it's probably just going to run right over it and not cause an issue. If it's higher than that, it might see it and stop. It might not. It might just keep going. I've heard from others that have trampolines that a lot of times they're going to get stuck under that and then they kind of don't know how to get back out because they didn't see the bar when they came in. But then on the way back out they see the obstacle and now they don't know what to do. So that can be a challenge. I think the solution there is to create those no go zones similar to with a vacuum. But then again now you're having to go back with a manual mower or a trimmer and get some of these areas that it couldn't quite get to. And so you, you're adding that time back into your overall maintenance. And so we're not saving quite as much time as we would hope for. It's not a complete set it and forget it type situation. Right. What about hills and trees and some of those types of obstacles and things to deal with? Yeah, you definitely get what you pay for in that regard. And so the ones that don't have all wheel drive or they have the tiny little wheels, I had instances where they couldn't go up the hill and they would just call for help or if they had like a divot in your yard, it might get a wheel stuck in there and then it just kind of gets stuck and that's frustrating. So then slightly more expensive models, they tend to have more rugged wheels or all wheel drive and that's really going to help get them out of those places. So like the Luba kind of looks like a little dune buggy. That one is, is awesome with hills. The Goat, the Yarbo, the Segway, they all did a really good job. The Sunseeker. But yeah, some of those early models, like I had the dreamy that one, it just would go in the corner and get stuck. And same with the works. But again those are early models. And so even within just one year of testing, these companies have really come a long way. That's impressive. We hear pretty regularly from Our friend Seth and get pictures all the time of Clippy is stuck again on one or another sort of obstacle. So it's good that they're thinking about that. But I'm also assuming that just like a vehicle, an all wheel drive mower is going to cost you more than a dual wheel or single axle mower. Yeah, that's again where you get what you pay for. The other thing to consider too is we kind of talked about things that are low to the ground. Things that are higher can also be a challenge because some of them aren't going to notice things like swing sets or cars. And, and apparently there's been instances where they'll just go underneath and either wedge themselves and get stuck, which is not good, or I've heard of cases where they've actually taken off their own antennas because they just kept going and they didn't have that height awareness. So hopefully these are things that they address over time and avoid for other people. Okay, so the next two questions are. In my own arena of problems I would face with this, I have a gated backyard. So if I wanted to cut front and back, I would need some sort of way to either get in and out of a gate or in and out of a fence. What have you seen in terms of solutions to handle that type of problem? So you're in the same boat as I am. I have a fenced in backyard and then the front and sides are open. Two solutions. One is to buy two of them. Not ideal for most people. When you're testing them, not so bad, you know, rotate them out, it's all good. Otherwise, just open the gate, let it do its thing, then when it's done, close the gate. Now we have puppies. And so that's a whole nother issue. I don't want the puppies to go out and escape. So yeah, that is a big limitation. But could you set up a zone separate in the back so that you could manually navigate it behind the gate, then close the gate again and let it do its thing in that other zone? Yeah, but you're still having to open the gate. All of these steps are just eroding our time efficiency. Especially if we're talking about something that is really designed to run every day. So I don't want to spend 10 minutes every day opening a gate for my robots. Yeah, yeah, okay. Okay. We could try to automate the gate, but then, you know, I'm spending more time figuring out a gate automation going to just mow my yard, move on with my day. Yeah. Yeah, all right, I get that. Initially I was thinking it was starting to sound a little ridiculous. Yeah. But then I have to open the door. But you're right. If it's doing this every single day, then gonna get annoying. Yeah, I know. When my buddy was looking at this Husqvarna thing, they actually had an auto gate thing. Think of it like a dog door for the robot. So I think something like that is probably the right solution. Or maybe you have like a one way door that it can push through that obviously. Obviously a dog or another animal isn't going to be able to use, but obviously depending on the size of it for some of your smaller models. Okay, something like that makes sense. You're going to need like a Wiley Coyote door for that Yarbo to go through your gate. Yeah, you need the whole gate to open up. Basically. That's a big unit. So kind of like we've evolved to the robot vacuums have an arm to pick up socks. We need an arm to be able to pick up the gate. You need a way for it to manipulate the gate lock. Yeah, but only socks that are perfectly folded in an exact orientation that match its AI model. And maybe some slippers, again, if they're super lightweight and perfectly positioned. I contacted them about like doing a video on picking up dog toys because of the puppies. I was like, this would be a great collaboration. And they're like, yeah, so about that. It doesn't really actually pick up anything. And I couldn't help but notice at CES that those socks were just oh, so perfectly folded. That's exactly the way I dropped them in my bedroom. So what we really need is some gate automation companies to come around to solve this problem for us. We need like a Star Trek door for gates or some other way to magically solve this problem. And then we're just back to how much time and money are we putting into it. Exactly. Either bought two robots or I could just mow my yard. Full disclosure, when the testing was done, I kept one in the backyard because it's fenced in and I enjoy the time savings. But the maintenance of trimming around our garden beds and the fence and stuff is still quite time consuming. And then for our front and side, because it's so small, I just have my ego mower and I mow it in all of 10 minutes. And so, yep, makes sense. Maybe not the best use case for everyone. Either you have too small of a yard or too big of a yard and it just doesn't make sense. But I think there is a sweet spot where, okay, this is something that's going to save money, save me some time, peace of mind when I'm traveling. I do think it is the year of the robot mower, and I. I think it's going to make sense for a lot of people, but they're definitely not for everyone. We talked about dogs. I have a dog. Richard has dogs. You have dogs. Let's talk about poop. How robots get along, coexisting with dogs, all about how big the poop is. If the poop is small and it's nestled in the ground, I'm going to plow right through that and grind it up. If the poop is big, it's going to go around the poop. Either way, you got some poopy wheels and poopy blades that you're going to want to do some maintenance on. My recommendation is to pick up the poop. Yeah. That's my solution anyway, because I don't want to step in the poop. So I am religious about always going out after that. But, yeah, I could see that being maybe not so much a problem at the time, but not fun to deal with after the fact when you're replacing blades and cleaning the bottom of these things. Our last dog was a poop eater, so we've just gotten in the habit of picking the poop. But I have had the poop magedon both on the robot vacuum side and then got to experience that same fun with the robot mower. And the mower was easier because you can't hose up a robot vacuum. You better just throw it in the garbage and get a new one. Honestly, it's not a fun situation. It's as bad or worse than you would expect. The damage it could do is what I worry about. Right. Like just dragging that all over the. Okay. Anyway, I think, like, the gate situation, there's an opportunity for innovation here. We either need a module for some of these more advanced robots to do this or another robot specialized in picking out poop. That's the poop copter. Yeah. There you go. Pete claims he's going to get him as a guest on our podcast, so we'll see to the bottom of this. I look forward to hearing about that. This is a real problem, and I'm interested to see what the solutions are. All right, other challenges. So what if you have long grass? Yeah. So the robot mower is actually more of a maintenance item and not a mowing item. And so in the instructions, it will actually tell you that you need to mow your grass first before it can mow the grass. So this poses a real challenge for someone that's trying to go the route of just having a robot mower and maybe doesn't even own a mower to start with. So you got to get someone to do that. And then if you run into an instance where, you know, maybe there's been a lot of rain and it hasn't been able to run, or something happened with a docking issue and you just didn't notice it, now the grass got long. You actually are going to need to use a regular mower. And so I do recommend that you have something like an ego mower on standby. That way you can kind of hit some spots that might be challenging and then get a nice fresh start. So what typically happens if it is raining or if there's rain going on when it's supposed to be mowing? Technically, the mowers can go through the rain, and that is okay. It's not the end of the world. Obviously, we don't want them driving through, like, a lake. The sensors should detect that and not go through standing water. Most of them do have rain sensors on the top, similar to a leak detector with the two probes. That is both good and bad, because if you have a sprinkler system, the sprinkler could go off, and then the robot now thought it rained and doesn't go. You could also have an instance where that rain sensor is not drying. So if where you keep your mower is not in sunlight, that water could sit there for a while. And it constantly thinks, oh, it's wet, and so it's not going out. Others do rely on integrations with weather apps. So, like, the Segway is synced with some sort of weather app. However, in my testing, that clearly doesn't update fast enough because it was storming as hard as it could possibly storm. And the robot just went out and tried to do its work, and of course, it got stuck. And then I like, I don't want to go out in the storm and deal with this. So rain is a challenge. They are designed to not run in the rain, but if they did, again, not the end of the world. We hit a little bit on, like, edging and other maintenance. How close in general, do a lot of these models get to the edges, and how much trimming do you find yourself having to do yourself? So this is by far the biggest issue with robot mowers that not enough people are talking about. I don't like doing the edging. Already my wife has to nag me about it. And with these, it's going to be even worse because think about it. The razor blades are about 2 inches from the edge of the robot. And so even best case scenario, you're looking at 2 inches. It does have overlap features. So if there's like a patio space, then it could kind of ride the line, and that's fine. It does a great job with that. Most of them are really capable in that department. But if you have a fence or some other surface that it's going up against, yeah, there's at least 2 inches. And so you actually spend more time with edging, which is frustrating. And then if you really neglect it, it's just going to keep creeping and creeping and creeping in. So with the segue, I did this on purpose. I. I didn't go out and edge because I wanted to see what would happen. So we have garden beds in our backyard, raised gardens, and the grass would grow along the edge. Well, then that wasn't getting trimmed. The next time it came by, it was go a little bit further left and a little bit further left because it sees it as high grass, as an obstacle, and it's not going over it. And so slowly from the edges of the fence and from the garden beds in, it was getting longer and longer, which is a real problem. They are attempting to address this with a module. It's actually supposed to arrive today. Segway is sending the trimmer module, which is a 300 add on. We'll see how this does. Yarbo also has one. And in their video, they show how safe it is. And first it goes along like a house, and you can actually see where it's nicking the side of the house. So not great. And then they show a tree and it's like chews up this tree and they're like perfectly safe. So. Wow. I don't know. They were gonna send that one and they have it. If and when these companies do send these, I will put it to a test and make a new video because this is what needs to be solved for robot mowers to actually make sense. In my world, your situation might be different. Like, maybe you have a gap with proper landscaping and no fence. But for me, like the fences and the garden beds, like, this is a real pain. I would have the same problem for sure. Yeah, it's worse than mowing. Yeah, sounds like it. Your arms get tired, thing vibrates, it's loud. Some real first world problems here. Okay. Yeah. How about maintenance in general, how often do they require maintenance, changing the razor blades and attending to them to do routine stuff? So I'm told that you're supposed to replace the razor blades every month or so, but since I was testing so many of them, they're alternating days. And then by the time I was done, I kind of got rid of them. So I truthfully have never actually replaced the razor blades in any of these. In my video you'll see that I probably should have on two of them. And for the new owners, I did give them a replacement set. Most of the time these extras come in the box, but otherwise, if you do need to buy them, they're super cheap and they're pretty much standard. So you just get those online. Nice. But you need a screwdriver. That's it. Unscrew the old ones, put the new ones in. Blades on these are standard, they're not proprietary or I mean, even in the days of mowing lawns with an old Toro, I had to get either a Toro blade or find some third party manufacturer that made replacements for those. And that wasn't all that common. Yeah, so they are proprietary, but they're just cheap. Okay. Yeah, yeah, they're basically all the same. It's a razor blade with a hole in it. I mean, worst case, you could probably get a razor blade put a hole in it. Turns out razor blades do have holes in them. Heaven forbid they stop making them. I think you'll be fine. Interesting, interesting. Okay, but so your, your scenario then is you can pretty much go online and find manufacturers that are making them because they're easy enough to replicate, correct? Yeah, they're easy. And replacements came in the box as well. Okay, so, so looking at the wide range of everything you've tested, what's the price range between all of these? So I think you're going to be starting in that fifteen hundred dollar range. And then depending on the size of your yard, could get up to about 3,000. And so you really want to look for a robot that's going to have the correct features for your yard. If you have challenging yard, you maybe want to get something with lidar or vision, more advanced navigation. And then I would recommend figuring out the size of your yard and get one size bigger. So a bigger battery. The reason for that is that it can just go out and do its job without having to return. They base the sizing of the batteries off of it running basically constantly. And so if it says 0.2 acres, that means to them it's going to run 24,7 to do 0.2 acres. So I would just go up a size and get the 0.3 or whatever. And when you think about the acres, it's not the actual size of your lot because you have a house in the middle. So you can subtract that square footage, which is a good thing. But yeah, get one that's sized appropriately, big enough battery, and then has the correct navigation. And so just like robot vacuums, you definitely get what you pay for. And if you cheap out on this, you're just going to be frustrated because it's going to get stuck in the corner and then you're going to spend every other day going and rescuing it. And then you're not really realizing the benefits of having a robot mower. Before we get off the topic of pricing, we talked about the Yarbo and how that's kind of a whole package of things, if I remember correctly. I think that's somewhere between six and seven grand for that whole like snow, blow and mow. Now you get it for like five to six, but yeah, the full package. And so you think about that. You get the mower, you get the snowblower, and so multi seasonal use. And if you are replacing a snowblower and a mower, like in theory, that's really good. I do think that you're still going to need to keep a shovel because even in the winter it's not going to be perfect. And it does leaf blowing too, right? Yeah. I have one tree in my front yard and so we drove it in circles with the leaf blower and it pushed the leaf like two feet. So we'll see this fall. I have a friend here in town that has a very large lot with lots of leaves and so we're gonna see how it does. But supposedly you map it the same way you do with the snowblower and so you tell it kind of where to push the leaves. What's interesting is that the blower doesn't move, so it can only push leaves to the right. Right. And so it will have to constantly do a circle around the spot that it's trying to go. So it's gonna be interesting to see. We plan on trying to get some time lap footage of this to see if it actually works. But yeah, my house is definitely not the place to be testing this. Interesting. As far as then how do you make that cost work? I think most people are seeing dollar signs when they hear these prices. I think it does then come back to either what utility you're getting out of it by time made available to you. Or probably the easier calculation is if you're already spending money on a lawn service, you're probably already spending as much as a couple thousand dollars a year. I mean, I know for those services, for the combined services of snow blowing, blowing leaves and mowing the lawn and then taking care of gardens and stuff like that, which is, you know, in addition, we're paying a good many thousands of dollars for that over the course of a year. Then it starts to make more sense, I think. Yeah. Eric with modern day tech has been testing the mowers as well. And he kept his service because of the issues with the trimming. And so it's more of a maintenance thing for them. But if you think about a lawn care company, they're doing more than just mowing your yard. So like we have a service that comes out that does like fertilizing and other stuff like that. There's actually a company in Iowa that their primary revenue is the services around the yard that are like the fertilizing, all that other stuff. They actually have robot mowers as a service or that you could buy for that reason because they want to cater to that audience. It's kind of like a hybrid that's like, okay, I want this maintenance free solution. But then there's this other periodic stuff that still needs to be addressed. And so how can they capture that market? That makes a lot of sense. And actually that coordination is probably important too. I didn't really think about this, but if you have a service that's fertilizing or you're fertilizing or you're doing any sort of treatments on your lawn. How does that interact with these mowers? Typically you're supposed to wait a day or two before you mow again if you've just done some fertilizer. So I didn't even really think about that before you said that. Yeah. And so they're just all set up on schedule. It's a very easy to deposit. The other thing too is that when they're not actually cutting the grass or just trimming it, that little tip tip top there actually helps fertilize the grass. And so in my own experience, I have noticed that the grass is greener, so that's kind of neat. They touted this as a feature and I really didn't believe them. Full disclosure, I don't know a lot about lawn care, to be honest. I'm just a regular guy that's pretty lazy, loves tech and has a yard but afterwards, I would say, yeah, it definitely is greener, which is neat. That makes sense because the mowers aren't blowing stuff out like a traditional lawnmower might, so you're not really disrupting the surface as much. So something odd. All the brands we talked about here, where are all the lawnmower companies? You know, you don't see ego. Toro, Craftsman. I also threw John Deere in here. I remember we went and visited Deere for a possible Iot project a number of years ago. I remember them having something in testing in the back and kind of never went there. I guess I'll also throw in the mix, like, where are your vacuum companies, too? You would think this would be a natural extension for them. Yeah. So I don't know if I'm actually able to say this, but iRobot had a whole line and it got discontinued during that whole buyout thing. That didn't happen. I was supposed to be getting one to test, and then the head of the program was like, hey, sorry. It all shut down. So there was also drama. They wanted to use a frequency that was used by astronomers. I remember they were, like, fighting against scientists because they wanted to use this frequency for their robot lawnmowers. And they were like, oh, it's going to disrupt special telescopes or something. It was weird. But some of the big manufacturers, they definitely have the technology. Like, they've been testing it, and I think they're looking at it more from a commercial application. But the reality is, when you take a real blade that's spinning and could take your hand off, there's a lot of safety concerns around this. Whereas the little ones are definitely designed for, you know, just going in your yard. It's very contained, very small scale. Whereas the other side of this equation, you're taking a very sharp blade and spinning it and setting it off on its own. And so I think they're a little bit slower to deploy those. I know they have some commercially available options, but from what I've heard, they started like $50,000, so. Geez. But I do find it interesting that we're not seeing anything from, like, Toro or Craftsman. I think you did a review last year, one from Works, that's one of the newer mower companies. But it's just odd that they're not here. Like, are they going to become the next decade's Kodak? Right. They're like, hmm, we should have watched this space a little bit more closely. I think you're onto something there. Here's my prediction. As this tech Becomes more mature. One of these big companies is just going to buy one of these brands and pull them in and rebrand it under Toro or Crafts or Deer or whatever. Like, you heard it here. This is my prediction. I like that idea, though. That's probably the way to go. I like it with worx. It was funny because, like, I have been writing about smart home tech for so long, and I just wanted to test a robot mower so badly, and I saw that WORX was at CES and had a keynote, so I went to that. It was in some obscure locations, so it wasn't on, like, the main area. I was the only press person there, so it was like, me and a bunch of executives from works, and nobody else showed up. So they delivered this whole presentation. Wow. The guy in the audience and then afterwards is like, can you send me one to review? And it took a year, but a year later, I actually got one. And that's kind of where it started. And then Dreamy saw they sent one. And then, of course, the following year at ces, every company all of a sudden has one. And so that's where the other six came from. And who knows? I'm already getting outrage from other companies that I hadn't even heard of that now want me to review their mowers as well. But I only have one yard. It's not even that great of a yard. And I'm definitely not a mower specialist, so I might kind of just refer these off to others. It was a fun experiment, but I don't want to be pigeoned into being the lawnmower guy, the mower guy. Like, I was with locks for a while. I don't know if you guys have tested smart locks, but when you test one, they just keep coming. There you go. So you've tested a number now. What are some of your favorites? Maybe give us a top three, or maybe you want to give in different classifications, but what stands out for you? Yeah, so I kept the Segway because I want to test the trimmer. I was impressed with the overall quality, the cut and everything. It's navigation. So that's what's running right now in my backyard, I've got the Yarbo, because all season I've got other modules I want to test, but truthfully, absolute overkill for my yard for the wintertime, though. Oh, my God. Greatest thing ever. Love the snowblower. It's phenomenal. As for the other mowers, the goat was an absolute standout to me from ecovacs. And on prime days, that mower got significantly reduced and like almost instantly sold out. So rumors are that it might be being discontinued, which seems really odd to me because they sent a review unit. So that doesn't make sense. Maybe a new model, something like that? Yeah, that would make sense if instead of being the A3000 and it's like a 4000 or whatever, and they combine some of the learnings from the two different models they have. So they have the A2500, which is their RTK unit, and then they have the A3000, which is the LiDAR vision based one. So maybe they'll combine them. Who knows? We'll see. But then the other big standout for me is going to be the Luba. So I had the Luba 2 all wheel drive. Looks like a little buggy car thing. And honestly that's probably what I would recommend for most people just because ease of setup and handles hills really well. Looks neat. And then on the budget side, the Eufy E15 was actually pretty impressive as far as deployment goes. You just literally take it out of the box and kind of set it down. It auto maps and everything. However, when I was testing it in my backyard and then I wanted to move things around when we were filming and get a different environment, I brought it to the front yard, plugged it in. We had something come up when I had to leave. And during that time, apparently the schedule was still on and it didn't have a map, so it made its own map and it went and mowed my neighbor's yard while I was gone. I came home and I was like, oh, somebody stole the ufi. It's not in its station and I'm like looking around for it and it's on the other side, the far side of my neighbor's house, and it made its own map. Fortunately, the neighbor was cool about it. He just kind of said it. It's been so fun watching you test these. I'm glad I got to get in on that. Yeah. Thanks for cutting my lawn. Yeah, that's a good one too. For just a smaller yard that maybe doesn't have a lot of hills. The UFI is pretty plug and play, so long and short. All of the ones I reviewed are ones I recommend, except for the ones from last year for sure. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing a little bit about robot lawnmowers and kind of the outside maintenance area in general. That's fascinating and definitely something I've been very interested in. And it's been very educational. So no question for this episode. If you do have a Smart Home question for us, you can send it our way with SmartHomeShow and we'll try to pick one to include in a future show. All right, Brandon, you have been a wealth of knowledge and information for us, but as we alluded to at the beginning of the show, you are into so many things and your YouTube channel is probably one place where people can find out more about what you do. You want to tell people where to find that and anything else that you want to promote right now? Yeah. So my social media handle is going to be the same across the board. It's randondoylemn. So you can find me on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, all those fun places. I'm also a guest contributing writer for Realtor magazine, which is now online only. I run the Smart Home column, so you can check out all of my Smart Home articles there if that's something you're interested in. All right, very good. And Adam, where can people find you? You can find everything my company's up to@GridConnect.com or consumer stuff@ConnectSense.com find me still on Twitter, Adamjustice or other various social medias. Just search for my name. How about you, Richard? You can find me on Mastodon or bluesky. Just search for my name there. And also I occasionally post stuff to the Digital Media Zone where I have a couple other podcasts. This smart home show is part of Technology fm, which is a collection of great tech focused podcasts that includes the Home Tech podcast we've referenced a couple of times, and my other show, home on and SmartHome FM is where you can go and find all of our show notes and details about each episode or send us feedback to feedbackmarthomefm. You can find us in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, anywhere that you go for your podcasts and even an RSS feed. We had someone ask about our RSS feed. We have, I think it's called Podcast 2.0 version of an RSS feed. Your feeder needs to be able to read an HTML feed, but that is available as well. And do us a favor, leave us a rating or review, but most importantly, tell someone about the show. Have a good day. Ram.