Flymo 1200R Robotic

I have waited a couple of months to write this review so that I could give an informed feedback - the result is that the mower is amazing, if you are considering buying this product you will have no regrets, I will have saved the money it cost me to buy it in 10 months as I have now got rid of my gardeners, the garden looks amazing all the time and in great condition as other reviews said it would, once you have this you can forget about your garden.I bought what they call a robotic lawnmower garage roof for mine and I think it should house under some protection when recharging/resting although the manufacturers do not say too.But here is the 'biggy' I can't encourage everyone enough to bury the boundary wire in the dirt and do not run on top of the grass just using the pegs, the lawnmower kept cutting the wire in various places even though we pulled the wire tight and pegged it right down, this caused me so much hassle in the beginning, I almost gave up on it, and every time it was because it cut the wire.I had to call the manufacturers to send me new wire connecters as there were only a couple in the pack and even then I had to buy more from ebay, I decided to put the effort in and bury the wire, it is simple, I literally used a large kitchen knife, cut into the ground about an inch, wiggled it side to side a bit and kept slicing though unil I finished, then open the cut grass and push the wire in just so its level with the dirt and not above it - since doing this about a month ago I have not had this problem again and love my garden and mower. If you found this review helpful please give it a like

Key points from my experience- This mower does my 700 m2 metres meters square lawn quite easily. It cut all the fairly high grass down to a low height in only 2.5 days. In my opinion this mower would easily cut 1,000 m2 meters square plus as it can be set to run all 7 days of the week. One review on here suggests this mower will cut 4,000 m2. I can quite believe that because much larger areas offer long clean runs without continual stopping and turning, where as smaller lawns mean the mower is spending lots of time inefficiently stopping and turning.- I paid £400 for the mower delivered from Amazon and bought an extra kit on ebay containing 150 metres perimeter wire, 300 pegs & connectors for the larger lawn. This extra kit cost £33. So total cost all in was £433 delivered.- The total length of the supplied perimeter wire (150 metres) plus the additional perimeter wire I added on for the larger 700 m2 meters square lawn is 210 metres.- The join in the perimeter wire for the return to base wire and the join for the extra perimeter wire do not affect the performance of the mower detecting the edge of the lawn. Edge detection works flawlessly on all of the perimeter.- I installed this on Friday morning. It took the whole morning to install. It did 3 cuts and charge cycles on Friday before I realised that I had to press AUTO to get it working as much as it will (it will only cut 12 hrs a day because of Flymo imposed firmware limitations).- After I had installed the RTB wire I did the initial "can it follow the RTB wire" test. On the menu it's called the "Calibration". This checks that it can follow the RTB wire all the way to the end. It does this then starts cutting. I thought that the mower was all automatic after that. It's not. It does return to base, after this initial test then when it gets back you must press AUTO and start while it is charging. It will then cut automatically on the timer. You must also set the timers for the amount of cutting time & respective days you desire.- This mower is a wholly HUSQVARNA mower. Husqvarna bought Flymo. The mower is badged Husqvarna all over. This is a quality mower. Husqvarna are the market leader and were building auto mowers decades(?) (a long time in any case) before anyone else.Limitations / to do list :- This mower is limited by the firmware on board to only cutting 12 hrs per day. Even if you set it to cut from 00:00 to 23:59 it will only cut for 12 hours in each day. You can set it to cut every day if you want. The literature does not list how many hours it will actually cut as a maximum per day if you set it to cut 00:00 to 23-59, only lists maximum operating time, which is charging time plus mowing time.- The danger of power cuts. The mower uses the powered edge wire to know where the grass boundary is.If like me you have a grass boundary which is a flat surface, and which is connected without barrier to another property owners land and the public highway then a potential power cut is a problem. Because in the eventuality of a power cut the mower would not be able to detect the edge wire - because the edge wire would no longer be powered - and the mower would potentially go off off my land into someone else's. This obviously could bring mower into contact with children or animals and be a dangerous situation. For this reason I only operate the mower while I am in the house so I can be here in the event there is a power cut.this problem can be resolved with a battery operated current detection system that will send a radio signal to the mower in the event it detects a lack of current in the edge wire, the more I would have a similar simple radio connected to a battery that would then activate the stop switch. this is actually a simple circuit to implement, but it is a question of when I get the time to do it.- The mower is currently limited by it’s own firmware to being able to charge and cut for only 12 hours per day. This limitation can be circumvented through some combination of resetting the mower and reprogramming it on the fly while it is mowing (avoid on the fly reset while it is charging). This could be done through use of an additional pre-programmed chip, placed on top of or inside the mower, connected to the mower internal chip pin out. Or for more convenient control - even more work - through the use of simple radios as mentioned previously (NRF24 or RFM69C).- additionally, the use of a GPS with an internal map would alleviate the problem that can potentially be caused by a power outage on the boundary wire, and a rogue mower going off to where it should not, and would also allow the mower to be directed to spend equal amounts of time in all areas. This is future work which I could do but simply have not the time to implement.- Once an open source project is developed that provides a board with on board (i) control chip, (ii) firmware ie re-programmable software that is baked into a chip (iii) gps (iv) wi-fi (v) remote sophisticated app for our phones all we will need to do is disconnect the current control board and place in a new one. This cannot come fast enough. I am sure the Ardumower project will develop into this.I will update this review after a few months

We have an orchard containing semi-standard trees, so while they are tall enough for weeds to grow underneath - and hence to require mowing - they are also so low that going under the trees on either a lawn tractor or with a walk-behind mower means that you get scratched to pieces, and lots of twigs and spiders (and worse) in your hair. It's also on about a 10 degree slope in places, is very much ex-field rather than lawn, and has suffered visits in the past from my dairy farmer neighbour's milking herd, so it is not exactly the velvet smooth lawn so beloved of lifestyle magazines. I've added some photos of the mower itself, the docking station and also a general view of terrain and trees to show what it faces.In summary it is quite a difficult proposition: rough grass, bumpy surface, reasonable slope and plenty of obstacles in the form of trees, and its area is 400 square metres which is at the top end of this machine's capability. Yet this little chap (and he's definitely male) copes really well.Installation: is straightforward. Read the instructions, then read them again to make sure you've understood all the concepts. In particular obey the minimum spacings recommended for the various cables, and if you need to route cable through a narrow gap I suggest that you peg it down first and try it out, as you may end up adjusting its location once you see how it is used. Note that it tracks a variable distance to the *side* of, not on, the homing wire (to the left as viewed going "home") to avoid leaving marks, so you need to leave more space on that side than you might expect. As others have remarked once you've got the cable routes worked out you need to bury them, especially if your surface is rough. This is a time-consuming and messy job, but is simple enough.Coverage: as I have remarked above I have plenty of obstacles in the form of trees, and this means that there is a fair bit of "bump into tree, stop, head off in a different direction" going on - it's a sort of slow-motion pinball game effect. This works, and the random choice of a new direction works reasonably well, however there is no getting round the fact that an area of garden densely populated with obstacles will get more mowing attention than a more open area, and you should consider this when siting both the docking station and the intersection where the homing wire meets the loop of wire that goes around the boundary. The mower can be programmed to start mowing at the far end of the homing wire (at its intersection with the boundary wire) at various frequencies ranging from rarely through to always, and if you have both open and congested areas it will probably pay you to locate either the docking station or the intersection point in the open area, since this will give you some degree of control over the time it spends in these different areas.Terrain: it copes surprisingly well with rough ground, but you will soon learn from observation if you have any localised holes that flummox it. Either they cause it to "nosedive" in, think it has hit an obstacle, stop and head off in a different direction; or in the worst case it simply gets stuck. The solution is simple enough, just fill in the hole; however if your lawn is at all rough be prepared to find it stuck a few times in the first weeks of operation until you have identified and filled in these hollows. Molehills present less of a problem since it just hits them, stops and moves away, and molehills can be a convenient source of earth for filling in the aforementioned hollows!Rain: doesn't seem to affect it much, although it does increase slightly the chances of it getting stuck in "difficult" areas where rough ground is combined with a confined space. This is fair enough, and you soon learn where these are and sort them out. So far as I can tell rain does not affect the quality of the cut, although it does increase slightly the chances of leaving wheelmarks in difficult regions where it has experienced some wheel-spin or has had skidded when turning.Safety: I would say that it would be near impossible for a dog, child, chicken or anything else to get injured. It moves at a slow walking pace, detects any sort of contact via a very soft bump at which it stops immediately, and it also knows if it has been lifted up or toppled over and again stops itself immediately. Sorry to any personal injury ambulance-chasing lawyers reading this, you'll have to look elsewhere for business.Cut quality: I've only used it on the highest setting (it gives a range of 1cm to 5cm) since my ground is rough. Where is has made sufficient passes the grass looks as if it has been cut by a conventional rotary mower, ie short but no stripes. It does miss the odd tuft in the more open areas, but as I have remarked above I think this is a feature of the variable "obstacle density" in our orchard, which has clumps of trees in some areas and open expanses in others. The good news from my point of view is that it does lots of bumping into trees which, in turn, means it does lots of mowing *under* trees, which is exactly the bit I find difficult. I'm happy to whizz over the more open areas occasionally with the lawn tractor, and I think that a more conventional lawn would not suffer from this problem anyway.Edges: our orchard is fenced, and I have buried the the perimeter wire about 8 inches (20cm in heathen units) in from the fence. Since the cutter is a rotating disk that is about half the width of the machine this means that you will inevitably end up with an uncut fringe of grass if your lawn is bordered by obstacles of any height and you need to be prepared to cut these manually. You'll get the same fringe effect around any interior obstacles - but then you'd get pretty much the same effect with an ordinary mower, so it's not really very different in that respect.Timing: it has a built-in clock and can be programmed to mow within a set period. The default setting is 7am to 11pm, but despite our orchard being 400 square metres, the supposed maximum for this machine, I have cut its hours down to 9am to 8pm since it clearly did not need all that mowing time - and this is in warm wet Devon where grass grows like crazy. Perhaps this is because I have it on the highest height setting (5cm), but nevertheless I think it could easily cope with at least a 30% larger area in our conditions, and probably more in a dryer area with less grass growth.Noise: as near silent as makes no difference. There is a whirr from the drive motors and another from the motor spinning the cutting disk, but the loudest noise is from the blades hitting the grass and you'd need good hearing to pick that up above ambient noise from more than 20 yards away. The beeps it makes when it stops after it thinks it might have hit someone are loud enough to be audible without being intrusive. While charging in its docking station it is absolutely silent.Security: it has a PIN number that has to be typed in to re-activate it any time is it stopped manually, picked up or generally handled. This is the lowest level of security and you can go to higher levels which will sound alarms and things if it is picked up. We live 1/2 mile from the public road so I'm not too worried about thieves and use the lowest setting, but if you are going to use it in a very public area that doesn't have someone nearby who would investigate noises promptly you will need to give this some thought. I suspect a thief would feel a bit embarrassed walking around with a bright orange terrapin shaped object under his arm that was shrieking its head off, but that might not stop him smashing it out of annoyance. Realistically I think this sort of technology is only suited to reasonably enclosed and secure areas which, to be fair, is probably a description of most large lawns.Aesthetics: Flymo colour their products orange, bright orange. Yuk! Hopefully even the marketing folk will eventually twig that not everyone wants a bright orange thing burbling around their lawn, and produce it in different colours. In the meantime a judicious application of black silage tape works wonders...Maintenance: I've found that the blades have got pretty blunt after about 6 weeks so that it barely cuts which - in theory - means removing and replacing both blades and screws, which is a two minute job requiring only a screwdriver. It uses three blades, and Flymo provide 9 spares + screws in the box with instructions to change the screws as well as the blades in case wear of the former leads to blades flying off. When I took mine apart a visual inspection showed that the screws were absolutely fine and the blades were just blunt, so after a bit of honing on a whetstone the original blades and screws have gone back on, and it is cutting beautifully again. Make up your own mind about whether to replace or sharpen, but I think inspection and common sense is the way to go. Otherwise I muck out compacted grass and mud from its underside about once a fortnight, or after very wet weather, and that's it - no other maintenance has been required during the cutting season.Problems: so far no significant ones. The setup needs tuning, and in particular I've had to learn where and why it gets stuck and adjust things accordingly. Given the variable congested / open nature of our orchard it is a bit frustrating not to have more control over where and how it cuts but you get what you pay for. I think I may in fact end up adding artificial obstacles to the more open areas as a way of forcing it to spend more time there, but then I'd still have to hand mow around them, so maybe it's not worth it. Bigger wheels to give a better capability on rough ground would be useful for us, and in fact the bigger Husqvarna models have this ... at a price.Quality and performance: after three months I am increasingly impressed. The grass obviously likes the "little and often" treatment since it looks better now than it has ever done in the past. My wife thinks it looks better than when I cut it which - given how much I hated doing it - is a definite case of mixed emotions! Despite bumping into trees 100s of times a day the machine shows no obvious signs of wear and is still working perfectly.In summary I'm impressed, in fact more impressed than I expected to be. It's not perfect, and it's a hideous colour, but I really hated mowing that orchard and now I don't have to. In other words it does what it says on the tin, and does it better than I expected. If you are dithering because you are not sure whether it will do the job my experience is that it will, and I would recommend it.[Update March 2016] I bought this in summer 2015 and after a winter's hibernation it is back working again. When first reinstalled it simply would not work properly, detecting "false" collisions every few seconds and stopping repeatedly. Finally it showed a "rear sensor faulty, get it serviced message".Well, it has a 2 year guarantee so I could have sent it back, but instead I decided to attempt a bit of amateur fault-finding and solved the problem really easily. The instructions state that you should store it upright, and in fact I left if (one could say this is "upright") on its nose all winter, which led to the four flexible rubber supports which connect the shell to the body become permanently bent forwards. This meant that the magnet attached to the shell was not central in the collision sensor slot on the body, hence the detection of false collisions. It was easily fixed by rotating two of the rubber mounts by 180 degrees, cancelling out the overall bending, and now it is absolutely fine and back working happily. So, with hindsight, my fault - but if you get one don't store it "upright", but rather "flat" on its wheels!Also I was so impressed with it that I have bought a second one, which is now busily cutting a different area of lawn. That's a pretty serious endorsement of how good these machines are.One word of warning: these little machines will not cope with the long (eg 4+ inches) and dense wet grass that grows over a typical winter, so when you first install them in the spring you need to cut the grass manually. Cutting once a year is a small price to pay for relief from weekly slavery, but I'm afraid that you can't throw away the conventional mower altogether.[Update June 2016] Herbie I (orchard dweller) is fine; Herbie II, installed at the beginning of April, is doing well in his separate area of grass.Herbie II's domain is a much larger area, probably around 650 square metres (the 150m metre drum of cable that came in the box wasn't enough to go round the perimeter, and I had to buy another reel) yet he is keeping it down without any trouble. This is a more garden-like area with flower-beds as well as shrubs, and it is roughly "U" shaped so I have his docking station in one leg of the U and the junction with the boundary wire going round the bend into the other leg. This is the solution given in the destruction manual, and configured to start remotely at the far end 50% of the time it seems to work well with even coverage in both legs of the U.There are various "tight" areas and near cul-de-sacs in this patch of garden, and I have had to leave the tightest of these outside his working area to avoid his getting trapped in them. The manual suggests that 2 metres is the minimum width and, based on observation of his behaviour, this feels about right. We have one salient that is about 3m x 3m and when he goes in there he can end up doing a lot of toing and froing before he finally escapes again. Not only does this waste time and battery power, it also results in the ground becoming a bit trampled by the continuous turning.I couldn't be bothered to lay boundary wire around all the flower-beds, and anyway if you use a spade to tidy up the edges you could end up exposing or cutting the boundary wire if you forget exactly where it is. So instead we have been experimenting with different edging solutions, and at the moment the favourite is pieces of wood, about 8" long x 1.5" wide, wired together in a roll. (Available pretty cheaply from the nation's most ubiquitous supermarket.) Held in position in the "precipice" around the edge of the bed by short bamboo canes these extend about 2" or 3" above grass level forming a low-level barrier which doesn't look too bad. The arrangement has a little bit of give so Herbie hits gently, pushes it back slightly in the process before stopping, and so cuts pretty much up to the edge of the bed without leaving a fringe of longer grass. And where this doesn't quite work you can strim up against the wood without damaging anything. It's not a perfect solution, and I have been mulling over alternatives, but so far haven't come up with anything better that is cost-effective.He is currently working at the factory preset of 7am to 10pm, 7 days a week, and that was necessary in May when we had a flush of grass. However now that growth is slowing down I will cut his hours back a bit since he is coping easily with this area. Like our orchard it is ex-field, hence rye-grass which doesn't look good if cut too short, so I have his height set to about 4.5 cm.So, once again, I'm very pleased and the grass looks miles better than when I did it myself. I think this improvement in appearance is a feature of rye-grass and uneven ground: my tractor has a 42" cut so, inevitably, grass on raised areas gets cut too short exposing the lighter-coloured base of the blades of grass. Herbie rides over the bumps and only cuts a swathe about 8" wide, so he follows the contours of the ground more closely and gives a more even cut as a consequence.[Update April 2017] After a winter's hibernation (horizontal this time!) Herbies I and II are back out at work. The machines themselves seem to have survived the winter OK: I charged them fully before storing them last autumn, and also gave them another charge before setting them to work this spring. I also stored the docking stations and power supplies indoors over the winter, but reinstalling those is quick and easy.I get the feeling that their battery capacity (as in time between recharges) is starting to degrade, but I haven't made any quantitative measurements and after 2 years they clearly have enough oomph to continue doing the job for at least another year.The grass was definitely too long for them by the time it was dry enough to turn them out to work, so I had to cut it manually, but once that was done they seem happy enough to get on with the job once more. (As I've remarked above this is warm, wet Devon where things grow like crazy; if you are somewhere drier you may not have this problem.)Problems: only two, and both mole-related. Maybe the worms here have a high kryptonite content, but whatever the reason the moles managed to cut through the homing wire in one location, so I had to locate and fix that. Also excavation by said moles, plus digging by the dogs trying to catch the moles, mean that we have a new crop of bumps and hollows in which the Herbies can get stuck. So I have been busy shovelling earth from molehills to hollows, and then rolling, to try to flatten things out. I'm now down to about one "rescue from hole" operation a day, which is no great burden, and it is getting better all the time.[Update September 2018] Herbies I and II have had another mostly successful year. I turned them off during the dry spell this summer because the grass had stopped growing and they were chewing up some edges a bit. I think the problem was that the way they turn is by skidding their single rear roller, and when the ground gets dry and the grass sparse this can ending up moving soil rather than skidding over the grass.Our moles have also had a good year :-( and I have had to spend quite a lot of time filling in holes where their tunnels have collapsed in the dry weather, otherwise the Herbies get stuck. The moles can also lift the boundary wire to the surface when the grass cover is eroded, whereupon it can get cut through, so I have had to do some mending. I have found that the wire tends to get cut in similar locations, and to speed up the process of finding the break I now feed both ends into a short section of plastic pipe (say 6 inches long) which I drive vertically into the ground leaving the top and connector exposed. The connectors have 3 holes, and you only use two to fix a break, so you can put the terminal of a multi-meter into the 3rd hole which makes finding the broken section a *much* faster process.They have done 3 and 2 years respectively and are still working well, with no obvious signs of reduced battery life, and are coping easily with the size of their working areas.Problems: only one this year. After their winter hibernation I, like others, found that the connectors on the wires that attach to the back of the base unit fell apart, so I have replaced them with automotive spade terminals. This is easy and cheap to do, but begs the question of why Husqvarna saved fractions of a penny by using such grotty ones in the first place!Like others I have had to replace the shoddy connectors to the base unit with automotive spade terminals, but that is a cheap and easy job.[Update Oct 2023] I think these two machines are finally dying after 8 and 7 years of hard use, they are on 5500 and 5000 hours respectively. They have each had new batteries, which helped a bit, but both are clearly suffering from electronics problems and becoming unreliable. Spare parts are too expensive to contemplate repair so I shall have to replace them.So they cost about £100/year all told.Worth it? I think so.