ECOVACSGoat A3000 LiDAR Robot Lawn Mower, Dual-LiDAR Navigation,Suitable for 3/4 Acre, 13” Cutting Width, 45min Fast Charging, Precise Edge Mowing, Smart Lawn Mower for Large Garden

I am so delighted we went with the Ecovacs Goat. Some pertinent background; we live in Florida and let me tell you with our daily summer rainstorms our grass needs to be cut every 5 days or so. We only have grass in the front and on the sides of the house. The grass covers just under 1/4 acre.Set up out of the box was intuitive and pretty easy, in my opinion. I should note I do not consider myself exceptionally tech savvy either. I was able to sync with my home WiFi in under a minute. The unit updated for about 10 minutes and then it was time to sync with the satellites. The process was simple, the first time it only synced with 19 satellites but it was super easy to restart the process. The second time around I made sure I was more than 2 feet away. Worked like a charm!Once I had the unit synced with satellites. It was time to map our property. I found the process rather intuitive and honestly quite quick for what was taking place. After mapping was complete I let the robot charge to full and decided to run it for a cut. The robot did a beautiful job. Our lawn looked as good as if we had used the push mower ourselves.I really like that this ecovacs model doesn’t have a perimeter wire. I can’t imagine how time and energy intensive installing a perimeter wire might be. The real time GPS navigation is working flawlessly for us.Another cool feature is the LiDAR to detect obstacles and the subsequently avoid the obstacles. Our oldest son had left a hose out during a mow that we missed. The ecovacs robot avoided the hose thus saving us an expense replacing it.The ecovacs robot is surprisingly quiet, magnitudes upon magnitudes quieter than our push mower. It also has a zero cutting edge which actually works, we definitely will not have to edge every time we mow with how good this robot mows edges.The app is amazing and so easy to use. I can customize zones and schedule mowings all from the comfort of my house when I have a spare minute. Battery life was more than enough to finish mowing our whole lawn in one charge. Overall I am beyond delighted with the performance of this robot mower for all the reasons mentioned. I really did not find anything worthy of a complaint.

The media could not be loaded. After mowing my own lawn for 20 years, I'm finally taking a break.This mower is not just plug in and run. It takes some setup but this mower does a great job as long as you take the time to set it up correctly.I've run this mower 4x in my backyard and am pretty happy with it overall.SETUPSo there is a little bit of setup and planning required to set up this mower. The app will walk you through setup step-by-step which makes it easy. Essentially you leave this mower docked outside all the time. There are some screws to secure the dock to the yard, or you could dock it on concrete if it can drive easily to the yard or there is a small ramp.After that the satellite sensor needs to be plugged in and run to the halfway point in the yard. At first I was worried about the mower running over the cable but there are hooks to secure it low to the ground and out of the way so the mower can go over it in the yard without any issues. I made the decision to put the sensor up when I'm not using it, but that is a personal preference.SETUP IMPORTANT NOTESI had a few issues that I had to go back and fix before it mowed without missing spots. Map well, ensure the satellite sensor is not leaning, and my personal recommendation: Set the mower speed to Delicate, not Quick). Also, it isn't going to tear through really tall grass, so make sure it is at a reasonable height before expecting it to keep your yard looking great. Since there is only one sessor I haven't tried running it in my front yard too, but I suspect you would need to map the front and back all at once then split it into sections.MAPPINGTAKE YOUR TIME MAPPING. I used the manual mapping (although there is an auto-map function) and ended up doing it again after rushing it the first time. It recommends leaving space between the fence when mapping, but I've found that staying right up against the edge of the yard works best. You don't have to have it right next to the yard since you can drive it to the starting point when mapping but it will need a clear path from the dock to the yard.I have some holes in my yard it got stuck in and was able to add "no-go" areas after the mapping was complete. You can either mark it directly on the map through the app, or even drive the mower to the no-go area manually. You can also split the yard into sections, mark sidewalks, etc. which will help with mowing large areas, certain sections, or generally scheduling mowing.MOWINGAfter fixing the issues mentioned above it did a fantastic job mowing my yard. I didn't turn it over until the 4th run of mowing my backyard and realized the blades are small but VERY sharp, so be careful. This makes the mower extremely quiet to the point where I wasn't sure if the blades were running until I saw the mowed grass behind the robot. You still need a weed-eater for edges against the fence and stuff like that (which is to be expected since you do that with a normal mower too.) I expected to have some issues with wet grass, but it did a surprisingly good job, although I don't plan to run it right after rain. There is a setting to delay running until 3 hours after rain which is nice for scheduled tasks.APPThe app is helpful for setup, seeing the areas that have been mowed, etc. There are not a ton of settings, but there are some helpful things like auto-resume, obstacle avoidance sensitivity (flat ground, normal, high grass) and mowing direction. You can set it to mow along exact boundaries or edge mowing if you don't map exactly it will get closer to edges (do not recommend it if you don't have a fence separating your neighbors yard). There are also sensors for rain and pets that will automatically stop it.There are some extra settings that I don't use but are nice to have like an anti-theft alarm and adding the location to Google maps.Overall this is a great little lawnmower compared to others that are 2x or 3x the price. It isn't perfect and takes some time to set up but is worth it once it is up and running!