SILENO Minimo 5400 sq ft

Update 5-1-2023: Second year of ownership. I kept it in the garage over the winter so that it wouldn't have any issues with the snow. Tried taking it out and setting it back up. No longer functional. So I paid $1,000 for about $150 worth of work during a single barely functional season. This thing is absolute garbage and should be purchased by no one. It was so terrible that even if they offered to replace it via warranty, I would still feel ripped off. The only way I would be satisfied is with a full refund. Original Review: A drunk toddler with a pocket knife could do a better job of mowing than this thing does. I do not have a terribly large lawn; it typically takes about an hour and a half to mow the front and back, and I purchased this only to deal with my fenced in back yard (approximately half of the work). It's not clear to me why I need to lay a wire in my fully fenced in back yard (my roomba doesn't need a wire to operate in my enclosed house), but it will not start without the wire; which is somewhat frustrating given that in the week and a half since I installed it, it has cut it's own wire 3 times. It took exactly 1 hour and 15 minutes to install. And I had to wait a week after buying it to complete the installation because I ran out of stakes and had to order more (they send you about 2/3 what is actually necessary to have a hope to keep the wire down, and clearly more is better). I would absolutely recommend that you bury the wire if you want it to work, which would add a significant amount of work and time to the install. And every night I have to go out, find the tiny stick it got caught on, and return it to it's charging dock. I'm nearing 3 hours of work in the past week on this thing; I could have mowed the yard 4x in that amount of time. As for "intelligence", the Roomba I bought 2 years ago is way smarter; this thing is about as smart as the original Roomba release in 2002, except this thing was released 20 years later. It needs way better software (if this thing stops, you have to fix it manually with the buttons on the machine; there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to what buttons you push and the PIN is irrelevant), to swap out the bluetooth for wifi (the app is a joke and can't connect unless you're less than 15 feet away, and barely works anyway), to get real sensors instead of dealing with a wire, and add on size and bulk so it's not stopped by a toothpick. If you have children, neighbors, pets, or trees I would not recommend this mower; it will cost you more time and effort than you would already have spent mowing, and nearly $1k besides.

This little mower has worked nearly flawlessly for 2 seasons now mowing my 0.25 acre back yard. I only run it up to 3 days a week during the daytime in peak grass growing months. That's all it takes to keep my lawn mowed. A couple of times the mower has gotten itself stuck, but very few times. Most were due to the wheel getting stuck in a deep chipmunk hole opening and one time I found it stuck at an angle where it had started to climb a tree trunk. There were also a few times where the wire connections on the back of the charger got a little too loose and that broke the perimeter current stopping the mower until I re-tightened. The biggest problem I had was that the mower did not get to one area of the lawn often enough due to the fairly complex shape of my back yard. I needed to set it for circular cut mode a few times or just do that small section with a push mower. The mower app worked well too with my iPhone. The mower battery does not seem to be wearing out much yet. Maybe can get another season or two before it needs replacing.

We have a pretty flat lawn. It cannot handle any variation in the lawn. It will constantly think it bumped into something and just dies in the middle of the lawn. We have a 2500 sqft lawn and 3 full battery charges later it still hasn't been able to complete a cut. Not sure how anyone is getting results out of this thing.

I have about a 1000 sq ft side yard I decided I would try this out on. It is a pretty much a rectangle with a fence on two sides, a retaining wall and paved off area for the other two. Totally didn't need this but it was one sale and I wanted to try it out. First thoughts: When I opened the box and looked at this thing with its tiny razor blade like blades, I thought there was no way this thing was going to work. It also looked pretty straight forward to set up but the directions are not nearly as clear as they should be. This is made by Husqvarna and like directions are on the same level as bad as some things from IKEA. You could condense the instructions down to a few clear steps and make it super easy but no. First run: Honestly, after the first five minutes of letting it run, I thought there was no way I was keeping this thing. My yard was wet and tall. I followed the directions leaving 14 inches between the fence and barrier wire (WHICH IS A MISTAKE). Ran the guide wire. For my sized yard, it came with plenty of wire and stakes. I let it charge and then tried to figure out the not very intuitive app. Got it to run even though it wasn't clear if it would. A combination of tall grass (which it did actually cut pretty well) and a rough yard kept causing the mower to think it was running into things. So it would go a few feet, stop and turn, and repeat. Then it came time to return to the dock. It failed. Turns out it failed for a few reasons. 1. There was a slight slope to the charging base. It did not like that. 2. Barrier wires were ran to close to the sides of the base and would throw off its alignment. 3. The guide wire was leading the mower to go off center of the base. So the tall grass was clearly my fault and I gave it a cut with my push mower. After sometime of tinkering with it, it now can reliably return and dock on the charger. Eventually I had several days of running without too many issues. The shorter grass stopped the issue of only going a few feet before thinking it ran into something. The yard was really looking surprisingly good. Didn't take too long to see the mower will only cut a few inches past the wire. There is a setting in the app to tell it go past the wire but setting it to the max did nothing to help. No choice but to rerun the wire. Pro tip: leave some slack in places in case you want to go back and adjust the wire. 2ish week later: Now that the guidewires are more or less in the proper place and the mower can work without faulting, it is doing a surprisingly good job of keeping my yard mowed. I would actually give it 5 stars despite my issues except for one sort of big issue to me, the mowing height. Its highest setting is not very high. In the summer here in SE Michigan, it will get very dry and if the grass is this short, it will brown in many places. So I give it 4 stars. I would actually order another one for my front yard if it didn't mow the grass so short.

I bought this to keep the yard mowed. I have a busy schedule and it worked great. I just died one day and never came back. I tried everything. Left on the charger for a couple days, tried to reset, used the phone app options, sent several emails to customer support. There is no service for these stateside. Glad Amazon worked with me on a partial refund. It wasn't a total loss but a hard lesson not to buy this brand again.

8 hours setup time but it works perfect. You can barely here it working also. Very happy so far. Handles hills no problem. Recommend.

I wanted to love this guy so bad. Affordable, small, cute. It does it all. Except handle my yard. People have mentioned that it creates visible patterns, which it really does at first. But at least in my case it was because the grass was just long to begin with and the idea of this guy is that it runs daily and clips off small amounts of grass each day. If you rake the initial cuttings up and then let its do its job, you grass will look fine. So clearly it works, what then is the problem with it you may ask? The problem is that 25% grade sounds hella steep if you are driver, but yards are kinda lumpy. None of my backyard is extreme but this guy ended up getting stuck almost everywhere in little lumps and bumps that I didn’t even notice were there before. I ended up having to restrict it to a tiny subset of the lawn to do its job and it does it well, but I want no more mowing, not just mowing 30% less of my yard. I ended up getting a Sileno Life and returning this one. The Life is dope, it says it does just 35% so I was skeptical, but that guy just flies through my yard. If your lot isn’t perfectly graded, do yourself a favour and skip this budget option. Other than that, the boundary and guide wire are a pain in the butt, but it makes sense and they all work like that. Give yourself some time to adjust and maybe also buy some extra couplings because you will guaranteed mess up somewhere and then either the mower eats a bit of the wire or you gotta patch it in a different way. Ideally you bury the wire, but no sane person is going to start out burying the wire before at least testing and making sure the setup works. This part is annoying, take some time, don’t rush it and it’ll work out okay. One downside here, other than the upfront work, is that you lock the layout of your yard in forever (or you splice and patch more). This is a limitation of all of these mowers though and hardly something unique to this model. Just something to keep in mind. Lastly, the app could be better. The minimo lacks a screen, so the app is a must. The other sileno mowers have a screen and can be configured on the device. Overall for me it’s a 1 star product. If you have a level yard though, it could be a 5 star product for you.

Was hesitant given the mixed reviews on this robot lawnmower. Glad I made the purchase. Fantastic product and was easy to set up. Recommend to watch the videos on YouTube first before you install and you shouldn't have any issues. Very happy with this purchase.