Friendly Robotics RL850 RoboMower 21-Inch Automatic Cordless Electric Lawn Mower

Comment: Many of these reviews seem to be from recent purchasers. I've owned a RL1000 for 2 years now and I thought people could benefit from a more experienced owner.

In 2 years I've had to replace the power supply 3 times and the docking station board 3 times. Both these components are about $100 once you get done with shipping and such so you'll need to budget about $300 a year in maintenance costs. This isn't including the 2 sets of blades I also bought. (By the way, don't bother with the "deep cut" blades, they don't mulch any better than the regular blades.)
None of the components on this system were designed with durability in mind. I had 1 of the docking station boards fail after 2 (count 'em 2) days. The service for these units is terrible, simply terrible.
Finally, last week, one of the drive wheels failed and it just kept driving around in a circle. I'm not going to spend any more money on it, so I bought a lawn tractor.

Even when things are not breaking down, its operation is problematic at best. It is not something you can let run unattended. The first season the unit kept leaving the perimeter area. Had to call 3 times before anyone could tell me how to correct that issue (sensor needed adjustment). The unit would also get stuck a lot. More often than not, I would have to go out and move it away from an area that is was bogged down in.

I can't recommend this product to anyone. Which is really a shame because when it does work, it kept the grass looking very good.

Comment: I had basement work done that involved digging up my entire yard, so I had no yard until reseeding in the fall. Anticipating that mowing would begin that fall, I bought the RL 850 Robomower in June. Seeding took place in September, and I eagerly began to try out my new mowing toy in October. I'll describe the entire process I went through to date:

Laying the perimeter wire was a major project, since I have a large size yard with several trees, a shed, and a rock garden island. I think that even if I simply laid out the wire around a rectangle box of a yard, the provided pegs and wire wouldn't be enough. I ultimately ended up ordering one extra roll of wire and four bags of pegs to get my front, back, and sides of the yard securely wired. (You'll want more. Trust me. See the very bottom of this review for more information...) I also ended up buying a 3-inch edger to get this job done without killing my knees and back. At that, it took three weeks of evenings to get everything in place and securely pegged down, with dirt wheeled in to fill in the edging.

Once all wiring was in place, we eagerly watched the mower do its thing. It was quite a spectacle to the neighbors and even the UPS man, watching this little mower do its thing in the front yard. Sure enough, it zoomed this way and that, back and forth, staying within the wire and fairly well covering the entire front yard. It does seem to be less generous with cutting tighter quarters. I have a tree that's about 5 feet from my sidewalk and driveway, and that area invariably gets neglected by the robomower. I just manually run it over that area, which doesn't seem like a big deal -- except that I have a few areas like that between the front and back yards. Anyway, it mows, and does a decent job of getting most of the area cut.

Right away, though, we noticed that the cut wasn't as short as I'd like. My neighbor was chatting over it and agreed that it hardly looked like it removed any grass last fall when we first ran it. We adjusted the height, which made no difference. An online investigation indicated that the mower comes with high-cut blades, and if you want a closer cut, you have to order the low-cut blades separately. So, we ordered and they arrived a couple of weeks later, and the yard was cut more to my liking.

If my robomower continued as it did last fall in October when cutting my lawn, I'd indicate we're happy with this purchase. It isn't holding up, and it's only April of the following year -- 6 months after I began using the mower. To put this in better perspective, I mowed my tender new grass 2-3 times in late October just because I was eager to use my new electric mower gadget. Living in Kansas, it got cold and even snowed, so the mower was safely stored in my garage through the winter months in early November and not in use...

I got it out three weeks ago for the first mow of the spring, and right away, I noticed it running somewhat sluggishly when manually moving it to the yard to start mowing. I set it up, turned on the perimeter switch, and let it do its thing, and the robomower nicely cut my side yard, which takes all of one hour. No problem so far, I thought.

Then I moved it to my front yard and let it mow that zone. It got about half way through the front yard before it died entirely and I had to literally drag the mower to the garage to plug it in -- only a half hour after it began cutting the front yard. When it died, it died completely. There was no juice left to move it to the garage or even to turn it on and begin to head in that direction.

I thought, maybe the poor thing is just sluggish from having been stored for the winter, etc. I recharged 24 hours, babytalked to the thing, and set it out on the front lawn to begin mowing again. It finished the front lawn, which takes 80 minutes, and then I moved it to my back yard to start in. It died within 20 minutes, although this time it had enough remaining juice to limp along to the garage for recharging.

Today, I brought it out to the back yard to try again. Just over an hour into the mowing process, after a full day's charge, it died again. This time completely. I had to drag the power charger cord and an extension cord out to resuscitate it before I could move it back to the garage again for recharging. Grrrrr!

I checked my battery stats setting on the mower, and it looks like the mower got all of 24 hours of use from the original battery it came with before it essentially wasted away. Given the size of my yard, it'll probably take four days of single hour-long mowings before I can get hte entire back yard mowed. Unfortunately, it's not like the mower can tell where it died out and quit mowing each time, so when I return it to eh yard to restart, it ends up going back to places it had already mowed.

Obviously, I'm an unhappy camper. Based on the many reviews I'd read prior to buying the robomower, I opted for a second battery which was purchased at the time that I bought the mower itself. I had envisioned that I could charge one while the other was on the mower. Unfortunately, I didn't buy the special external cord to charge it. It's still in the box as I type this. Looks like it was a good thing to have prebought, since the old battery will be going back as soon as I can reach tech support for a warranty claim.

I'll keep you posted on how Friendly responds to my inquiry about a warranty claim. At this point, I've socked a lot of money into a mower that fizzles after a single hour, and whose battery died after 24 hours of total use. Clearly, this product is not ready for primetime. Unfortunately, since I invested all of my mowing dollars into buying this thing in good faith, I'm going to have to go through the warranty folks to get this resolved so it's up and functioning right away.

About the need for more pegs: Because my back yard grass came in with a patch-type pattern, it didn't make sense to use the robomower all over the muddy dirt segments in order to get the patches of grass as well. So, my son and I went out and set up three temporary "zone" type areas for mowing efficiently until the grass filled out elsewhere in the yard. Because these were temporary patches, we used a minimum number of pegs to secure the wire above ground -- a perfectly acceptable practice in the manual for the mower. We also added an extra peg or two along each perimeter stretch for extra securing effort. By the second time the mower was out there cutting grass in the zones, it had a tendency of catching the perimeter wire in its wheel and dragging it along in stretches -- essentially reshaping the zones we'd set up. If I was going to use those perimeter wire setups permanently, I'd have to set up more pegs to secure the wiring. A decent rule of thumb: one peg for every 5-7 feet of straight stretch of wire.

Comment: I purchased RL850 in July 2008. I have beening using it almost every afternoon except when it rains. So far, I am pleased with this purchase. The instruction is easy to follow and the operation is very simple.

Comment: In writing this review I have very mixed feelings and buyers remorse.

First I would say that if you expect great customer service from the the manufacture, your not going to get it. I expected a vendor return with my product as it is defective, but the vendor is absolute in me sending it in for warranty work. After dropping a buck and a half you'd think they'd be concerned about reviews and such, but I guess not. Their stance is that it has a two year warranty and that how it should be handled.

The reason I have mixed feelings is that my mom has the mower with no issues, in fact she is the reason I purchased it, but I see a train wreck coming and things for me usually only get worse with defective product..............I THINK I GOT A LEMON.

Thank god for Amazon as they are taking a return!

Comment: It is just about the end of my first summer spent watching Mo cut the grass in our zone 6 Pennsylvania yard. It is a delight not to be doing the work myself. If Mo misses a spot I do not care because I AM NOT MOWING. Yippee.

Yes, it takes time and perserverence to lay the wire. I make my own pegs from wire coat hangers and I use 14 gauge wire from Home Depot because the supplies from this maker are just too high priced. The blades will probably have to be replaced (too many stones were hit this year) and the battery still seems fine after one summer of mowing 1/3 acre every week.

I have learned to use Mo only in dry weather - comments made by other reviewers are true, he does make a mess in mud and the deck does indeed get clogged with wet grass. But so did my big old gas powered Toro, which I do not miss.

You will like this mower if you are opposed to feeding and coddling lawn. MY "yard" was mainly weeds and turfgrass last May. Mo is set to mow high - 3" - and I can already see the improvement. The higher cut is allowing grass to crowd out weeds, with the result that there is more grass. The robot does a good job, costs over a three year period will be less than I would have paid the lawn service, and as for the edges, who really cares whether they are the neatest in town?

I love this thing.