u/El_Dads

I have been running the Lidax Ultra 2000 for the past month regularly; through heat, humidity and a week-long family vacation! Now that I have had a solid 5 weeks of operation and gotten used to how it runs, I wanted to talk about what I love about it and a few things I would like it to do differently.

🏡 Lawn: My lawn is roughly 5,400 square feet of Kentucky bluegrass and tall type fescue.  It is pretty thick and I keep it at 3-3.5” most of the season. I have slopes on the sides of my house from the front yard, to the backyard.  These are sloped at about 19 degrees.  I live in a newer subdivision so there are no defined borders around my property. 

✂️Cut Quality: Overall, over the past 5 weeks cut quality has been solid. It leaves straight and narrow cut lines that look great and unique!  It gets the majority of the grass, but at times it will miss small strips of grass or decide that there is an obstacle in the way and leave an area uncut.  This tends to happen in long and thick areas.  The ground is pretty level in these areas so I think the front camera sees grass and thinks it's something in the way.  I have the obstacle avoidance height to the highest setting, (7.9”) and it still does this at times. 

Backyard

📅Scheduling and mowing cadence: I tried to set up a schedule for mowing, but I ran into a few issues.  These were more issues of preference than technical problems. 

1. The weather was very hot and dry for a two week stretch.  I didn't want to stress the yard mowing frequently.
2. Secondly, it takes nearly 15 hours to mow my entire yard.  The backyard, which is 3500 sq ft takes 9 hours and is west facing.  We get morning dew nearly every morning this time of year and it is shaded in the backyard by my house until mid day so it takes a while to evaporate.  I try not to mow a wet lawn to lessen the chance of a fungal infection.

I’ve stuck to manually running a few zones every other day depending on the weather and it’s been working well for me so far. I have only had to use a traditional mower one time since getting the Lidax.  This was because we went through a few rainy days in a row and the grass became too long for the Lidax to mow without skipping a bunch of areas. 

✅Reliability:  The Lidax Ultra 2000 is a workhorse.  I’ve never encountered any issues regarding navigation, nor issues of it going out of the mapped area.  I even tested mowing overnight and it did great!  One of the things I was most excited about is mowing the lawn while we were on vacation.  I always hated coming home after being out of town for a week and having to mow an overgrown lawn.  With the Lidax, I was able to send it out a few times while I was gone and came back to a perfectly mowed lawn.  It’s nice to have confidence in the robot that you can send it out without supervision.

Front Yard

🪛Maintenance: Maintaining the Lidax has been very simple.  Every week, I will clean the underside and remove all dirt and grass with the garden hose.  Sometimes grass will be wedged under the blades.  With gloves on, I will spin the blades and clean out the grass to make sure they move freely. I recently changed the blades and it was very simple.  I took a roll of painters tape and laid it on the ground.  I flipped the Lidax over and made sure the lidar was inside the tape roll.  It worked really well!  The only thing needed to change the blades is a phillips screwdriver.  It took only a few minutes to install fresh blades.  Much easier than taking the blade off of a traditional mower and sharpening it. 

Changing Blades

⁉️Quirks and issues: 

• Issues with the steep slope.  The Lidax struggles on one side of my house. I measured the pitch and it was about 19 degrees.  It had torn up a portion of the hill and sometimes will just refuse to mow the area.  It does ok climbing up the hill, but has issues turning.  
• It also has a problem with thick grass areas.  Because I keep the grass height high, in areas where it is very thick, the Lidax will think there is an obstruction and skip it. 
• Overheating:  There were a few occasions where the Lidax would return to the dock without a notification.  At first, I was confused and I tried to restart the mow, but it just displayed a generic error. “Failed to start the task. Please retry”  I tried to restart a few more times without success.  It was a 95 degree day so my hunch was that it got too hot.  Once the sun was lower in the sky, it continued with the job.  A notification that it was too hot to continue would have been helpful.

Missed areas

Missed cut on slope

🧠Final thoughts: I have been incredibly impressed with the Lidax Ultra 2000.  It has freed up my time to do other things around the house or spend time with my family instead of mowing the lawn.  The reaction to the Lidax in the neighborhood has been overwhelmingly positive.  I constantly have people walking by asking me about it.  There are 3 of my neighbors who are seriously considering buying one as the benefits of a robot taking care of the lawn are intriguing. 

I wanted to share some of my experiences with the V50 ultra after a little over a month of use. To premise, I was looking for a robot that was carpet focused, but also had the ability to mop well. I’ve owned robot vacuums from a few other brands; Roomba, Roborock, and Eufy. I’ve heard good things recently about MOVA so I did further research. I was very intrigued with the detachable mop pads. This robot lives on my upper level where its mostly carpet with the exception of the bathrooms and laundry room. I found a good deal on Amazon for the V50 and saw it came with a bunch of consumable replacements so I decided to order it.

It was super easy to set up, as are most vacuums these days. The only issue I had was I didn’t know there was a power switch on the back of the basestation so it took me a few minutes to figure out why the robot wouldn’t charge.

V50 leaving mop pads at the dock

Vacuuming

It mapped the floor very well and I was shocked how quiet it was while mapping. I typically have it set with the vacuum then mop setting. I have been very impressed with how well it vacuums. My old vacuum would’t leave lines in the carpet at all. The V50 leaves nice, satisfying lines. We have two kids so our loft usually has some snack debris on the floor and it handles it with no issues at all. I like the fact that we don’t have to pick out side table off the floor or make sure all the cords are tucked away. It won’t get stuck under the table like our previous robot nor has it eaten a usb cable. The retractable lidar is super cool and it allows it to go under out tv stand. I did have an issue on the first clean where it retracted the lidar under a bed and seemed to get lost for a while. It eventually worked it’s way out though.

Retracting lidar under TV stand

Mopping

Mopping works well. This is my first experience with spin mops. One of my other robots, on our main floor, which is all hardwood, is a roller mop. The spin mop works well and I can already tell that there will be much less maintenance with spin mops compared to a roller mop. I appreciate the ability to extend the mop to get to edges, but this is something most of the vacuums on the market can do these days. Overall, I’m happy with the job it does mopping.

Extending mop pads

Basestation

First of all, I’m super impressed with how quiet emptying the dust bin and the dirty water is. It’s a huge positive compared to my other vacuum’s base station. There is no dirty or musty smell coming from the dock, nor do the mops smell at all. It does a good job self cleaning.

Conclusion

Overall, the V50 Ultra is a solid high end robot vacuum. It does a really good job vacuuming carpet, which was the main reason I decided to go with it. I’m happy with the mopping performance as well. Other than the small issue getting lost under a bed, I don’t really have any issues with it. I’m looking forward to see how it holds up over time!