Ecovacs A3000...can't get a full mow
Bought the Ecovacs A3000 after a long time scoping the market. It was finally onsale during the Amazon Prime Week, and as a birthday present to myself I thought "Why now?".
So far it has been a frustrating week trying to get this thing to mow my yard even one time. Here are my current list of "grievances":
- The app is super buggy. I constantly find myself having to switch to another app or back, quite and come back in, etc. to get it to respond. It's not a 1-star situation, but frustrating as hell when you are trying to joystick this robot around your not-so-straight yard and it keeps loosing connection.
- The robot doesn't seem to "learn". It gets stuck in the same damn places. Over and over. And when it does, it likes to dig nice big tire marks into your turf. I now have many little dirt spots all over where I have had to repair these divots.
- The robot doesn't seem to respect the settings at all. I will go into more details, but sufficit to say you set no-go zones and it still goes in them, you turn on the "no turn around in skinny areas" option and it still tries to u-turn in skinny areas. It's CONSTANTLY backing into my retaining wall. Like lil' bro, that wall has been there all 20 times you have tried to mow...stop running into it.
- If the grass is even REMOTELY long-ish, or "thick", the robot just spins it's wheels and can't get through. Like I bought this thing so I wouldn't have to mow my lawn, but so far in the week I have had it I have mowed more times than I did in the entire month before I bought it!
Step-up was easy, but took forever. You essentially have to follow it around, using your phone as a joystick, to drive it around the perimeter. The problem is it's top speed only works when the virtual joystick is exactly straight. Any course correction makes it slow to a literal crawl. Once in a while it will loose connection or something, then literally cat-walk when it finally springs into action. I tried using the "auto-zone" feature, but it gives me an area about being within 20in of the yard edge that makes no sense.
The biggest issue is that the right side of my yard is very narrow and has a slight gully for drainage. It's not a deep gully by any means, barely deep enough that when it tries to u-turn in that area the bumper hits the other side of the mini-hill and it mower bails out completely. I even tried filling the gully with some fill dirt to level it out a bit, but now the mower sees the darker area and just tries to go around it. Then I tried adding a no-go zone on the other side, which is technically my neighbors yard, but it STILL tries to pop a u-ie. I have their "Narrow Path Adapt" option turned on, and even with that coupled with the no-go zone I have to save this thing every time it mows that side. Once I save it about 2 or 3 times per mow attempt it basically just gives up and says it's done, despite the largest portion of my lawn, the first part, not being done at all.
Next issue is it's traction. It has none. It keeps getting stuck in my lawn, where it proceeds to dig a bunch of wheel-shaped divots everywhere. Admittedly my lawn is pretty thick, but the strange thing is if I run it in manual mode it works perfectly fine. It's when it's in robot-mode it keeps trying to turn around or something. Again, just go in a straight line! I don't understand why it feels the need to keep rotating over an over again in the same spots, honestly. And keep in mind most of this is in my front yard, which is not only my largest area, but also the one it keeps skipping due to getting stuck on the side over and over and over. I have taken to trying to do an "Area Mow" because then the robot actually does what it's should do on the side and just goes straight and doesn't try to u-turn over and over, but then it gets to the front yard where it tried to u-turn over and over, thus getting stuck.
So far this has been more frustrating than it really should be. I am seriously thinking of boxing this thing up and sending it back. I really love the idea of having a large part of a shitty chore I hate doing weekly+ done for me, but I feel like it's become my full-time job doing search and rescues on this dumb thing.