r/MOVASmartGardenHub

Did a fun video. Hope you all enjoy!
Matt

This doesn't apply directly to a specific model, but heavy morning dew is frequent in my area. Has anyone developed, designed, jerry-rigged a system to check if the grass is wet and whether or not to mow?

This may be a bit out there, I'm just looking for creative people.

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. 

Full disclosure I received this unit for free to review and give my honest opinion on, both good and bad. I am not receiving any additional compensation.

With that out of the way, let’s get into it!

In this video I go over the unboxing, setup and first impressions of the mower (spoiler this machine is awesome!)

Here were the high level steps I took to set up my mower:

1. Unbox

2. Assemble and install the charging station on a flat spot with an accessible outlet. Luckily the cord is very long so there’s a good chance you can get away without using an extension cord.

3. Install the app, and connect the mower via the QR code, following the prompts to turn on the device and get it paired.

4. (Optional): Install an AirTag in the designated compartment for added security and peace of mind.

5. Map the yard as a whole rather than breaking it into separate maps. This involves mapping the boundary of your first yard space (e.g. backyard), then driving the mower to the front yard and mapping the boundary of it as a second zone under the same map. At this step I was left with multiple completed unconnected zones.

6. Add no-go zones and paths. I experimented with accessible zones for mowing around my low shrubs with mixed success. When it says it turns off obstacle avoidance, it means it! Next I will try adding no-go zones within the accessible zones hugging the bases of the bushes in hopes this will stop them from getting rammed. Prior to turning on the accessible zone, it worked well, but required a bit more manual trimming under the canopies.

7. In the settings tweak the mow height to 5, turn on the child lock, add lift notifications as well as human notifications.

8. Turn on the checkerboard setting so that the mow direction is switched up which is better for the lawn.

9. Tweak the obstacle avoidance settings for both the buffer left around the object and the height detection setting.

Finally I was ready to take it for a rip!

Pros:

- Once you have it mapped properly, it’s as simple as hitting start, or even easier, you can have it on a schedule. I did find it important to be detailed with the settings, setting no-go zones, accessible zones, and making sure the boundary hugs the exterior nicely.

- The build quality feels premium and I find the design very sleek. For something that is a permanent fixture in my yard, I want it to look nice and this fits the bill!

- It is way quieter than I thought it would be, I would have no issue running it at night or while relaxing outside.

- My dog wasn’t scared of it at all! There are lots of dogs that go for walks on the street in front of my house and it’s comforting knowing it shouldn’t bother them.

- The mow lines look fantastic and it makes my yard look like it was professionally done! 😍

- I love how easy it is to adjust the cut height. I never really bothered with my old mower, but I love the idea of being able to adjust it to account for seasonal changes and for times when I’m over-seeding.

- Patrol mode is a super fun feature and gives an extra way to check on my property when I am away.

- The anti-theft features are a huge perk. I understand more redundancy can be added using the 4g module, but between the human detection, lift notifications, air tags, child lock and flexible placement, it fits the bill for me.

- The app UI is very clean and intuitive and allows for a lot of remote customization.

Other considerations:

- This model will not replace the need for a line trimmer, and similar to using a lawn mower, you will most likely still need to clean up the edges around trees, fences and other garden features. My understanding is other Mova Lidax mowers do have an edge cut feature (ultra trim 1.0 edge cutting) that is able to cut even closer but at a fixed cut length.

- There was wheel slippage on slightly wet grass going up an incline (maybe 20 deg). I’ve learned my lesson and will be sticking to dry grass as recommended.

- Not shown in the video, out of curiosity, against the install instructions, I did try moving the base station about 6 inches away from the fence to avoid having a small patch of grass that wouldn’t be able to be maintained by the mower. When exiting the station, it would get stuck between the fence panels and would need to be rescued. There is a reason they recommend half a meter on either side of the unit. That being said, I have since placed it on an angle in the corner and have had no issues since. This does not follow the manufacturers recommended instructions so I won’t be mad if I do end up having to move it again.

- My lawn has roughly 325m^2 of mow space, under 0.1 acres. It is a good amount of lawn space, but definitely within the capacity of the robot lawn mower. The couple of times I’ve run it, it needed to charge a couple times in between to get the job done. This isn’t a huge deal as I’m able to leave it to do its thing, but it does increase the mow time accordingly.

- During the setup I did have a few hiccups with the base station location being sensed as being outside the mapped zone. It was an easy fix after lifting the mower and having it relocate itself. Once the map was completed it wasn’t an issue anymore. For a mower being setup for someone less tech savvy, they might benefit from a hand getting the mower mapped and setup.

I would love to know what other people’s experiences have been like with the Mova Lidax series mowers and if there are other aspects of the mower I should explore!

I plan on making an update review once I have had a chance to really put it to the test!

Happy Mowing! 🏡

I love my robot mower but I have a slope that my mower struggles to scale. Has anyone tried an attachment like this to improve traction? How well did it work?

This might be a lot of overthinking over a 200 sqm garden, but I keep changing my mind between viax 300 and 500.

Either one should be more than enough size wise. The garden is mostly flat, but there's a mango tree near the middle and a narrow passage down the side of the house. That part stays shaded most of the day. So coverage isn't really the issue. I'm trying to work out whether the lidar on viax 500 would actually help with the tree and the darker passage, or if viax 300 would behave much the same in a garden this small.

Anyone used either one in a similar layout? Mainly curious about navigation, map editing and how often you need to step in. My husband says get viax 300 and stop overthinking it, but I'm still leaning towards the 500. We're in Spain, if that makes any difference.

The following are things I strongly suggest the Mova app team to work on after using my Mova Lidax Ultra AWD 2000 (also own a Navimow i206 NRTK AWD):

[1]Splitting zones: Provide a way to split the zones with the robot itself and not just with a straight line on the app, for non-rectangular shapes. Navimow does great here.

[2]Zones within zones: Enable the creation of zones within zones but that are not absorbed by the bigger zone, to enable inner zone mowing at different times and settings. Set it as an option to choose when about to create a new zone.

[3]Zone boundary editing: need to provide a way to edit boundaries if need to shrink the zone! Currently can only expand the zone by the zone "absorbing" behavior, but can't edit it to contract it. Re-mapping the whole yard or adding no-go zones against your edges should not be the only options here. Navimow's approach for this is great!

[4]Battery: Enable battery health protection feature that allows you to set the max % that battery will charge to when no session is scheduled. For example, I don't want my battery charging past 80%. Refer to Navimow's option for this again.

[5] Map view: to be able to overlay the lidar scan map under the working map so that we can add or split zones more accurately, for example, instead of having to guess where to trace the lines.

[6] Navigation glitch: the selection to do the curved turn instead of in-place rotation keeps reverting to in-place rotation. Please assess.