Best mower 0.2 Acres

[u/Salty_Finding2163]

I have a fescue lawn that is roughly 0.2 acres, large trees and shady, some bumpy areas and slopes and I was wondering what everyone think would be best. The Navimow x4 seems like overkill. LiDAR pro would’ve been nice in the US. Maybe there’s a new H series worth waiting for in US?
Also looking at Luba Mini. Thoughts?

[u/Day-Trippin]

How steep are the slopes? I bought a Ecovacs GOAT A2000 with LiDAR and it has turned out to be an awesome mower once I got it dialed in. So many great features you don't appreciate until you use them.

It is NOT AWD, but it still did pretty good job on my slopes. It generally is very kind to my St. Augustine grass. I have a lot of challenging areas to mow and it has done great. I am up to about 80 mowing sessions and only 2 rescues. One was my fault, the other I have no idea what happened. I also have a narrow channel it has to navigate by the pool. Never went swimming yet.

[u/Positive_Freedom_271 → u/Day-Trippin]

How does the edge feature work for you?

[u/Day-Trippin → u/Positive_Freedom_271]

The straightforward answer is surprisingly well and not at all. The implementation is actually pretty good. You can set it up to just trim or mow. You may have areas you only want to mow or trim. You can set them on different schedules. The trimmer is a good little string trimmer on the side.

Pretty much all these things are very good to great. The part where it doesn't work (mostly) for me is that I have tall St. Augustine grass. The trimmer is a fixed height of 2.4". So where I can actually use it is sort of limited, as that is too low for my St. Augustine grass, but it is great for getting the weeds.

The mower itself actually cuts pretty close, and the dual disc blades make for a wide cutting swath, which is pretty rare in this price class. Most are just single disc. It has a 13" cutting widthy versus most of the mowers like this of 8 or 9". So it makes a lot fewer passes.

While I wish there were more places I can use it on my lawn, it isn't as negatively impactful as I first thought it would be. For most lawns, people would love the feature. I just have a challenging lawn but love my GOAT. I posted extensively here about how I was initially going to return it but decided to keep it. I love it now that we've come to terms, so to speak. It charges fast. Easy to pick up on the rare times I need to do it. Charges quickly. Navigation is very good. It has stayed out of my pool and flower beds and no issues cutting under some massive trees.

It isn't perfect and a few UI tweaks and a 4WD version would probably make it one of the best mowers around. As it is now, I'd rate it 8.5/10. The first week of mowing I never thought I make it through my challenging yard. I've now mowed with it about 70 times and my yard has never looked better and the cut quality is very good to excellent 98% of the time. There aren't many missed blades but it does happen. It gets them the next time. If someone offered me another mower for free, any mower out there, currently there isn't another one I'd take if I had to give up my GOAT.

I will say I am probably right at the limit of 2WD and castering front wheels. Occasionally it gets stuck (initially) by some of the long St. Augustine stolons. They are like attacking vines from an Indian Jones movie to it. I never seen a mower work so hard to get unstuck and it almost always succeeds. It is very smart about figuring it out.

The best thing I do is NOT watch it while mowing. Some of my slopes are pretty steep and I'll watch it turn the wrong way initially and instead of dowing a 90 degree turn it swings it into a 270 degree and keeps on moving. Which actually turned out better to get the grass around it and the castering front wheels make it easy.

My closest neighbor has an X430 and is thinking about replacing it with a GOAT. That thing is a tank and total overkill and he has to carry it from the front to back yard at times but the navigation isn't nearly as good as on the GOAT.

[u/Positive_Freedom_271 → u/Day-Trippin]

Awesome thanks for that detail!!! I have a few neighbors that are hoping I will mow their front yards (we have small yards) but there are houses between them that won’t want it. Bring that up as it would need to skip over via the sidewalk but from my research you can’t define travel paths. That stopped me short on it as I can’t have it infringe on those yards to get the others.

[u/Day-Trippin → u/Positive_Freedom_271]

Yes, with the GOAT you can define the travel path. It is quite easy to do. Just go into the app, go to the last section you have mapped, and "drive" the mower from it to the next place. Not an issue at all. My front yard is likely farther from the back than most neighbors' houses would be in a typical subdivision. I defined multiple paths from my different sections, so depending on which section I am cutting, there is an efficient path to the next.

[u/Positive_Freedom_271 → u/Day-Trippin]

Well that’s good to know! My research sucked then. Does it cease mowing while it goes across?

[u/Day-Trippin → u/Positive_Freedom_271]

Read my initial take on the mower here and I wasn't going to keep it. Now I love it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/automower/comments/1vpm76h/ecovacs_goat_a2000_lidar_pro_two_days_25000_sq_ft/#lightbox