Husqvarna Automower 115H 4G Robotic Lawn Mower with Patented Guidance System, Automatic Lawn Mower with Self Installation and Ultra-Quiet Smart Mowing Technology for Small to Medium Yards (0.4 Acre)

tl; dr: was skeptical at first, but I am rather pleased. I was in no way compensated for this opinion.I have a dog that doesn't like grass, much like tall grass. She (dog) has an area in the back yard that is fenced to the space of about 60' x 50' that she can freely go without a leash. But, I live out in the sticks and that is also where the septic system is located - meaning it grows like crazy. I work and am getting older and find it difficult to mow as often as is needed, and then as often as she would prefer. I like the warmth of summer, but hate the dread of constantly and continuously fighting with the grass. When I have the time or energy to mow, it rains and ruins everything - and the grass grows.I was aware of automowers, but somehow Amazon made it super easy to justify purchasing one with their credit card and no interest payments for a year and as luck would have it, this little 115h was in stock for way less than others, after several youtube videos, I decided to try it, but it was going right back in the box and back if it could not handle the incline. It arrived via Amazon delivery on a Monday. I didn't even open the box until Friday or Saturday. There are 3 areas of my yard in the picture, the back with the blue fence indicator, the front and the side on the other side of my driveway. I had intended to main zone the back yard, and then secondary zone the front yard and across the driveway.It was drizzly and cold when I put the boundary wire in. I did not bury them, I staked them in and the wet actually made it easier to get the stakes in the ground. I did NOT mow beforehand as recommended. The basic process is that you determine where you want the boundary to be, you stake it to the ground by crouching or kneeling, you get up, move over about 3 feet (ish), crouch down, insert another stake, etc for what is about 1,700 feet of boundary wire. After a minute, it hurts. The orange line is from one spool, the yellow is from another and you see where I got. My neighbor actually mows the part I did not stake, so....The boundary wire is also used as the guide wire with use of a connector (4 connectors included, needs one for the guide wire, I used 1 connector where orange and yellow meet on the side of the house in the image- I have 2 left for when or if I want to expand to the other side). There is also a "low voltage" wire included which goes into the power supply and acts as an extension cable to the charger unit for more flexibility in dock placement. I am limited as I have 1 spot in the back yard that is flat and it is up on an incline and that is right by the house.Challenges of the main area: the prior homeowners dug a rather large burn pit about 12-15' in diameter. I did originally form an island entirely around it. Also, the incline that is most pronounced closer to the house but is inclined throughout. There are also areas that are dipped that are smaller, maybe1-2 foot. I had originally packed these smaller ones with top soil from Lowes.Challenges of the front yard: there is a pit closer to the driveway and the road about a foot deep, wide and about 3 feet long with ditch shoots from it. And there are trees, several of them. And then right by the house where the two lines meet, there is a 8x12' patch on the other side of the sidewalk.Mowing the Main Area: my mower has a name. It is Tiny. Tiny did not like that I did not mow the yard prior to first use. It was also wet and he did slip some on the hilly area. I do not let Tiny mow in the rain. Tiny also did not like the crab grass that is thick and makes up about 10-15% of the back yard. He did get stuck repetitively on a few of the dimples in the yard. I did wind up observing Tiny over a few days and did take the weedwhacker at the crabgrass and other areas where I noticed it repetitively stopped and turned around (though he will turn his ash-end on to it and cut things all the same). Honestly, after the 2nd day, the back yard was fantastic.Mowing the front area (Secondary Area): the flowery weeds were about 10" tall and he repetitively ran into the trees and got caught between the line of trees and the boundary wire closer to the road. But more annoyingly, he found the hole...a lot. With some supervision and bump-stopping him with my feet, he did mow the front yard satisfactorily.Then I got Tennessee chert mixed with some sand and over the week after work I filled in the burn pit, and the several other divits in the back and front yard, packed them down with my feet and body weight. The day after it rained and Tiny did not mow. The following day, Tiny became basically unsupervised without incident in the back yard. He can do the job just as well in the front yard, but since that is more visible to the neighbors and road, I don't want him to get stolen. Yes, he is pin-coded and every time you pick him up, you have to put that code in or he won't work, but that would not keep someone from running off with him and then I wouldn't have it to mow the yard.Tiny does have just the knack of finding himself on the path to the dog whenever the dog actually wants to potty. My annoyances with Tiny are that there isn't a keypad to put digits into every time you have to put in the pin (arrows up, down, sides only), that if you put him in park on the app you still sometimes have to tell him to start manually, and that he won't clean my house too. Otherwise, Tiny is a good lil autobot.

UPDATED with more details and info (June 7, 2023)I had high hopes for the Husqvarna 115H when I bought it about a month ago. Sadly, I returned it after trying very hard to get little "Husky" to work out for me.This is not my first rodeo. I have been using robot lawnmowers exclusively since 2006 when I said a final goodbye to gasoline powered mowers. I'm not going back! During the past 17 years I have owned 3 different robot mowers ("Pepe", "Jose" and "Juan") all made by Friendly Robotics).By coincidence, I have also successfully installed boundary wires at 3 different homes during that time. All 3 homes had level yards under 3000 sq ft. My lawns were all Bermuda grass, and I did not plant winter grass, so the lawns here in Phoenix were dormant for 4-5 months of the year.During the growing season, I mowed them weekly with 2-hour sessions of the robotic mowers. Since these Robomowers had 19 inch cutting paths (twice the width of the 115H) and mowed backwards and forwards (didn't need to turn around), 2 hours of mowing a week kept my lawns looking neat. Their sealed lead-acid batteries typically lasted for only 2 or 3 years, but were relatively cheap ($70) and were not difficult to replace.My 3 previous robot mowers did not have a docking station, so they all required me to manually position them in the mowing area using a wired hand controller. I then pressed a START button to set them to mowing. After the mowing was complete, I had to drive them back to my garage and plug them into a charger. So, when my last RL-800 mower failed (after a good 10 year run), I was ready to try a model that would dock and charge itself on a pre-set schedule, hoping to automate even this modest chore. After reading a lot of reviews and specifications, I decided to try the Husqvarna 115H as a low-cost solution.My current lawn is a level 2000 sq ft (0.05 acre) roughly rectangular plot with no included obstacles other than a single small tree with no protruding roots. Easy-peasy, right? The 115H is rated for 0.4 acres, so it should be no problem. Husqvarna is a well-respected brand and Amazon could deliver it overnight. All good, right?I'm a retired engineer. Manuals and instructions are enjoyable reads for me. I read them and also watched the setup videos, and signed up for the Facebook and Reddit forums to learn from others. This mower was going to be just what I was looking for, I hoped.Wrong! Since setting it up, I’ve experienced non-stop problems requiring almost daily interventions. The model 115H is seriously overrated with a claimed 0.4 acres (17,424 sq ft) of coverage. For my modest little 2000 sq ft lawn (0.05 acres) the schedule setup wizard recommended 4 hours daily . Going by that, to mow a 0.4 acre lawn, the mower would have to be scheduled to be mowing and charging 24/7, with about 10 charging and mowing cycles each day. Maybe this little unit is designed for many thousands of mowing and recharge cycles before it wears out. I certainly hope so, but I'm skeptical.However, I never got a chance to test the unit's longetivity, because the major problem is that my mower’s self docking system is too erratic. Yes, I'm confident that the boundary wire and guide wire were properly set up. The problem is that the mower seldom docks properly more than 3 times in a row. Even when it does dock, it sometimes fails to charge. I fiddled with the docking system's location, trying many different setups, but could never get it to dock and charge reliably. So, this unit is just too much trouble to use, requiring almost daily attention. So, I'm rating it one star. Maybe I just got a bad unit? I don't know.Before sending this unit back I really tried hard the last few days to give it a fair trial, as I did not want to have to send it back. On the contrary, I really wanted to get it working. I sought help from the Facebook group, and from a Reddit forum. After all I could do, I actually got it to run without supervision for four cycles of charging and mowing (two days). Then on the 5th cycle, when it docked to recharge (with 35% charge remaining), the app indicated it was parked, but once again it never started charging. As I watched the battery charge shown on the app slowly drop a percent or two every hour (rather than increase) on this charge cycle, I was sad. Yes, I know I could have gone out and repositioned the mower, recyled power, reinitalized the setup, or done whatever to get it going again. But it's not acceptable to have to do this on an almost daily basis. Besides, I travel out of town for a number of weeks each year, and after trying to teach my wife how to fiddle with it when it needed attention, she wanted NOTHING to do with it!Goodbye Husky! I'm very sad you were so starved for attention. Before carefully packing it up and sending it back, I spent several hours cleaning and polishing this little guy, returning it as close to new as I could. I even included some additional stakes and wire couplers in the box to make up for the ones that I used up.To its credit, Amazon has given me a full refund. I've reacted to that good news by ordering from Amazon a GPS RTK enabled MAMMOTION Luba AWD 1000 unit that needs no boundary wire as my next mowing companion. Is this $2000 expenditure (after taxes) overkill for a 2000 sq ft yard? Probably yes, but I'm an engineer, so I love gadgets. I sure hope that "Lucy" works out better than "Husky" did.