I purchased the McCulloch ROB robotic lawn mower in July of 2017 and it is the best purchase I have made in regards to any yard equipment. Since robotic mowing is new to me I also bought the expert assembly service that Amazon offers with this product to assist with setup, which went very well. The expert assembly service was handled all electronically through the Amazon app and email. While the product is in process of being delivered, Amazon works with you on times you are available for the installer to come to your house and install the mower. The install took roughly two hours for the team to lay down the ground wire and get the unit programmed. Honestly, after seeing them install this unit, I could have done this myself, so this is definitely a DIY project.

Before you can get ROB mowing you need to get your lawn to the right height so this did take me a little bit of work to do so, but it is totally worth it to get the yard to the optimal height because once ROB started it is great. Benefits I have noticed now that ROB has been mowing for almost a year now is no more ANTS! We had a few ant mounds in our yard and it was funny to see the mounds move closer and closer to my neighbors yard because ROB would consistently demolish the ant mounds making the ANTS rebuild. Now we have no more ants! Also, ROB helped with the crabgrass that we had popping up. I did treat the yard with crabgrass control, which helped a little, but having ROB maintaining the grass height limited the crabgrass gross, which eventually killed it off and eliminated it. The only yard work I need to do now in the backyard is trim around the fence!

I just started ROB off for the 2018 season and he is back at it. Definitely worth it.

McCulloch should include more boundary wire and pegs with this mower. My yard is well within the area constraints, but I ran out of materials, anyway! And Amazon is not much help for getting additional wire. You pretty much need an entire installation kit. (And I blame Amazon since they seem to be the exclusive online vendor of this particular unit.)

All of that being said, I love this thing. It has minor drawbacks--it occasionally becomes stuck in the yard, and twigs sometimes get hung up beneath it and drag--but what a great job it does of maintaining the lawn! I was skeptical about its consistency once I first had it up and running because there was a patch of grass that just wasn't being touched, but by the end of a week the entire lawn was one length. Also, I did not perform a cutting just before activating the ROB, and it still managed to make the lawn uniform.

If you don't have a landscaper and you don't have time for cutting your lawn, this is a great solution.

If you just want to not waste time mowing, it's great for that, too.

NOTE: Expect the mower to run many many hours at a time, several days a week. At first we thought this was strange and it made us uncomfortable. Now that we aren't maintaining a lawn, we are fine with it.

Installing the wire boundary and "follow home" guide wire took one evening (couple hours) a pretty big back yard. I accidentally hammered down the wire too much once and broke it (was able to splice back together with two of the included water proof splicers. I did not have the splicers punched down all the way so the wiring didn't work at first (solid yellow light on base station). I started off mowing manually the whole back yard down low before letting the robot take over.

The instructions and video both suggest planning out exactly where you are going to run the wire before starting ... very good idea... you do not want to pull the wire up and start over!

This robot works great! It bounces around from wire edge to wire edge and eventually covers every inch. Any holes in the yard can cause it to get stuck so just fill those in as the robot runs into them. It is very quite. The chirp sound it makes when it is heading out off its base station is louder than the actually cutting. I now have a constantly perfectly cut yard.

Cons: The robot works in the rain, but I would prefer an option that tells it to go home when the rain starts. More splicers should be included ... if I had broke the wire one more time I would have been out of business until I ordered more. And lastly I cannot find anywhere on the companies website where I can buy replacement batteries.

No.....I'd rather do it myself

This robot has taken over mowing my yard. I was a bit nervous about how hard it would be to set up, but really just took a couple hours one morning with my 11yr old son to help string the guidewires along the edge of my lawn & around bushes. I admit I got a bit lazy with spacing out the stakes, so I learned the grass would lift the wire pretty high over the dirt and the mower could cut the wire. Lights on base told me what happened. So after fixing wire with one of the included connectors, I went back and made sure wire was staked all the way to the ground. Haven't had problems since. Also, when I 1st set it up, I let it run all the time but have since adjusted the time available to run and my lawn looks great.

Not sure which is best part - watching my dog stalk then run from the mower when it turns around, or watching people's reaction and questions about my new lawn service, or the fact that I can just sit and watch while ROB does my work for me. If my wife can get a robot instead of vacuuming, I'm happy to use one to cut the lawn.