WORX WA0184 Landroid Boundary Wire Kit

When I got this mower I thought it was a fail since it did not work properly, when WORX repaired it I thought it was good and now after a summer of mowing I think it is GREAT – the best tool I have ever owned.I wanted to wait until I had fully tested this mower before I left my review. I bought my WORX WR150 Landroid Robotic Lawn Mower in October of 2020. Since I live in Colorado, I had to immediately break open the box and begin putting down the perimeter wire to test the mower before the snow started to fly. Unfortunately, after staking out the entire yard the Landroid did not work. It continuously threw an error indicating that it had been picked up. I even took video of the Landroid on my perfectly flat and pre-mowed and raked yard just refusing to work. After a long call with the Worx team including reverting my software to a less sensitive previous version to no avail, WORX decided I had to send it to them for repairs. By the time I got it back it had already snowed a few times and all I could do was start the Landroid and determine it ran continuously without error, so I was hopeful for spring, but into the garage it went.Fast forward to May 2021 and ‘Larry’ the Landroid is back in action.I’m going to break my review into sections to help others with similar issues.My yard – I probably have the ideal yard for this type of mower to be fair. I have a 7,000 square foot, perfectly flat rectangular lot upon which sits my house, garage and two sheds. The ½ acre WORX WR150 Landroid I purchased is more than adequate for this application. My yard has trees, however I did not bother to circle those trees with the wire since the mower only taps them lightly, for the smallest of trees I have hammered rebar around the trees so that the mower taps that first before changing course. I have Kentucky bluegrass which is a very fine blade grass species and this easy for the mower to get through. Typically, small tree bits and leaves don’t seem to bother the mower at all.Setup - Let’s start with the setup. I would suggest not rushing through the planning, charger placement and wire installation phase.The charging pad – I believe the instructions say to leave space in front of and behind the charging pad, however you really need it to be clear on all three of the sides that face the inside of your yard. My mower navigates back to the pad flawlessly however when charged the first thing it tends to do is not drive straight forward but make an immediate 90 degree turn and thus bumps into the ladder garden I have it installed under (see photo). A better option would have been for me to simply build a little roof under which the Landroid could get out of the weather.The perimeter wire - The wire is going to be your weakest link in the entire system; fortunately Worx did not flavor the wire with rabbit or squirrel chow like all of my other outdoor wiring seems to have been (soy based wire coating) so to my surprise my wiring was 100% intact this spring. In fact, since I put it down in the fall after a good mowing and onto dormant grass, I find it very difficult to even find the wire in most areas now.Pay close attention to all instructions, including the distance from objects and the inside and outside corner instructions as well as how to secure the wire to the ground. If I had it all to do over again, I would have given the Landroid a bit more space on the inside corners in particular. As I have a fence, when the Landroid makes its cleanup lap and comes to an inside corner if even the grass under the fence has built up the mower will sense an obstruction and back up. Since this is an inside corner it immediately hits the fence behind it and struggles. Ultimately it will figure it out but not without effort. My observation is this, you will likely need to weed eat every now and again so what is an extra inch or so of weed eating? Give the Landroid a little more room.Obstacles – again, I have my Landroid mow under a stair landing and when it is following the wire it does so flawlessly, however when it is mowing it comes at the perimeter from a 90 degree angle and always struggles to free itself (see photo). Again, hindsight being 20/20 I would have just had the Landroid stay out from under the landing. Also pay close attention to obstacles that may exist above the perimeter wire. Unfortunately, as my mower performs its clean up lap by following the wire it goes under a Lilac bush that has a branch that is just low enough to grab the back wheel of the mower and make it hiccup a bit on its way home. Again, it navigates this perfectly well, but I did not think about low hanging branches when I strung the perimeter wire. Keep in mind the real wheel of the Landroid is ~9.5” high so anything that overhangs your yard by less than this height will eventually catch your Landroid. I have not had this mower through a fall season where I expect leaves may affect it's performance however a good raking should be enough to mow until the snow flies again.Sidewalk – As I said before, your wire is your weakest link. I have a front walk with grass on either side of it. Since the wire has to cross this in order for the Landroid to cross it you have to figure a way to get the wire across your sidewalk. I guess I could have burrowed under the sidewalk and snaked the wire underneath however I know it would be at least 5 inches deep and I’m not sure that would even work. I was lucky insomuch as I had my front walk scored with a diamond blade and thus was able to lay my wire in this crack leaving about a 3 foot gap through which the mower occasionally randomly finds it way (see photo). This actually works quite well but in any other application this may have been difficult.Surprises – now for the best part. I have not had to mow my yard once all summer! This is the best purchase for my yard I think I have ever made. I am stunned at how well this mower works. We have a Roomba, and this blows that away. A couple of side benefits that were unexpected to me. First, my yard looks freshly mowed every single morning because it is! I never look outside and think to myself that the yard needs mowing, it doesn’t. Next since the yard is kept short all of the time my dandelion problem seems to be under control. When you see the photos, bear in mind I do not use weed killer to kill dandelions, I simply pick them but with the Landroid they never have the chance to flower.Bottom line – I would HIGHLY recommend this mower or other WORX models depending on your grass type, configuration and yard geography. I read a lot of reviews before buying this mower and there is really good information to be learned by doing so. I hope this helps with your decision to by a robot lawnmower.

July 20 update:I am doing this update mostly because of another reviewer who recently updated their review because of firmware 3.3.0.0+1 This reviewer reported a lot of issues after getting this update. I have the same mower except I did not upgrade to the 8 ah battery and I do not have the "find my landroid module" . I did not have any of the issues that this person has. I did however experience two different issues after getting this firmware update. I no longer get notifications to my phone. Before the update I got notifications about everything. The activity log does however now work better and gives me all status updates. The other issue I am now having is how the Landroid reacts with my isolated loop durng the Landroid going home. While going home if the mower comes in contact with the isolated loop before hitting other parts of the boundary wire it will think the isolated section is a normal boundary wire and follow it in an effort to get home. So now it will just go in a circle around the isolated loop until the battery runs dead. I fixed this by changing the isolated loop where the boundary wire is supposed to be right next to each other. I moved these wires to be 4 inches apart. Now the mower sees this loop as a part of the regular boundary and will follow it when going back to the base. The 4 inch wide section gets cut twice a week while the mower does it's edge cut, so no longer a problem. The only difference is now the mower has to travel an additional 60 feet when going home. The advantage to this is that the mower does a edge cut around the rose garden and looks much neater. Of these two issues the no notifications is the big one. If the mower has a error such as outside boundary wire I will not know about it unless I watch the Landroid all the time. I have had a outside the boundary wire error four times now. It was caused by the front castors hitting a pine cone while on a slope and getting diverted from the wire when searching for a zone. This is not a problem with the Landroid as I should keep the pine cones out of the mowing area any how.I could rectify these issues by reverting to the previous firmware version but my ACS works much better with this version of the firmware. Hopefully Worx will fix these firmware issues in another update.I still like my Landroid and would still recommend it.Original review:After reading all the negative reviews and watching many negative videos I decided that I would still give the Landroid L a try. I am glad that I did. This robot does a fine job in my opinion. There are some minor improvements that would make it even better. I will get in to these later in this review.I not only purchased the Landroid but I also got the ACS, Dual Off Limits , Radio Link and Garage . All of these accessories work very well.First of all I am 73 years old and almost blind. I went with a robot mower mainly because of my poor vision. I decided to bury the boundary wire instead of pegging it down. It is only buried to a depth of less than one inch. I did this all by myself. I buried around 850 feet of wire. It took me 5 days and was hard work as I did it with only hand tools. I think the extra effort will be worth it in the long run. Before I buried the wire I tested different areas of my yard with the 165 foot accessory kit wire by pegging it down in places that I thought might be a problem for Landroid to mow. I found that these areas were not a problem after all. I was mostly concerned about the slopes in my yard. The slope runs right to the boundary of my yard so I could not stay the recommended distance away as noted in the manual. The Landroid did not have a problem over running the boundary wire as so many people have complained about. This may be because the firmware has been altered to rectify the problem, but I do not really know this for a fact. Any way I went ahead and buried the wire.My yard is quite bumpy and this seems to not bother the Landroid at all. I bought the Anti collision system as an add on so I would not have to make no go zones around my propane tank, bird feeder pole, well pipe, observatory and a tree. It works very nicely most of the time in avoiding these items. Once in a while it will bump in to them but not a big deal.I have it mowing two zones which are the front and back yards. I seperated the zones by running the boundary wire 6 inches apart through a passage way seperating the two zones. I also used small lengths of magnetic strips to prevent the Landroid from leaving the zone by following the narrow 6 inch passage that the wire created. I had to do this because the Landroid did try to enter the other zone through the 6 inch openning. I have also set up two short cuts with the magnetics strips and the dual off limits module so the Landroid will take a shorter way back to the charging base. These two uses of the magnetic strips are veryuseful as well as it's no go capability.I have been running the mower for four weeks now and it has not got stuck once or over run the boundary wire. I have run over pine cones and small twigs with out any issues. So far my lawn looks great as the Landroid does a great job of maintaining it at a set hiegth of 2.7 inches. I have it mowing each zone for two hours each every day unless there is a rain delay.The battery life seems to be quite good. I have the 6.0 AH battery and it used only 35% over a 1 and 1/2 hour ttime period. Of course it was not cutting much grass so I guess the life will shorten as it cuts more grass.The mower works very well but the free app can be a bit of a challenge to figure out when it comes to redefining zones. The instructions for this are somewhat lacking. When I tried to re set up the zones I kept getting error messages. After a lot of trial and error I finally figured what needed to be done to accomplish the task. Befor redefining zones you need to first disable multi zones in the app. I also needed to run the mower and send it back to the base using the controls in the app. After doing this I was able to redifine the zones. The initial zone set up was however very easy to do.This is not a real big deal but it would be nice if zones were handled differently during a rain delay. My yard is divided into two zones. My Landroid was waiting out a rain delay before starting to start mowing zone 1. After the delay ended and mowing of zone 1 started it started to rain again so the mower returned to it's base as it is supposed to do. When the rain delay again ended the mower went to zone 2 instead of finnishing zone 1. It would be nice if it would resume mowing the zone it was in when the rain delay occured. I have my zones set up so that the mower can not leave it until it returns home. I have the mower set to mow zone 1 for 1 1/2 hour and zone 2 for 1 hour because zone 1 is larger than zone 2. When what I described above happens the mower will then mow zone 2 longer than zone 1. My only solution to this is to make both zones have the same mowing times. To accomplish the different times for each zone I had the mower going out twice a day. In other words schedule 1 corrisponds with zone 1 and schedule 2 with zone 2. This works great if there is no rain delays. Another solution to this is Worx changing the software so that the mower returns to the zone it was in when the delay occured. Just a suggestion to make a great mower even better.I also modified the garage so that it will allow rain to get to the rain sensor. I did this by using a small length of pvc pipe which i attached to the underside of one of the roof supports of the garage with one screw. I plugged one end of the pipe and drilled a hole in the pipe near the plugged end of the pipe. I placed a small funnel in the hole. When it rains the funnel catchess the water and it flows along the pipe and exits at the other end of the pipe which is directly over the rain sensor. This was simple to do and works good. I also only had to put one very small hole in the garage where it can not be seen easily..The bottom line here is that I think this mower works great and is going to be a big help for this somewhat blind old man. It is a bit of work to set it up especialy when burying the wire but you only need to do it once. If you are on the fence about getting this mower my advice is to just bite the bullit and do it. Just be sure to read the manual and do a good job installing the boundary wire. If you peg it down I would suggest to get more stakes as the mower does not come with enough of them unless your yard is perfectly flat with no bumps.