Editorial Product Review:Amazon.com Item Description:The Friendly Robotics RoboMower Automatic Lawn Mower is a fully automatic lawnmower designed to mow your lawn entirely by itself. The fully-automatic mower travels across the lawn in a crisscross pattern, covering up to 10,800 square feet on a single charge while you relax on the porch. The RoboMower works by mowing within a selected boundary outlined by a small wire (the unit includes 500-foot perimeter wire). Its navigation system can handle any lawn, regardless of shape, slope, or obstacles. It is capable of mowing 3/4 of an acre on one battery charge. Because the mower is rechargeable, it doesn't need gas or oil, and emits no pollution and little noise. However, it's still as powerful as conventional mowers, employing a battery-powered 3-blade, 21-inch powerful cutting system equivalent to a 5-1/2 HP gas mower, but with better mulching and a 5,800 rpm blade speed (double that of a typical gas unit).
The Triple Chamber Mulching system compacts grass into small clippings that decompose naturally on the lawn, improving your lawn's health while lightening your workload. The mower also comes with a host of safety features, such as a child lock and a detection system that automatically turns off the blade if the mower is lifted. It also includes a user-controlled theft protection and disabling system using a personal password. The mower comes with plenty of oomph, completing about three hours of mowing with a single 24-hour charge. The RL850 is also upgradeable to the RL1000, which comes with a programmable docking station. The RL1000 will automatically depart and return to the docking station at preset times to mow the lawn--even at night while you're sleeping--adding yet another level of convenient operation. A 2-year warranty is included and comes complete with 2007 generation software.
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Buyer Reviews
Average Buyer Rating:
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Very useful tool
I purchased RL850 in July 2008. I have beening using it almost every afternoon except when it rains. So far, I am pleased with this purchase. The instruction is easy to follow and the operation is very simple.
Customer Rating: 
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Stopped working in three hours - lawn not finished
In writing this review I have very mixed feelings and buyers remorse.
First I would say that if you expect great customer service from the the manufacture, your not going to get it. I expected a vendor return with my product as it is defective, but the vendor is absolute in me sending it in for warranty work. After dropping a buck and a half you'd think they'd be concerned about reviews and such, but I guess not. Their stance is that it has a two year warranty and that how it should be handled.
The reason I have mixed feelings is that my mom has the mower with no issues, in fact she is the reason I purchased it, but I see a train wreck coming and things for me usually only get worse with defective product..............I THINK I GOT A LEMON.
Thank god for Amazon as they are taking a return!
Customer Rating: -
Love it!
It is just about the end of my first summer spent watching Mo cut the grass in our zone 6 Pennsylvania yard. It is a delight not to be doing the work myself. If Mo misses a spot I do not care because I AM NOT MOWING. Yippee.
Yes, it takes time and perserverence to lay the wire. I make my own pegs from wire coat hangers and I use 14 gauge wire from Home Depot because the supplies from this maker are just too high priced. The blades will probably have to be replaced (too many stones were hit this year) and the battery still seems fine after one summer of mowing 1/3 acre every week.
I have learned to use Mo only in dry weather - comments made by other reviewers are true, he does make a mess in mud and the deck does indeed get clogged with wet grass. But so did my big old gas powered Toro, which I do not miss.
You will like this mower if you are opposed to feeding and coddling lawn. MY "yard" was mainly weeds and turfgrass last May. Mo is set to mow high - 3" - and I can already see the improvement. The higher cut is allowing grass to crowd out weeds, with the result that there is more grass. The robot does a good job, costs over a three year period will be less than I would have paid the lawn service, and as for the edges, who really cares whether they are the neatest in town?
I love this thing.
Customer Rating: -
Not perfect, but saves me a lot of work
I've had the robomower for a few months now. Laying the wire was the hard part; I had to get additional wire and stakes and was sore for a couple of days from all the kneeling and standing -- if I had to do it over again I would come up with some means of placing and pounding the stakes from a standing position. The first few times I ran it in my front yard it was a big attention getter, with neighbors and passersby stopping to watch and ask about it, and some kid even offered to buy it from me (I referred him to Amazon). Understand though, it is not perfect, and you likely won't be able to throw away your regular mower. It takes a LONG time (2+ hours) to mow a section of lawn, and it doesn't handle long narrow sections like the sides of the house or areas behind obstacles very well (it's really not very smart). I have given up on having it mow my front and side lawns as not worth the time it takes, so I let it go in the (large) back yard for a couple of hours, then get out the manual mower and quickly do the front and sides with it, plus the necessary trim in the backyard in areas where it has trouble (I have a lot of obstacles - trees, flower and vegetable gardens, pond). Overall I am pretty happy with it, as it saves me from the really heavy work on those hot summer days, and I barely break a sweat on what's left. I have only had one problem which required a call to customer support (it wasn't charging properly), and the response was prompt and helpful, even if it did presume that I owned a voltmeter and knew how to use it, and the mower was back to work a few days later. Oh yeah, it doesn't handle wet ground well, even if the grass is dry, so bear that in mind; I've seen it wedge itself against a tree root and just sit their spinning its wheels obliviously, until I freed it. In my fenced back yard I can let it roam relatively unsupervised, with the exception of an occasional check to free it from some minor problem or other (sometimes it gets confused and calls for help). One issue - as a software developer with some relevant expertise, I am a bit irked at being unable to modify the mower's embedded software, as I have little doubt that I could vastly improve its performance - an inquiry to this effect to the company has gone unanswered. While I can appreciate their presumed liability concerns, it would be to their benefit to mobilize the user community to develop and improve upon it - this sort of thing has been a big boon to the iRobot.