Support tickets in the first seven days after delivery are remarkably consistent. Almost none of them are faults — they are questions about how the machine is meant to behave, from people who have nothing to compare it against yet.
Here are the eight we see most, answered before you need to ask.
“Where exactly should the base station go?”
Somewhere with the widest possible view of open sky, and as far as practical from the wall of the house. Under the eaves, beside a chimney or tucked against a tall hedge are the three placements that cause the most trouble. If your only mains outlet is in a poor spot, an extension for the RTK power supply is a cheaper fix than moving the socket.
“The map does not match my lawn exactly.”
Perimeter mapping records the path you drove. If you cut a corner while walking it, the map has that corner cut. Redrawing a boundary takes two minutes and costs nothing — nobody gets it perfect on the first walk, and you are not expected to.
“It is leaving a strip along the fence.”
The blades sit inside the body, so no robot mower cuts flush to a vertical edge; there is always a margin of a few centimetres. Where you want a hard edge, the usual answer is a mowing strip — a line of paving flush with the turf that the mower can drive over. Otherwise it is a few minutes with a strimmer every couple of weeks.
“It drove over the same area twice.”
Deliberate. Path planning includes overlap between passes, because a mower that aimed for zero overlap would leave uncut ribbons wherever it drifted by a centimetre. Even coverage is worth the extra minutes.
“Why is it out again? It mowed yesterday.”
Because that is the design. Robot mowing is not a weekly event compressed into a machine — it is continuous light topping, taking two or three millimetres at a time so the clippings are fine enough to disappear. It looks excessive for a fortnight, and then the lawn starts looking better than it did and the question stops.
“It stopped and told me it was blocked.”
Look for the thing that was not there when you drew the map: a hose, a football, a garden chair moved for the weekend, a fallen branch. Vision-based avoidance steers around what it recognises, but something wedged against the deck needs a hand. A quick sweep of the lawn before a scheduled run removes most of these.
“How often do I actually have to clean it?”
More often in spring than in August, because wet growth packs into the deck. Once a fortnight in peak season is a reasonable habit, more if you mow early with dew on the grass. The deck opens without tools precisely so this is a two-minute job rather than a project.
“Can I leave it out all summer?”
The mower and dock are weather-rated for it, so yes through the season. Two caveats: bring it in for winter storage rather than leaving it out through months of freeze and thaw, and if it lives somewhere visible from the road, turn on the PIN lock and position alerts on day one rather than after an incident.
The pattern behind all of them
Almost every first-week question is the same question underneath: is this normal? Usually it is. The setup that takes an hour is not the part that determines how well the next three years go — an accurate map, a sensible schedule and a lawn cleared of loose objects is most of it.
