About Robot Mower Data
Robot Mower Data compares robot mowers on what their manufacturers publish, measured against what the rest of the category publishes. We do not test machines.
Why this site exists
Robot mowers are bought rarely, kept for years, and chosen from listings that are difficult to compare. Lawn area is stated in acres by some manufacturers and square feet by others, often as a fraction that reads as its own opposite. Cutting width appears in inches, centimetres and millimetres. “Wire-free” covers three different navigation technologies that fail in completely different conditions.
Reading one listing tells you very little. Reading 93 of them, normalised into the same units, tells you what an ordinary robot mower in each class claims — and that is the context that makes a single listing legible. The median machine here is rated for 10,890 sq ft.
What we do
We collect robot mower listings, extract every specification the manufacturer publishes, convert them into consistent units, and compute a baseline for each navigation technology and each lawn-size class. Every page then measures individual machines against the baseline for their own class.
The work that matters most is the cleaning. Push mowers and remote-control machines sit in the same search results as robot mowers. Some listings advertise a fraction of an acre that the extraction reads as a whole number. Some specification tables publish a cutting height that is not a cutting height. Each of those is corrected or excluded before any figure is published, and the methodology page documents exactly how.
What we do not do
We do not physically test robot mowers. No machine described on this site has cut a lawn for us. We say so on every page rather than implying hands-on experience we do not have, because the alternative is a claim that would not survive being asked about.
We do not publish star ratings or review counts. We do not publish exact prices, because a price captured on a scrape date is wrong by the time you read it — where price context is needed, we describe a band. Where a manufacturer has not published a specification, we print not stated rather than filling the gap.
Who writes this
Devon Marsh, Editor, is the byline on this site. Devon is a pen name, and we would rather say so plainly than let a fabricated biography do work it has not earned. There are no trade credentials behind it, and there should not be: a site that states on every page that it does not test machines has no business presenting a credentialed groundsman as its author.
What stands behind the figures is the method, not the persona. It is written down, it is repeatable, and where it fails we would rather publish the gap than paper over it.
Why baselines, and not verdicts
Most buying advice ends in a ranking. Rankings are useful when someone has genuinely tested the field and can tell you which machine performed best. Where nobody has tested anything, a ranking is an opinion dressed as a result, and the confidence it projects is the part that misleads.
A baseline makes a weaker claim and keeps it. It says: here is what an ordinary robot mower of this technology and this class is rated for, computed from every listing we could read, and here is where this particular machine sits against it. That is a fact about the market rather than a judgement about the product, and it is the strongest honest thing a site without a test lawn can offer.
It also happens to be the more useful claim for most decisions. Buyers rarely need to know which robot mower is best in the abstract. They need to know whether the one they are looking at is ambitious or conservative for its class, and whether the specification they are paying extra for is unusual or standard.
The limits, stated plainly
This site inherits every weakness of its source. If a manufacturer publishes an optimistic lawn area, we repeat it — the claim density figure is the only check we can offer, and it measures ambition rather than truth. If a listing omits a specification, we cannot supply it. If a machine is sold only through garden-machinery dealers and never appears in the catalogue we read, it is absent from our baselines entirely and we will not know it is missing.
Coverage is uneven in ways that constrain what can be compared. Run time and charging behaviour are too sparsely published across this corpus to support any comparison, so we offer none rather than comparing the fraction of machines that happen to state one. Noise figures are in the same position. Those are real gaps, and a site that filled them with estimates would look more complete and be worth less.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, it is worth more to us to know than to look right. Specification errors are usually traceable — a manufacturer restated a figure, a listing changed, or our extraction misread a unit. All three have happened, and all three are documented in the methodology.