An Australian icon known for many a mower is moving to the next generation, and letting a robot do the job so you can sit back and chill.
Weekends can be for the chores in life, such as making sure the home maintenance is sorted and dealing with the outdoors, and that’s typically when you can expect many a home owner to grab the headphones and switch on the lawn mower or trimmer, and dealing with the flecks of green that sprout up unevenly at home.
You probably know the sound all too well, and easily the smell: there’s nothing quite like fresh cut grass, and even though it’s one of the chores of owning a home, it’s still something that invariably needs to happen.
But what if the mower could just do its thing for you. We have robotic vacuum cleaners, so why not lawnmowers?
They do exist, albeit in rare numbers. While robotic vacuums are more common, the robotic lawnmower has existed for a while, and now there’s another, as one of Australia’s device makers and a local lawn mowing icon joins the world of the robotic mower.
Victa has entered robotic lawn mowers with its first this year, the RM100, a small lawnmower that looks like what you’re probably used to seeing in a lawnmower, but without the handles, and that’s because you don’t really need to touch it.
The Victa RM100 includes the blades to handle a lawn and all those specks of green you need trimmed, and can handle areas of up to 600 square meters and up to a 21 degree slope. Defining that lawn if a matter of using boundary wires for the Victa robot mower to respond to, after which it will cut in a random pattern until the whole lawn has been dealt with and covered. You can set the cutting height and mowing frequency, plus if it should be running at a time of day, with Victa adding the motor is quiet, so it can technically run at night.
If your lawn is sprinkled with the occasional obstacle, Victa tells Pickr that bump sensors on the device will be able to steer around them, be it from a fallen branch to something a little more personal from your pet.
Good for up to an hour of battery life, you still don’t need to be there for either the lawn or the charging, as when it starts to run out of battery life, Victa’s robotic mower will make its way back to its docking station, which also charges the thing. It will do much the same when its rain sensor picks up on water droplets beginning to make its way out into the world.
And if this sounds like the sort of thing you’re concerned someone might take off you, the RM100 also comes with a PIN code to lock it and an anti-theft alarm.
You’ll find it across Australia in select stores now, at Bunnings and Victa Gold dealers, available for a recommended retail price of $1299.
