Segway Navimow Robot Lawn Mower H1500VF Review

Segway Navimow Robot Lawn Mower H1500VF Review

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Takeaway: Great coverage, easy setup, can handle complex lawns with steep incline limitations, and still requires some manual cleanup and trimming.

The Segway Navimow robot lawnmower is setup and controlled via the Navimow mobile app available on the Apple App and Google Play stores. I picked this as my robotic lawn care solution because it was the first of its kind to utilize GPS positioning for navigating and setting up wireless virtual boundaries, and this is my second season using it.

When you open the box, a small, black cardboard ruler is embedded in one of the flaps, so be sure to remove this punch out, which you’ll need later for creating a map of your lawn. Navimow as has their own video demonstrating the mapping process, but I’ll show you what that’s like a little later.

In the box, I received the robot lawnmower, AC power adapter, instruction manuals, two metal poles, satellite cable, post-mounting stake, power extension cable, satellite receiver, cord stakes, spiral ground anchors and Velcro ties, markers, cutting blades and screws, set screw, and the charging base station. Additional blades and mounting screws can be purchased separately in packs of 12, which is enough for 4 complete replacements, or about once every 3 months.

We’ll first assemble the satellite post, so you’ll need the receiver, the two poles, lawn stake, and set screw. The top half of the post has a hole for the set screw and two notches on it. Simply line up the notches with the tabs on the receiver and insert it into the top of the post, then fix it in place with the set screw. The cable of the receiver will be opposite the set screw location. Next, insert the narrow end of the bottom post into the bottom of the top half, press firmly until the locking spring retracts and slides in fully. The bottom of the assembly has a threaded hole for the lawn stake to screw into.

The length of the pre-installed satellite cable is about 3 ft, which is just long enough to reach the plug on the charging pad. If you need to install the satellite receiver elsewhere away from the base for better reception, you can use the extension cable provided, which gives you an additional 30 ft of run. The serial port of the satellite has 6-pins compared to the power cable’s whose connector only has 2-pins. When making the connections, line up the pins, insert them firmly, then screw down the cap for a watertight seal.

The charging pad base station measures 31” from front to back, 21.5” wide at the front, and sits about 8” tall. At the front and rear of the charging pad are 4 holes for the ground anchors. The anchors have a hex head on them so you can install them with an Allen wrench or an appropriately sized hex bit and drill. The larger hole at the back right is for the GPS receiver post. Sticking out of the back are the two input connectors for the satellite signal and power cords. Again, it’s easy to distinguish them based on the number of pins. When connecting the power directly to the AC adapter, without the extension cable, you’ll have about 6 ft of length to reach a power outlet.

The mower itself measures 10” tall, 18” wide, and 23” long. Mine has a VisionFence sensor pre-installed, which allows the mower to detect the perimeter of your yard and other obstacles within several feet like trees, large branches and other objects, and areas that are not grass. On top, the mower has an LCD, large red stop button, mow, ok, and home buttons, and these two pins are the rain sensor which will send the mower home, or prevent it from mowing, if they get wet.

On the bottom of the mower is the mowing disc that has 3 cutting blades pre-installed. The blades spin 360 degrees while the disc turns to quickly and efficiently cut your grass. The blades are dual-sided, so when one side wears out, you can flip the blade over to use the other side before it needs to be replaced. The two wheels at the front also rotate 360 degrees for maximum mobility and at the back are the gear-shaped, rubber drive wheels. The cutting disc has a width of a little over 8 inches and just behind it under this door is the battery compartment, so you can swap the battery when it reaches the end of its life.

Before setup, you’ll want to charge the robot mower by pushing its charging port onto the dock post, and you’ll need to cut your grass below 3.5” tall with a traditional lawn mower first, as the Navimow isn’t designed to cut down tall grass and weeds. Instead, it’s meant to maintain your lawn height over time by cutting a little bit off the top more frequently.

You will need the app for setup, which requires you to create an account or login to register your device. I have the H series mower, and Bluetooth must be enabled; select your mower when it comes up, and press the OK button on top of it. Next, connect the mower to your WiFi network. Set the time zone and country. Then if you have a 4G network subscription for the mower, activating it enables cloud access and anti-theft features.

Next, we’ll select a location for the base station and GPS antenna. Ideally, the base station should be placed about 6.5 ft away from any tall structures like your home or trees and placed on a flat, level surface. If installing the satellite at the same location, drive the stake into the ground first, then place the base over it so the threaded part sticks through the large hole at the back right corner. Then fix the base in place with the ground anchors. Assemble the rest of the post then connect the wires at the back. Optionally, you can pin down the wires using the handful of included cord stakes.
The LED on the GPS receiver will be green when the unit has power, and if there’s a strong satellite signal the light on the base will be green or blue. If the light is yellow, there is a poor signal, and red means no signal or an error. For me, I had to set the receiver post away from the base about 8 ft for a consistently strong satellite signal.

If you need to install a firmware update, the mower needs to be charging in the station with more than 20% battery, and have an internet connection. Next, you’ll need to create your first map by tapping the create map button at the bottom. The first time you do this, the mower may be locked and on the LCD you’ll see a flashing lock symbol; this is the battery life indicator, the WiFi signal strength, Bluetooth, and status. Pressing OK brings us to the PIN entry screen and pressing the ‘Mow’ or ‘Home’ buttons changes the numbers; press ‘OK’ to confirm the digit and enter the default PIN ‘0000’. You can change this later in the app. Once unlocked, the lock icon disappears and the status stops flashing.

Mapping your yard is kind of a fun process. You’ll drive your mower around the perimeter of your yard like an RC car using your phone as a controller. Here’s where the cardboard ruler comes into play. On the back of the cardboard ruler is a double-sided sticker that you need to mount above the rear, right wheel. This is the distance you’ll want to keep from the edge of your lawn while mapping, and keep the outside perimeter to the right side of the mower. My only issue was that the sticker wasn’t very strong, so I had to reinforce it with some packing tape. At the top of the base station is a reminder that once mapping is completed, if you move or change the position of the base station or satellite receiver, you’ll have to delete and re-create the map.

Once the map is complete, you’ll see the base station on it, and you can add elements like off-limit islands, created by driving the mower around areas on the map that it should avoid like bushes and trees. If you’ve created multiple zones, you’ll need to add a channel between them where the mower can cross. The total area of my map is just under 5000 sq ft. You’ll notice that my yard isn’t square though, and it has a really complex shape. This large cutout on the left-hand side is the vegetable garden, and the reason the back perimeter isn’t a straight line is because there are trees and trellises here that don’t allow the grass to grow under them. I found that the mower tends to get stuck in bare patches of dirt as the wheels dig ruts into the soil when it’s very dry, so I found it best to just have the mower go around these areas where there’s no grass to cut anyway.

This elongated cutout is actually the side of a steep hill and although the mower can climb up to 24° inclines, or a 45% slope, it can’t make it up or down some of our hills. The same is true in the second zone on the other side of the house. But as you can see, it does fine on these small hill going up or down. The mower doesn’t make a lot of noise while cutting and is near silent when operating. It moves quite slowly though, but I’m not that worried about how quickly it finishes since it picks up where it leaves off if it can’t finish the entire map on 1 charge. The VisionFence sensor also allows it to avoid this pole, even though it’s no explicitly on the map. When it does bump something, the blade stop sensor shuts off the cutter for safety as it maneuvers away from the obstacle.

When tracking its progress, the darker areas are areas that have been cut, while the lighter ones have not been. So in this zone you can see a spot in the middle that wasn’t mowed and that’s because we have a little paver pad there without an off-limit island that the VisionFence sensor decided to avoid on its own.

You’ll also notice in zone 1 that the mower is cutting parallel lines on a diagonal and the orientation of the lines change with each successive cut to avoid rut lines. You can also see that it’s already gone around the perimeter of the map and each of the off-limit islands first, before filling in and cutting the rest of the lawn.

I’ve setup my schedule to cut only on the weekdays in the afternoon but it’s easy to add more time to the schedule, and you can even choose which specific zones you want cut for each time slot. You can set your desired grass height from 1.2 to 2.4 inches, enable mowing at night, choose between standard or efficient mowing, toggle on and off the sensors, and even use your smart home assistant like Alexa or Google to control the mower with voice commands. For those with a 4G subscription, you can enable the geo-fence alarm or track it with the find my mower feature.

Overall, I really like having this robot mower because it cuts down on a majority of our lawn mowing needs. It can’t quite give us full coverage because of our steep hills, which we still have to cut manually, and I wish the edge work was a little bit cleaner, since we still have to go in and hit spots that the mower misses. However, it keeps 80-90% of our lawn trim and neat and prevents most of the weeds from popping up and going to seed. The rain sensor sometimes isn’t sensitive enough, and we’ll see it out mowing even if it’s drizzling, and the wheels can sometimes pickup a decent amount of mud which you have to scrap out to ensure that it maintains good traction. For us, it usually covers about 3000 sq ft per day and cuts the entire map over the course of two days, as we only let it run a couple hours per day. With flipping the blades over to use the second side we end up changing them out only once per year so they last quite a long time. With recent firmware updates, careful mapping and defining of off-limit islands, and ensuring there aren’t any low clearance obstacles, it very rarely gets stuck or has any issues requiring us to intervene.

Since my model is already a couple years old already, Navimow has released a number of newer models in their I and X3 series with units suitable for lawns ranging from 1/8 to 2.5 acres, with the latest models supporting new features like dual antennas and could-based real-time weather responses.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. #CommissionsEarned
Buy it at Amazon: Segway Navimow Robot Lawn Mower H1500VF [Affiliate Link]
Buy Direct from Navimow: https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=2558876&u=997190&m=154959&urllink=&afftrack= [Navimow Affiliate Product Link]