I’ve been eager to test drive some robot lawnmowers for some time, and just like waiting for a bus, two came along at the same time. To kick off Goosed.ie’s lawnmower review season is the Eufy E15. I’ve installed this where it looks after two gardens. Previously, two gardens which were constantly overgrown – my Mum’s house.
They’d get cut once every couple of weeks if they were lucky, and now they’re being topped every single day while I look on from afar. That change alone has pretty much everybody in the family bamboozled by the little thing trundling around outside, left asking how did we ever live without it.
The Eufy E15 is a robot lawn mower that navigates using on-board cameras and AI vision rather than the boundary wires most robot mowers have traditionally needed. It covers lawns up to 800 square metres, handles multiple zones, adjusts its cutting height from the app, and costs €1,200 in Ireland at the likes of Amazon.ie. That’s not cheap, but for that money you skip the wire installation entirely, and that turns out to matter more than I expected.
I’ve been running it through an Irish summer heatwave, so there are caveats I’ll get to, including one mistake that was entirely my own fault. But the short version is that this is one of the most quietly useful bits of technology I’ve tested in a long time.
No boundary wires changes what a robot lawnmower can do
The E15 runs on what Eufy calls AI vision, and it’s actually quite good. Instead of detecting a wire buried around the edge of your lawn, it uses cameras and smart algorithms to see where the grass ends and the flowerbed, footpath or fence begins. The obvious upside is that you don’t have to install any boundary wires, which is the fiddly, back-breaking part of traditional robot mower ownership.
The less obvious upside is that it expands what the mower can cover. Because there’s no wire dictating a single enclosed area, you can send it out to completely different parts of your garden including through transit areas. We have two separate gardens, and the E15 handles both. You map a pathway between garden one and garden two in the app, the mower remembers it, and from then on it just commutes between the two on its own. If you have a big garden, or two separate ones like us, this is a really clever way of bridging that gap, and it’s all down to the fact that it navigates with cameras instead of wires.
There is a downside, though only a small one. Because the whole system depends on cameras, the mower is limited to daylight hours. In summer that’s no bother at all, you have a big long window and mine happily works away between 6am and 8pm, deciding for itself when to run. In winter that window shrinks considerably. A wire-guided mower doesn’t care whether it’s bright out. This one does.
If the mower gets lost in the top garden, it can also be an issue as it’s likely going to be out of WiFi range. More of an issue if you’re not around to correct it in the evening but ultimately, I don’t expect my mother to drag the Eufy E15, which we’ve affectionately named Alan after Alan Titchmarsh, back to his dock.
Setting up the Eufy E15
I took this thing out of the box and it was mapping within ten minutes. That’s not an exaggeration. You place the charging station in a corner of the garden, turn the machine on, it does a quick mapping run of your entire lawn, and it learns. Honestly, the hardest part of the whole setup is sorting out power, because the mower itself is really clever and really easy to get going.
On power, the E15 comes with a lovely long, thin cable that gives you decent flexibility on where the station can live. Ideally you want an outdoor IP68 or IP69 rated socket to plug it into. Being totally transparent, I haven’t done that yet. I bought the proper IP-rated socket but ran out of time to install it, so it’s currently running off a weather-rated extension into a waterproof box. Not the permanent solution, but it’s been running fine on it, and that’s the important thing.
Two gripes from setup. The ground pegs that anchor the station are plastic and pretty crappy. Our earth is quite stony, and one peg broke going in. In fairness, I was driving them with a battery-powered drill, which was probably too much for them, and the rest went in fine. The second issue was the 5cm step between our two gardens, which is too high for the mower to climb on its own. I lobbed a cheap ramp in from AliExpress, and even that wasn’t enough at first because the wheels slipped on the way up. Some Gorilla spray glue and a bit of felt on the ramp sorted it, and now it flies up and down without a bother.
This final step was critical to the two gardens being automated as this now meant Alan could venture out daily, unaided, and cut all grass on the property.
Daily topping instead of weekly cutting
This is one of those moments where technology challenges your mental model of how a job should be done. With a traditional lawnmower, you cut the grass once a week or whenever it starts looking shaggy. You’re taking off a lot of grass each time, maybe halving the length of every blade, hauling the box off the back and emptying it into the compost over and over.
A robot lawnmower works completely differently. It runs every day and constantly tops the grass, taking maybe ten percent (or even less) off instead of doing a big dramatic cut once a week. There’s no collection box because the clippings are so fine they just disappear back into the lawn which ultimately feeds it too. It also means the machine is far less likely to clog up, including in wet weather, because it’s never trying to chew through long grass.
One small thing I’ve noticed and quite enjoy is the lawn lines. Because the mower cuts in such a regimented, pre-programmed pattern, you get lovely straight lines across the grass that make it look like you put in far more effort than you actually did, which in my case was none.
The blades reflect that approach. This isn’t a traditional mower deck. Underneath there are four small razor blades, not far off Gilette razors, spinning at high speed, and replacements come in the box. Because the mower is always maintaining rather than hacking, it’s not hard on them at all.
One catch applies to robot mowers in general. You still need a regular lawnmower to start the process, because the grass has to come down to the height you want maintained before the robot takes over. That’s probably the biggest hiccup in the whole setup.
I’ll also own my one big mistake. We’re in the middle of a heatwave and I had the cutting height set way too low, so a good chunk of the lawn got scorched. Longer grass protects the roots and drought conditions. That’s not the mower’s fault. The grass gets a kind recovery period now while I learn how to actually look after a lawn, because this is my first year genuinely trying.
The result of this learning is the mower currently runs less frequently and at a higher cut.
The Eufy app and features
The Eufy app is fairly good. You can control schedules, manually kick off a session for one lawn or the other, or just leave it running its daily routine. Cutting height is adjustable remotely from 20mm up to 75mm, which is more useful than it sounds. If I’m away on holidays and see a hot spell coming, I can raise the height in the app so the grass holds more moisture. In hindsight, that’s exactly what I should have been doing before the heatwave.
There’s anti-theft built in too, so the mower should alarm if somebody lifts it. In my testing I couldn’t actually get that to work. It may have been down to Wi-Fi signal in the garden, or the fact that I never activated the GSM unit that’s also tucked inside, but either way it didn’t trigger for me. There are child protection measures as well, letting you lock the keypad on the mower itself so small hands can’t set it off.
What the Eufy E15 struggles with
No robot mower is perfect around obstacles, and this one is no different. It struggles to get tight to the base of things like a washing line pole, and certain obstacles will leave a little collar of longer grass for you to tidy occasionally. On lawn edges it’s better than I expected. Where the grass meets a footpath it can get right onto the margin, and you can adjust how wide a margin you deem acceptable in the app.
The feature I’d really like is predictive control. If there’s a heatwave coming in two weeks, I want the mower to stop cutting short on its own. For now, that’s a job I have to manage manually by raising the height when the forecast turns, but it feels like an obvious software update waiting to happen.
A bit of an unknown for now is wet weather. I’ve seen Alan stop cutting in the rain, returning to his dock and waiting it out for a few hours before coming back to work. But I’ve yet to see him work with a few days of solid rain. Or after a few days of sitting cutting out in the winter and coming back to cut longer, slightly higher grass. That is an unknown for now but I will update this review in due course.
The Goosed verdict
The Eufy E15 has taken two constantly overgrown gardens and turned them into lawns that are quietly maintained every single day, and the difference in just knowing that job is handled is huge. It’s the same trick a robot vacuum pulls. It doesn’t completely eliminate the job, but it stays on top of the vast majority of it, and that is a really valuable thing to have in your life. Robot lawn mowers are clearly growing in popularity in Ireland, and having lived with one for a while now, I completely get it.
It’s been left unattended for days at a time and just keeps going about its business. Setup took minutes, the app is genuinely useful, and the wire-free AI vision means it can do things, like serving two separate gardens, that wired mowers simply can’t without a lot of installation pain. The daylight-only limitation is real and worth knowing about before winter, and you’ll still need a regular mower for the very first cut. Neither changes my mind.
If you have a big garden, an awkward garden, or two of them, this is the cleverest way I’ve seen to hand the whole job over. The Eufy E15 costs €1,200 in Ireland and is available from Amazon.ie, Irish retailers like DID as well as directly from Eufy.
