Tahiti Eyelet Lined Voile Curtains, Lime, 56 x 72-Inch

We have an orchard containing semi-standard trees, so while they are tall enough for weeds to grow underneath - and hence to require mowing - they are also so low that going under the trees on either a lawn tractor or with a walk-behind mower means that you get scratched to pieces, and lots of twigs and spiders (and worse) in your hair. It's also on about a 10 degree slope in places, is very much ex-field rather than lawn, and has suffered visits in the past from my dairy farmer neighbour's milking herd, so it is not exactly the velvet smooth lawn so beloved of lifestyle magazines. I've added some photos of the mower itself, the docking station and also a general view of terrain and trees to show what it faces.In summary it is quite a difficult proposition: rough grass, bumpy surface, reasonable slope and plenty of obstacles in the form of trees, and its area is 400 square metres which is at the top end of this machine's capability. Yet this little chap (and he's definitely male) copes really well.Installation: is straightforward. Read the instructions, then read them again to make sure you've understood all the concepts. In particular obey the minimum spacings recommended for the various cables, and if you need to route cable through a narrow gap I suggest that you peg it down first and try it out, as you may end up adjusting its location once you see how it is used. Note that it tracks a variable distance to the *side* of, not on, the homing wire (to the left as viewed going "home") to avoid leaving marks, so you need to leave more space on that side than you might expect. As others have remarked once you've got the cable routes worked out you need to bury them, especially if your surface is rough. This is a time-consuming and messy job, but is simple enough.Coverage: as I have remarked above I have plenty of obstacles in the form of trees, and this means that there is a fair bit of "bump into tree, stop, head off in a different direction" going on - it's a sort of slow-motion pinball game effect. This works, and the random choice of a new direction works reasonably well, however there is no getting round the fact that an area of garden densely populated with obstacles will get more mowing attention than a more open area, and you should consider this when siting both the docking station and the intersection where the homing wire meets the loop of wire that goes around the boundary. The mower can be programmed to start mowing at the far end of the homing wire (at its intersection with the boundary wire) at various frequencies ranging from rarely through to always, and if you have both open and congested areas it will probably pay you to locate either the docking station or the intersection point in the open area, since this will give you some degree of control over the time it spends in these different areas.Terrain: it copes surprisingly well with rough ground, but you will soon learn from observation if you have any localised holes that flummox it. Either they cause it to "nosedive" in, think it has hit an obstacle, stop and head off in a different direction; or in the worst case it simply gets stuck. The solution is simple enough, just fill in the hole; however if your lawn is at all rough be prepared to find it stuck a few times in the first weeks of operation until you have identified and filled in these hollows. Molehills present less of a problem since it just hits them, stops and moves away, and molehills can be a convenient source of earth for filling in the aforementioned hollows!Rain: doesn't seem to affect it much, although it does increase slightly the chances of it getting stuck in "difficult" areas where rough ground is combined with a confined space. This is fair enough, and you soon learn where these are and sort them out. So far as I can tell rain does not affect the quality of the cut, although it does increase slightly the chances of leaving wheelmarks in difficult regions where it has experienced some wheel-spin or has had skidded when turning.Safety: I would say that it would be near impossible for a dog, child, chicken or anything else to get injured. It moves at a slow walking pace, detects any sort of contact via a very soft bump at which it stops immediately, and it also knows if it has been lifted up or toppled over and again stops itself immediately. Sorry to any personal injury ambulance-chasing lawyers reading this, you'll have to look elsewhere for business.Cut quality: I've only used it on the highest setting (it gives a range of 1cm to 5cm) since my ground is rough. Where is has made sufficient passes the grass looks as if it has been cut by a conventional rotary mower, ie short but no stripes. It does miss the odd tuft in the more open areas, but as I have remarked above I think this is a feature of the variable "obstacle density" in our orchard, which has clumps of trees in some areas and open expanses in others. The good news from my point of view is that it does lots of bumping into trees which, in turn, means it does lots of mowing *under* trees, which is exactly the bit I find difficult. I'm happy to whizz over the more open areas occasionally with the lawn tractor, and I think that a more conventional lawn would not suffer from this problem anyway.Edges: our orchard is fenced, and I have buried the the perimeter wire about 8 inches (20cm in heathen units) in from the fence. Since the cutter is a rotating disk that is about half the width of the machine this means that you will inevitably end up with an uncut fringe of grass if your lawn is bordered by obstacles of any height and you need to be prepared to cut these manually. You'll get the same fringe effect around any interior obstacles - but then you'd get pretty much the same effect with an ordinary mower, so it's not really very different in that respect.Timing: it has a built-in clock and can be programmed to mow within a set period. The default setting is 7am to 11pm, but despite our orchard being 400 square metres, the supposed maximum for this machine, I have cut its hours down to 9am to 8pm since it clearly did not need all that mowing time - and this is in warm wet Devon where grass grows like crazy. Perhaps this is because I have it on the highest height setting (5cm), but nevertheless I think it could easily cope with at least a 30% larger area in our conditions, and probably more in a dryer area with less grass growth.Noise: as near silent as makes no difference. There is a whirr from the drive motors and another from the motor spinning the cutting disk, but the loudest noise is from the blades hitting the grass and you'd need good hearing to pick that up above ambient noise from more than 20 yards away. The beeps it makes when it stops after it thinks it might have hit someone are loud enough to be audible without being intrusive. While charging in its docking station it is absolutely silent.Security: it has a PIN number that has to be typed in to re-activate it any time is it stopped manually, picked up or generally handled. This is the lowest level of security and you can go to higher levels which will sound alarms and things if it is picked up. We live 1/2 mile from the public road so I'm not too worried about thieves and use the lowest setting, but if you are going to use it in a very public area that doesn't have someone nearby who would investigate noises promptly you will need to give this some thought. I suspect a thief would feel a bit embarrassed walking around with a bright orange terrapin shaped object under his arm that was shrieking its head off, but that might not stop him smashing it out of annoyance. Realistically I think this sort of technology is only suited to reasonably enclosed and secure areas which, to be fair, is probably a description of most large lawns.Aesthetics: Flymo colour their products orange, bright orange. Yuk! Hopefully even the marketing folk will eventually twig that not everyone wants a bright orange thing burbling around their lawn, and produce it in different colours. In the meantime a judicious application of black silage tape works wonders...Maintenance: I've found that the blades have got pretty blunt after about 6 weeks so that it barely cuts which - in theory - means removing and replacing both blades and screws, which is a two minute job requiring only a screwdriver. It uses three blades, and Flymo provide 9 spares + screws in the box with instructions to change the screws as well as the blades in case wear of the former leads to blades flying off. When I took mine apart a visual inspection showed that the screws were absolutely fine and the blades were just blunt, so after a bit of honing on a whetstone the original blades and screws have gone back on, and it is cutting beautifully again. Make up your own mind about whether to replace or sharpen, but I think inspection and common sense is the way to go. Otherwise I muck out compacted grass and mud from its underside about once a fortnight, or after very wet weather, and that's it - no other maintenance has been required during the cutting season.Problems: so far no significant ones. The setup needs tuning, and in particular I've had to learn where and why it gets stuck and adjust things accordingly. Given the variable congested / open nature of our orchard it is a bit frustrating not to have more control over where and how it cuts but you get what you pay for. I think I may in fact end up adding artificial obstacles to the more open areas as a way of forcing it to spend more time there, but then I'd still have to hand mow around them, so maybe it's not worth it. Bigger wheels to give a better capability on rough ground would be useful for us, and in fact the bigger Husqvarna models have this ... at a price.Quality and performance: after three months I am increasingly impressed. The grass obviously likes the "little and often" treatment since it looks better now than it has ever done in the past. My wife thinks it looks better than when I cut it which - given how much I hated doing it - is a definite case of mixed emotions! Despite bumping into trees 100s of times a day the machine shows no obvious signs of wear and is still working perfectly.In summary I'm impressed, in fact more impressed than I expected to be. It's not perfect, and it's a hideous colour, but I really hated mowing that orchard and now I don't have to. In other words it does what it says on the tin, and does it better than I expected. If you are dithering because you are not sure whether it will do the job my experience is that it will, and I would recommend it.[Update March 2016] I bought this in summer 2015 and after a winter's hibernation it is back working again. When first reinstalled it simply would not work properly, detecting "false" collisions every few seconds and stopping repeatedly. Finally it showed a "rear sensor faulty, get it serviced message".Well, it has a 2 year guarantee so I could have sent it back, but instead I decided to attempt a bit of amateur fault-finding and solved the problem really easily. The instructions state that you should store it upright, and in fact I left if (one could say this is "upright") on its nose all winter, which led to the four flexible rubber supports which connect the shell to the body become permanently bent forwards. This meant that the magnet attached to the shell was not central in the collision sensor slot on the body, hence the detection of false collisions. It was easily fixed by rotating two of the rubber mounts by 180 degrees, cancelling out the overall bending, and now it is absolutely fine and back working happily. So, with hindsight, my fault - but if you get one don't store it "upright", but rather "flat" on its wheels!Also I was so impressed with it that I have bought a second one, which is now busily cutting a different area of lawn. That's a pretty serious endorsement of how good these machines are.One word of warning: these little machines will not cope with the long (eg 4+ inches) and dense wet grass that grows over a typical winter, so when you first install them in the spring you need to cut the grass manually. Cutting once a year is a small price to pay for relief from weekly slavery, but I'm afraid that you can't throw away the conventional mower altogether.[Update June 2016] Herbie I (orchard dweller) is fine; Herbie II, installed at the beginning of April, is doing well in his separate area of grass.Herbie II's domain is a much larger area, probably around 650 square metres (the 150m metre drum of cable that came in the box wasn't enough to go round the perimeter, and I had to buy another reel) yet he is keeping it down without any trouble. This is a more garden-like area with flower-beds as well as shrubs, and it is roughly "U" shaped so I have his docking station in one leg of the U and the junction with the boundary wire going round the bend into the other leg. This is the solution given in the destruction manual, and configured to start remotely at the far end 50% of the time it seems to work well with even coverage in both legs of the U.There are various "tight" areas and near cul-de-sacs in this patch of garden, and I have had to leave the tightest of these outside his working area to avoid his getting trapped in them. The manual suggests that 2 metres is the minimum width and, based on observation of his behaviour, this feels about right. We have one salient that is about 3m x 3m and when he goes in there he can end up doing a lot of toing and froing before he finally escapes again. Not only does this waste time and battery power, it also results in the ground becoming a bit trampled by the continuous turning.I couldn't be bothered to lay boundary wire around all the flower-beds, and anyway if you use a spade to tidy up the edges you could end up exposing or cutting the boundary wire if you forget exactly where it is. So instead we have been experimenting with different edging solutions, and at the moment the favourite is pieces of wood, about 8" long x 1.5" wide, wired together in a roll. (Available pretty cheaply from the nation's most ubiquitous supermarket.) Held in position in the "precipice" around the edge of the bed by short bamboo canes these extend about 2" or 3" above grass level forming a low-level barrier which doesn't look too bad. The arrangement has a little bit of give so Herbie hits gently, pushes it back slightly in the process before stopping, and so cuts pretty much up to the edge of the bed without leaving a fringe of longer grass. And where this doesn't quite work you can strim up against the wood without damaging anything. It's not a perfect solution, and I have been mulling over alternatives, but so far haven't come up with anything better that is cost-effective.He is currently working at the factory preset of 7am to 10pm, 7 days a week, and that was necessary in May when we had a flush of grass. However now that growth is slowing down I will cut his hours back a bit since he is coping easily with this area. Like our orchard it is ex-field, hence rye-grass which doesn't look good if cut too short, so I have his height set to about 4.5 cm.So, once again, I'm very pleased and the grass looks miles better than when I did it myself. I think this improvement in appearance is a feature of rye-grass and uneven ground: my tractor has a 42" cut so, inevitably, grass on raised areas gets cut too short exposing the lighter-coloured base of the blades of grass. Herbie rides over the bumps and only cuts a swathe about 8" wide, so he follows the contours of the ground more closely and gives a more even cut as a consequence.[Update April 2017] After a winter's hibernation (horizontal this time!) Herbies I and II are back out at work. The machines themselves seem to have survived the winter OK: I charged them fully before storing them last autumn, and also gave them another charge before setting them to work this spring. I also stored the docking stations and power supplies indoors over the winter, but reinstalling those is quick and easy.I get the feeling that their battery capacity (as in time between recharges) is starting to degrade, but I haven't made any quantitative measurements and after 2 years they clearly have enough oomph to continue doing the job for at least another year.The grass was definitely too long for them by the time it was dry enough to turn them out to work, so I had to cut it manually, but once that was done they seem happy enough to get on with the job once more. (As I've remarked above this is warm, wet Devon where things grow like crazy; if you are somewhere drier you may not have this problem.)Problems: only two, and both mole-related. Maybe the worms here have a high kryptonite content, but whatever the reason the moles managed to cut through the homing wire in one location, so I had to locate and fix that. Also excavation by said moles, plus digging by the dogs trying to catch the moles, mean that we have a new crop of bumps and hollows in which the Herbies can get stuck. So I have been busy shovelling earth from molehills to hollows, and then rolling, to try to flatten things out. I'm now down to about one "rescue from hole" operation a day, which is no great burden, and it is getting better all the time.[Update September 2018] Herbies I and II have had another mostly successful year. I turned them off during the dry spell this summer because the grass had stopped growing and they were chewing up some edges a bit. I think the problem was that the way they turn is by skidding their single rear roller, and when the ground gets dry and the grass sparse this can ending up moving soil rather than skidding over the grass.Our moles have also had a good year :-( and I have had to spend quite a lot of time filling in holes where their tunnels have collapsed in the dry weather, otherwise the Herbies get stuck. The moles can also lift the boundary wire to the surface when the grass cover is eroded, whereupon it can get cut through, so I have had to do some mending. I have found that the wire tends to get cut in similar locations, and to speed up the process of finding the break I now feed both ends into a short section of plastic pipe (say 6 inches long) which I drive vertically into the ground leaving the top and connector exposed. The connectors have 3 holes, and you only use two to fix a break, so you can put the terminal of a multi-meter into the 3rd hole which makes finding the broken section a *much* faster process.They have done 3 and 2 years respectively and are still working well, with no obvious signs of reduced battery life, and are coping easily with the size of their working areas.Problems: only one this year. After their winter hibernation I, like others, found that the connectors on the wires that attach to the back of the base unit fell apart, so I have replaced them with automotive spade terminals. This is easy and cheap to do, but begs the question of why Husqvarna saved fractions of a penny by using such grotty ones in the first place!Like others I have had to replace the shoddy connectors to the base unit with automotive spade terminals, but that is a cheap and easy job.

The media could not be loaded.  This is a review of the Easilife Go 150I'm writing this review a week after purchase (7th April 2022) and will update at regular intervals.First thing to note is that there is no real difference in new Easilife Go 150 / 250 / 500 range of lawnmowers. The only difference is the length of boundary wire and pegs you are given. My garden is around 100m squared and the amount of boundary wire provided by the Easilife Go 150 was more than enough. This was an impulse buy for me after receiving a notification on my Amazon app. I had been looking for a new lawnmower but hadn't considered a robotic lawnmower as I was under the impression they didn't really work properly. However, after reading the reviews and looking up reviews on YouTube I was convinced that they work well and that the price at the time was a cheap as they ever have been on a deal (I paid £372.99 for the 150 model, the 500 model was available for £409.99).Set UpAfter reading the reviews I expected the set up to me much more difficult and time consuming than it was. I have a relatively simple rectangular shape garden and I managed the set up in under an hour. It is much easier to follow the official Flymo set up video on YouTube (just search for it) than to follow the instructions provided. I am not a very practical person or a major DIYer but I managed it with ease. Also managed to connect it to my Android phone (Google Pixel 4a) with ease first time. By the way, you don't need to use a phone app to for the lawnmower, it can be used standalone without the phone, it just makes life easier.First StartI was a little perplexed at first that the lawnmower was sitting in it's charging dock and not moving despite me telling it to start both manually on the lawnmower and on the phone app. However, when I moved it from the charging dock to the grass it started working. I later realised that it will not move from the charging dock at first until it reaches 100% charge. So if you wonder why it will not move from the charging dock on its first use, this will be why. It worked its way around the garden and found its way home to charge when the battery it went down to around 20%. Then it moved back out again when it was fully charged. I have set it to mow for 4 hours a day but I will adjust as time goes on. I expect it will only need to be on duty 3-4 times a week.Cutting and PerformanceIt did a very good job cutting the grass down. It makes very small cuts and does not collect the grass but leaves it on the lawn. I thought this would be an issue but it wasn't. You don't notice any of the cuttings on the lawn unless you look very closely. I have found that the cuttings have increased the quality of lawn already, as the cuttings naturally fertilises it. I started at the highest cutting height (3) and the reduced it to the middle cutting height (2) which is perfect for me. The advice is to gradually reduce the cutting height. I didn't take any notice of this, and sure enough, I paid the price - it cut through a part of the boundary wire that was a little high. However, this was easily fixed (2 minute job) by using one of the spare electrical wire connectors provided. After this I also bought an extra pack of 20 wire connectors from Amazon for £7.99 for potential future use. Well worth an investment. Lot's of people recommend burying the boundary wire when first setting it up, but if you do this it will be difficult to find any wire breaks in the early weeks when potential problems are likely to arise. As the weeks go by the wire will gradually sink into the lawn and get overgrown by grass anyway. I main problem is that people ignore the advice to put the boundary wire at least 10cm away from the edge in the hope of a closer cut of the edge of the grass, but if you have a weeds, clumps, dips or bumpy ground beyond the wire the lawnmower will lift or fall and in doing so change the angle of the cutting blades and potentially cut the boundary wire. I find that it edges the lawn perfectly with the boundary wire set 10cm away.A Note on Changing the Cutting HeightAt first I just couldn't work out how to change the cutting height and the advice on Amazon Questions seemed different from different people. A lot of people told me I just had to turn a knob that didn't exist on my model. I have since discovered that there have been subtle changes to the models over the years. My current 150 model is the latest model and was released in February 2021. On these newer models you have to take the small top cover off (the black plastic bit, not the main orange cover) and there you will find a hex key. You then flip the mower on it's back and unscrew the blade mechanism and place it back on the mower on a different setting that is outlined. Easy when you know how but this took me ages to work out.Neighbour's and Dog's Best FriendA big bonus is that it is very very quiet, unbelievably quiet. You will be able to set it off to cut the grass at any time without disturbing the neighbours. Indeed it is very relaxing and meditative to watch. Also, my dog used to go absolutely mental when I used my hover mower to cut the grass and I was worried he would also bark at the robot mower. Praise the Lord, he takes no notice of it at all and this has saved me a lot of stress as no more unhappy spouse and children as the dog no longer bounces up and down at the patio doors like a demented banshie for an hour or so while I cut the grass.Final WordsIn short, if you're tempted to buy this but not sure. Take the plunge and go for it. It is my favourite buy of the year so far. I love it. Easy to set up and works brilliantly.