Mowrator review: Mowrator and Me

As a tech journalist who typically reviews things that can fit in the palm of your hand, I was shocked to get a call from the courier asking for my help to get the Mowrator off the truck.

The Mowrator is a hefty unit. The base unit weighs about 61kg, but the massive 18Ah 56-volt battery inside (which has its own handle for your convenience) weighs 9.5kg itself; just a little lighter than your average case of tinnies. The sheer size of the battery inspired confidence for the runtime but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little bit nervous about charging the gigantic LiPo battery inside my very flammable house. This isn’t something Mowrator hasn’t considered, mind you, and it has a list of safety features that protect against overheating and overcharging. And true to Mowrator's claims, the massive battery charged in under 90 minutes and lasted even longer than the 2hr 15m runtime. Not all of my time with the Mowrator has been spent mowing, mind you. I've spend a fair bit of time just driving the thing around. But with that considered, I clocked over three hours with the Mowrator before needing to give it some juice. 

My severe paranoia aside, I was pleased to find out that the Mowrator was a breeze to set up. All that was asked of me was to pop on the all-terrain wheels and mount the catcher. Pairing the remote control and the Mowrator was almost instantaneous and signalled conveniently by corresponding green lights on both the Mowrator and the controller. Naturally you will be asked to set a PIN at setup so nobody can nick your Mowrator but that’s about all that’s asked of you. No WiFi, no app and no subscription. What a world.

Learning the controls was almost as straightforward. There are two joysticks for acceleration and rotation, a big emergency stop button front and centre and various switches that are intuitively labelled for speed and settings. For safety reasons, initiating the blades requires you to hold both shoulder buttons down and tap a green button on the touchscreen. Release a shoulder button and the blades will come to a halt. It’s pretty straightforward but I think the hours spent controlling the forklift in GTA: San Andreas prepared me for this moment. 

The controls are intuitive but helped by the fact that the Mowrator turns on a dime. Despite its hulking size, Mowrator is surprisingly easy to manoeuvre in tight spaces. This is handy in more ways than one: obviously, it makes navigating complicated terrain a breeze but it also makes driving it to a shed (or through the house, in my case) nice and comfortable.

Fitting in the shed? Now that’s a whole different story. See, the Mowrator is currently sleeping in my lounge room. That’s fine by me as a temporary solution but my family thinks the Mowrator has overstayed its welcome. I can’t keep it out the front of the house because, well, I’ll refer you back to the matter of price, and I can’t keep it in the shed because it simply won’t fit through the door.

The Mowrator S1 4WD is 66.5cm wide and 1.5m long. That’s significantly larger than anything else that lives in my shed and roughly twice the size of my existing electric lawn mower. All of this is to say, that if you’re spending big on the Mowrator, just make sure you’ve got somewhere convenient to park it. 

Despite being such a heavy-duty piece of machinery, the Mowrator only has an ingress rating of IP54. That means it can take a splash or two over about ten minutes, and a bit of wet grass won’t hurt, but extended rainfall will take a toll eventually. 

It doesn’t have to be locked away; it can be locked with a PIN code and the sheer weight means any potential thief would need about five mates to cart it off; but it does need to be somewhere it’s not in the way. Preferably not in the lounge room where small children can treat it like the world’s most lethal jungle gym. 

Sending the Mowrator S1 4WD off for its first expedition in my backyard felt like sending King Kong outside to pick flowers. It understood the brief and responded to my commands with razor-sharp precision, but it might be too stacked for our precious buffalo lawn (the worst part is, it’s not even my lawn, technically.) 

Hooning around the turf patch out back sure was a fun way to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon. On a flat surface, the Mowrator couldn’t really be faulted. Its height settings don’t quite match my regular mower; where I’d usually cut at a three, the Mowrator offered a little off the top on the second-lowest height setting. Even though I’m scared to go any lower, the second-lowest setting still offered a fine, even trim.

All in all, the backyard was looking fresh after a run around with the Mowrator, even if I did still need to tidy up the edges (but that's also my favourite part.)

The front yard wasn't as easy breezy. The slight incline coupled with a light dew caused the Mowrator's wheels to spin and struggle under it's own weight. It also completely took out a fence pailing I accidentally knicked when trying to get as close to the edge as possible.

In the image above, you can make out the patches of soil where the Mowrator made the most mess. Cranking the speed limiter down a few notches helped the Mowrator find its feet but even on the slowest setting, the AWD wheels struggled with a bit of moisture. 

The thing is, that only matters for more precious lawns like this. The Mowrator S1 was far more useful at my Mum's house; a small, slightly swampy, acreage where the grass grows at an aggressive rate. That seems to be the type of place a working Mowrator could get some good, honest work.