REVIEW – I dislike mowing the lawn so much that I finally entered the middle-age era of paying neighbor kids to do it in recent years. We have about a quarter acre of grass, and it is a chore I’d rather avoid if possible. Unfortunately, our last lawn mower has moved on, so the timing couldn’t have been better to review the Hookii Neomow X robotic lawn mower.
⬇︎ Jump to summary (pros/cons)
Price: $2199-3199 ($2,699 as reviewed, on sale for $2,375 at time of review)
Where to buy: Hookii
What is it?
The Hookii Neomow X robotic lawn mower is a robotic lawn mower that can handle mowing yards up to 1.5 acres (on the top trim “X Pro” version). It can run on automatic schedules or on demand, and there’s all sorts of settings you can tweak such as number of passes and even direction of the resulting cut lines. It uses LiDAR and optical sensors to map, route, and avoid obstacles. Hookii sent me the Neowow X model, rated for up to an acre of lawn mowing.
What’s included?
- Hookii Neomow X robotic lawn mower
- Quick start guide
- User manual
- Warranty card
- 10 extra blades (2 sets)
- Base station mounting hardware for grass or hard surface installation
- Base charging station
- Cleaning Kit
- Hex key
- AC power cable
Tech specs
Positioning/navigation: 3D LiDar SLAM and Vision
Mower size: 725.2*507.6*336.4mm
Base station size: 520.3*513.7*388.3mm
Obstacle Avoidance: LiDAR/Vision/Bumper
Route Planning: U-shaped and Loop-shaped
Max mowing size: Up to 4000㎡ (1 Acre)
Mowing area per charge: 600㎡
Mowing speed: 0.2-0.6m/s
Mowing Height: 30mm-85mm (1.2 in.-3.3 in.)
Mowing Width: 280mm
Max slope: 24° (45%)
Number of blades: 5
Narrowest passage: 77cm
Auto-recharge and resume: Yes
Network: WiFi (2.4/5GHz), 4G, Bluetooth
Battery: 18V, 13 Ah Lithium
Charging time: 180 mins
Mowing time on full charge: up to 120 mins
Battery operating temp: 0℃~45℃
Battery storage temp: -20~60°C (0~25°C recommended)
Safety systems: Battery management, Tilt sensing, Flip sensor, Rain detection
Noise level: <60dB
Weather resistance: IPx5
Design and features
The general shape of the Hookii Neomow X robotic lawn mower reminds me of an oversized robot vacuum (which makes sense; the technology is pretty similar). Large knobby drive wheels are on each side, a large bumper on the front for obstacle sensing and safety, and the Hookii logo on the front as well.
Up top is the LiDAR dome for mapping and navigation, while an optical camera up front watches for balls/pets/kids/etc.
In the above shot you can see the profile of the mower, as well as a peek of the back wheels that swivel to provide steering.
On the back are the charging pins and some warning stickers.
Flipping the mower on its side reveals the undercarriage. Near the front is a comb that helps rake the grass a bit before reaching the cutter wheel. Said cutter wheel has 5 blades on it which cut by being spun around quickly while the mower moves forward. Note that there’s no clipping collection, all the cut grass is going to fall back down into the lawn (which is what I personally like, but if you prefer to gather and throw away the clippings then this mower isn’t right for you).
The base station has a large reflective blue area up top to help the mower find and navigate in for recharging.
The charging itself is done by the two metal pins shown above. Overall, fit and finish on everything is very nice, no complaints about build quality or quality control.
Assembly, Installation, Setup
The (very large) quick start guide is easy to follow. I set up the base station and plugged it into power, then physically set the Hookii Neomow X robotic lawn mower onto the stand. It lit up and started charging right away, so I proceeded to download the app (available on iOS and Android, tested on Android). After creating an account, the app walks you through setup and firmware updates.
Once all that’s done, it’s time to start mapping, which you do by manually controlling the mower via your phone and the app. You add your first mowing zone by driving to it and then hitting the Add button. The robot is pretty easy to control with the joysticks on the screen (left stick is forward/back while right stick controls left/right). I did have to be careful and start and stop frequently, as sometimes one wheel or the other would get more traction and thus turn the mower a bit to either side. You navigate the mower all around the perimeter of your lawn, then you can add “no go zones” for things like tree rings or any other spot within the perimeter you want it to avoid.
You can map paths between lawn zones, and you are required to map a path to the charging station, to ensure the robot doesn’t randomly get stuck or lost trying to find it after mowing. When you’re done, you save and close the mapping screen. You can come back and modify the zones later (in case the robot is missing areas or otherwise needs to be tweaked in the future). The initial mapping setup took about 45 minutes for our ~1/4 acre lawn.
Performance
You can set up the Hookii Neomow X robotic lawn mower to run on a schedule (as frequently as daily) with specific times to run, or start it up on-demand. Because the review period was interspersed with snow and rainstorms, I only ran it on-demand. We did have some long grass left from last fall though, so I was able to test both the mapping and navigation abilities of the mower, as well as the actual cutting performance.
The first mowing run went pretty well, except for two snags. First, the mower slipped a wheel over one of our concrete landscape edges and couldn’t get back over to the grass. I manually lifted it back and then had to manually resume it in the app. I later re-mapped this area and it did fine on subsequent runs. I believe their centimeter accuracy claim, but sometimes a centimeter is enough to jump an edge when initially mapped right to said edge.
Besides that snag and getting stuck on a basketball pole (again fixed by slight re-mapping), the mower was exceptional. The default settings single pass run did have some random tufts of long grass remaining when it was done, but overall it did great. By selecting a closer distance between lines, the later runs had nearly no missed grass strands, and I could still could have gone overboard and chosen the option to do full second run at a 90 degree angle to the first.
I couldn’t believe how quiet the Hookii Neomow X robotic lawn mower is. The sound of the grass itself being cut is almost as loud as the drive motor moving the wheels. Turning the mowing function on and off could only be verified by that grass cutting sound, the spinning wheel and blades themselves are silent. You could run this mower at any time of day or night without bothering anyone, which is great.
The mower seemed to work just as well in near-darkness as in bright light (though I’ll bet the optical obstacle avoidance only works with daylight). The bumper based avoidance worked like a charm, poles are bumped and then navigated around, and I noticed that the mower would stick its back end into tight spaces to ensure everything gets covered.
My only minor complaint is that in order to avoid jumping the concrete landscape edges around our lawn, I had to leave about a 2 inch strip of uncut lawn, so I’ll still need to run a trimmer and/or edger frequently to avoid long grass at the edges. I wish there was a built in edger of some sort for exactly this scenario, though the safety concerns on that for me would be something to consider as well.
Final thoughts
We were previously paying our neighbor lawn mower $30 a week to mow, so the basic math says that if we’d spent ~$2500 on this Hookii Neomow X robotic lawn mower, it would pay for itself in 83 weeks of mowing. I do love that I could run this daily or every few days and never have long grass (except around the edges). I was impressed with the mapping process, the accurate straight lines, and overall cutting performance of the mower. I look forward to a summer of only periodic trimming instead of frequent mowing, and that alone would make this mower worth it if I hadn’t already received it to review.
What I like about the Hookii Neomow X robotic lawn mower
- Super quiet
- Obstacle avoidance and safety features are great
- Very clean lines after cutting
What needs to be improved?
- Need to do tighter passes or multiple passes to cut all our grass (on default settings it misses some grass blades here and there)
- If you have landscape edging/barriers you’ll likely need to trim the edges when it’s done
- Struggled with some slopes well below the rated climb ability, but got around them eventually
- No clipping collection option
- The multiple small blade setup didn’t seem to chop dry leaves very well, left them mostly intact and ignored
Price: $2199-3199 ($2,699 as reviewed, on sale for $2,375 at time of review)
Where to buy: Hookii
Source: The sample of this product was provided for free by Hookii. Hookii did not have a final say on the review and did not preview the review before it was published.
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I tried this mower a while back and it had a number of issues with my yard. I returned it. I now have a Yarbo version 2 and it does a much better job with many more features.
Hoping to review the Yarbo someday! Costs quite a bit more, but you get what you pay for, right?