A job that I never look forward to is mowing the lawns. Don’t get me wrong I love being in the garden and gardening in general. I think gardening is great for one’s mental health, but that does not extend to lawn mowing. So, a couple of years ago I bought a robotic lawnmower – a Flymo Easilife 250 – which we dubbed “Robbie”.
In order to get the mower to know where to mow you have to lay a wire around the boundary. This is a pretty straightforward job and you can either peg the cable down (in which case it will simply disappear into the grass over time) or bury it an inch or so below ground. I chose the latter.
All worked well until one day it suddenly stopped working and the base unit, which acts as a home and a charger for the device, showed a flashing blue light. This is the worse possible error as it covers a multitude of sins including that there is a problem with the boundary wire.
And that is how things remained for the next six months with Robbie in his home with nowhere to go as without a complete boundary wire he is effectively blind.
Listen to the Radio
When the weather started improving the grass began to grow again and I knew that I finally needed to get the boundary wire sorted so I bought a radio!
If this seems an odd thing to do it is because the low voltage electrics running through the boundary wire cause interference in the radio signal. Tune the radio to about 700Khz and run the radio along the path of the wire and instead of hearing static you hear a slight pulse and change in tone. When the pulse stops that’s where the break is. More or less. The sound change can be quite subtle so I ended up wearing headphones to hear it better.
I dug up the cable and made a join between the wire and was good to go but it still didn’t work. Checking again I found a second break in the front exactly where the new broadband cable had been laid recently. Despite telling them the cable was there they still managed to sever it. A second repair later and all was well.
It is undoubtedly less stressful having someone else mow the lawn for you but this high-tech approach comes with a higher level of maintenance and its own stresses. However, on balance I much prefer to watch someone else mow my lawns!