I tried the Eufy E15 for my first spring mow — it’s good, but has a serious navigation problem

If you’re anything like me, getting back out into your garden during the warmer months is a supremely exciting prospect. Dampening that excitement for me, though, is the onus and rigmarole of mowing my lawn.

That’s why robot lawnmowers like the Eufy E15 exist! This mower is designed for smaller lawns, up to 0.2 acres / 809 square meters, with an array of smart features to make your life easier. There’s auto-mapping, zonal and pathway control, adjustable cutting height, a remote control function, and anti-fog cameras. It’s built well, is super easy to set up and use, and cuts very evenly.

Unfortunately, the E15 has a few issues that stop it achieving one of our perfect scores. Its plasticky wheels lose grip easily on damp or dewy grass, and it struggles with only lightly uneven terrain. It also has issues mapping longer grass and trimming edges.

Could this still be the right robot lawnmower for you? There’s a lot of potential, as long as you know its limitations. Read my full Eufy E15 robot lawn mower review to find out more.

Eufy E15 review: Specs

Eufy E15 review: Price & availability

The Eufy E15 costs $1,799 from Eufy or $2,299 from Amazon (although it’s often discounted to $999 at Amazon). In the U.K., it costs £1,499 from Amazon and Eufy. Believe it or not, this puts it in the mid-range of robot lawnmowers, where it competes with the $1,299 Segway Navimow i110N.

Indeed, the E15 is specced like a budget/mid-range robot mower — most of which comes down to mapping range (how far the mower can go from its base station). Its range is 0.2 acres (809 square-meters), which is comparable to the $999 Segway Navimow i105N (0.125 acres) and the $999 Ecovacs Goat O1000 (0.25 acres). The Eufy E18 (this model’s larger brother) can map up to 0.29 acres but costs $2,599, but for huge lawns, check out the Ecovacs Goat A3000 LiDAR, which can map up to 0.75 acres but costs $2,999.

Both the Eufy E15 and E18 can have their ranges boosted by buying extra base stations to serve as repeaters, so if you have a larger lawn, you can still cover it with a Eufy mower.

Eufy E15 review: Design

Eufy is an Anker brand, so you’re getting Anker’s typically excellent build quality. The E15 is kinda weighty, but mowers simply are. It weighs 27 pounds — the same as the E18 — and I had no issues lifting it around (which was needed a lot). The Segway Navimow i110N is a little lighter at 24 pounds, but we’ve seen mowers go way heavier. The Ecovacs Goat A3000 weighs 57 pounds, while the remote-controlled Mowrator S1 2WD weighs a whopping 99 pounds. Anyway, the E15 is lighter than a traditional gas-powered lawnmower.

The E15 measures 23.7 x 15.5 x 12.5 inches, so it’s fairly compact. It needs its base garage to function, though — as with robot vacuums, robot lawnmowers use a base station to orient themselves and recharge. The base garage is bulkier at 28.6 x 18.9 x 17.8 inches, but I’ll cover this more in the ‘Storage & maintenance’ section below.

The base garage needs to be kept outside or near your lawn. Thankfully, the garage and mower are IPX6 waterproofed, so should be fine left outside to the elements — just ensure you have a waterproofed outdoor power socket, or that you can run the power cable inside.

The E15 uses a two-wheel-drive (2WD) design, with a driven rear axle and a single unpowered trolley-style wheel at the front. 2WD isn’t ideal for gripping on gradients and/or wet terrain, so you’d be best going for a 4WD mower if that’ll be a problem. The E15 is rated by Eufy for 18 degrees of gradient, but I had grip issues on my flat lawn in testing, which I’ll discuss later.

Under the E15 you’ll find the blades, which are adequately shielded by the mower’s body. The E15 uses three blades attached to a central disk. The blades themselves are very small, looking more like shaving razors than the large arms of traditional mowers. They nevertheless proved surprisingly effective, as I’ll cover below.

There’s no grass collection bag/compartment, as the E15 is a mulch mower. That means it spits the cut grass out after cutting to act as mulch/fertilizer on your lawn. Again, I’ll discuss this more later on.

Eufy E15 review: Connectivity, controls & sensors

The Eufy E15 is easy to set up. You download the Eufy app, connect the mower to your Wi-Fi, update it, then get going. I didn’t expect the Wi-Fi hookup to be as seamless as it was, as I set the device up halfway down my garden and a long way from my nearest mesh router.

The app does a great job of teaching you the ropes. This was my first ever robot lawnmower, but I had no issue getting my head around everything. Admittedly, I’m a veteran tech reviewer with lots of experience using adjacent autonomous products, so I’m an abnormal test case. But the process is objectively simple and user-friendly.

The app offers you everything you need to control the device: mapping, pathway allocation, features, a remote control mode etc. There are buttons on the mower itself, too, including a home button to return it to its garage, a play/pause button to pause/restart it, and a STOP button for emergency cut off.

The E15 uses an array of sensory gear in its top ‘bridge’ section. There are three cameras/lenses and a sensor that help the E15 map out, navigate and avoid obstacles. It can also sense rain and automatically returns to its garage when it does — this happened during testing when it started raining. Handily, there’s an anti-fog setting to demist the sensors if they cloud up, although given the mower returns to base whenever it rains, I’m not sure when this would be needed.

In operation, the E15 is mostly autonomous, but you’ll need to input the odd command or move it when stuck (which happened plenty during testing)

Eufy E15 review: Performance

The Eufy E15’s performance is mixed. Mapping required a bit of input, including driving the mower remotely to set a route from the base garage to my lawn. I also needed to manually set a route for it to cross over a central concrete pathway that runs through the center of my lawn, so it could map both sides.

Aside from that, it mapped my garden reasonably accurately, avoiding an overhanging bush and plotting the overall shape of my lawn. However, it missed a few sections where there was actually grass (along the bottom of the map in the screenshot above). It also thought two small patches of (only slightly) longer grass were obstacles (visible along the upper left hand side of the map), and left those chunks out, too.

Mowing

The E15 cuts very nicely. I enjoyed being able to customize the cut height. As I was mowing at the start of spring, I wanted to cut back the grass a decent amount, so I could easily see any sections for reseeding. I set the cut height to 30mm / 1.2 inches. The E15 cutting effectively and evenly, mincing up the cuttings thoroughly before spitting them out as mulch — so I didn’t have a carpet of long trimmings on my grass.

It’s fairly quiet during mowing, at 56dB, which is around the same volume as a household refrigerator. It’s fast, too, taking around 70 minutes to complete my 893 square feet / 83 square meter lawn. By contrast, the Segway Navimow i110N took 5 hours to mow a 65-square-meter lawn (although this wasn’t my lawn, and the specific circumstances will affect timing).

Unfortunately, that’s where the positives end. The E15 has ‘smart obstacle avoidance’, but it worked so poorly that it made even the stupider of my two dogs look like an astrophysicist.

The E15 repeatedly got snagged on a small, 3x3-inch pit one of my dogs had dug (and which I had mostly refilled, ready for a top layer of compost and reseeding). It marked the pit as an obstacle on the map… and then kept going over it… four times in a row.

It then repeatedly became stuck on some damp grass (not very wet, as it hadn’t rained yet that day). See, the wheels have large lugs, but are finished with a very firm plastic that slips on anything but dry grass — this will likely include morning dew. Again, I had to move the mower. By this time, it wasn’t feeling like a particularly autonomous piece of tech.

After moving the E15 post-slippage, it then returned to the start of the mow, leaving a large patch uncut and redoing areas it had previously covered instead. It later returned and did the missed section, but this felt like a waste of time and battery life.

The E15 supposedly offers “precise edge trimming” capabilities, allowing the mower to straddle 6 inches / 15 cm over an edge. It can’t cut borders with anything raised next to them — such as raised planters or fences — which I get, as it’s not physically possible for it to straddle those edges.

Annoyingly, though, it left the edges uncut along the pathway running through the middle of the lawn, which it was definitely able to straddle (it crossed that path to get between my two lawn sections). The result was that all my edges were left long and bushy. Again, it’d have been great to take remote control here and ensure the pathway edges were cut myself. Or… for the E15 to live up to Eufy’s promises and cut those edges itself in the first place.

Eufy E15 review: Storage & maintenance

The E15’s base garage is used for storage and charging. You’ll need to make sure there’s a path between where your base garage is placed and your lawn, and that your lawn is in range of the base garage.

The base garage measures 28.6 × 18.9 × 17.8 inches, so it’s fairly bulky (albeit less so than a traditional lawnmower). I couldn’t put the E15 in my small shed, as the doorway has a lip, but it wouldn’t have fit anyway and requires a power connection.

Eufy supplies the E15 with a set of three spare blades and retaining screws. The blades are very easy to swap out (there’s just one screw holding each in place) and affordable to replace.

Eufy sells a 9-blade + screw replacement kit for $27.99, while a replacement central disk costs just $21.99. At the time of writing, Eufy is throwing in a free 9-blade kit with the E15, so look out for similar deals if you decide to buy.

Eufy E15 review: Battery life & range

The E15 is rated by Eufy for up to 150-270 square-meters of mowing on a single charge. Obviously, gradients and environmental factors will affect that. I’d say Eufy’s estimates are fairly accurate. My lawn area measures around 83 square-meters and the E15 was showing half battery after it finished. This included it messing around getting stuck numerous times, and repeating a large area it has already covered.

Note that the mower will return to its base station to charge up, which it will need to do several times to hit the 0.2 acre / 800 square-meter maximum total mapping area. It takes around 90 minutes to fully recharge, so if you’re mowing a 0.2-acre yard, you’ll want to start it mowing in the morning.

Eufy E15 review: Verdict

The Eufy E15 is a good mower— under the right circumstances. I would recommend this mower for people who live in dry climates where slippage won’t be an issue, and who have well maintained lawns with no obstacles/holes, and edges that are higher than adjacent paths or beds. Yes, that’s a lot of caveats, but as you saw above, I had some issues. Anyway, in those cases, it’ll make your life very easy, with its array of smart features, customizable cutting and respectable speed.

Outside those perfect conditions, though, I find the E15 much trickier to recommend. The E15 has left my pathway edges uncut, despite Eufy’s promises. It also required so much input from me that I almost forgot it was supposed to be autonomous. Our rating is defined as very good, but not quite good enough to get a flat out recommendation, and that’s the case here. The Eufy E15: for already immaculate lawns only.