I spent a season with the Ecovacs Goat A3000 robot lawn mower, and it's the ultimate time saver

Money can buy a lot. We just wrapped up Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when a lot of money was spent on tons of stuff.

But there's one thing money can't buy you, and that's time. You can be as rich as you want, but you only have so much time here. However, there's a loophole of sorts — you can buy products that save you time, creating more time to do the things you enjoy.

For my money, one of the best products I've ever used to free up time is a robot lawn mower. I have almost an acre of land to mow, and it's all fairly lumpy. The grass grows fast, too, so I spend a couple of hours mowing it every 5 or 6 days.

Since getting the Ecovacs Goat A3000 robot lawn mower, my time spent doing yard work has decreased dramatically. Outside of occasionally helping it get unstuck, it handled my large, lumpy yard with ease, which saved me countless hours throughout the mowing season.

Why I love the Ecovacs Goat A3000

So I'm going to start by saying the Ecovacs Goat A3000 isn't perfect. It, like all robot lawn mowers, is still what you might call emerging technology. It still gets stuck sometimes, and the blades break more than I'd like (a cheap fix).

But what it does well is so great that I can put those issues aside and gush over how much time the product has saved me.

Once you make it through the initial setup, which sees you follow the robot around the perimeter of your yard so it can learn the edges, you can have it get to work.

I admit I watched it for most of the process the first time, since I've never let a robot cut my lawn before, but after the first one, I just turned it on from my phone and only paid attention if I got an alert that it got stuck somewhere.

The actual mowing job was nearly perfect every time. You can adjust the cut height from 1.2" to 3.6", giving you the flexibility to create the yard you want. You can even set it to change directions every week, giving you those crossover lines we all love.

It would occasionally struggle with the bumps in my yard, mistaking them for tall grass, but if I set it to enhanced mode (designed for longer grass), this problem was mitigated. If your yard is flat, you'll probably have an even better time.

What's the price of time?

So while I said you can't buy time, living with a robot lawn mower has shown me that you can, kind of. Saving time doing tedious tasks in favor of doing fun ones is as close as you can get to buying more time.

And how much does that time cost? It's not cheap. At full price, Ecovacs charges $2,999.99 for the Goat A3000. But that gets you LiDAR, 45-minute fast charging and a ton of other features. There are cheaper robot lawn mowers on the market for those with smaller yards, but if you have a big one, you're going to have to shell out some cash.

If you have a big yard and hate spending half of your weekends mowing it, I really can't recommend a robot lawn mower enough. It doesn't have to be this robot lawn mower (though it is the only one I have first-hand experience with), but the feeling of knowing your lawn is being taken care of with minimal effort is a good one.

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