A Dallas Area Landscaper Reports 2 to 4 Crew Man Hours Saved Per Job With Robot Mowers

Crew hours disappearing into push mowing

A Dallas-area commercial landscaping company runs about a $15 million operation, split evenly between construction and maintenance work. Its maintenance clients are residential, and every one of those accounts carried a block of mowing time built into the weekly routine.

Its crews mowed with push mowers only. That kept mowing on the same clock as trimming, edging and bed work, and it left little slack when a lawn ran long or a crew lost a day.

The company's leadership also saw a wider squeeze. Labor was hard to hire and keep across the industry, and many operators had begun to view robot mowers as a way to give experienced crews back their hours.

Two years of testing, then a measured rollout

The company spent roughly two years testing robot mowers before it started installing them. Installations began early in the year the account was reported, and the work was planned property by property rather than fleet wide.

Each install began with a site visit to map the area the mower would cover. A perimeter wire was then buried about 2 inches deep and tied to a base station. Start to finish took one to three hours, depending on obstacles and lawn size, and an average sized lawn took about an hour.

Mowers went onto clients' maintenance contracts as leased equipment. The company planned to offer the mower as an extra service later, paired with battery powered tools. By the end of the season it had completed seven installs and had 15 more properties queued.

• Site visit to map the mowing area and obstacles
• Perimeter wire buried about 2 inches deep
• Base station set and the wire connected
• Run schedule matched to each client, with irrigation timing respected

Hours returned to the crew, as the company reports them

The company's director of fleet and facilities put the labor effect at 2 to 4 man hours saved per job. That figure is the company's own staff estimate, not an independent audit, so it is best read as a reported result rather than a measured one.

The freed time moved to work that robots do not replace. Crews shifted toward trimming, edging and bed maintenance, the detail work that tends to define how a maintenance account looks to a homeowner.

Scheduling changed too. Because the mowers run any time of day or night and are weatherproof, rain no longer forces a reshuffle of the week, and each client's run time is set to that client's needs.

What this means for commercial mowing decisions

For a landscaping operator weighing autonomous mowing, the first question is rarely which robot. It is which lawns, how the boundary and obstacles lie, and how the mowing hours fit the crew week. Service Robot Co. is an OEM neutral robot integrator for US businesses, so we begin with a site assessment, select the right machines across manufacturers, and then handle deployment, integration, training and service through a nationwide US engineer network.

Customers get our robots on a lease. Our offer is a 3 year lease with one fixed payment quoted after the site assessment, so the finance decision follows the yard survey rather than preceding it.