No RTK! No Problem! The Ecovacs Goat A3000 with Built In Trimmer!

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, it's Justin from Bitners and this is the Eovax Goat. Uh if you've watched my channel, you know that I've moved over to robotic lawnmowers a couple years ago. I love them. I love not having to waste my time mowing the lawn. I have better things to do. And so, uh there's been one pain point though with mowers that I haven't been able to overcome until now, and that is edging. Uh all of my other mowers, as close as they'll get to the house, to trees, to fencing, I still have to go out with a trimmer and clean everything up every few days. Uh but here, the goat has the true edge trimmer built into the side. This is what I'm really excited about testing on this mower today. So, we're going to set it up uh and I'm going to set up some tests. We're going to set up brick. We're going to set up a wavy line. We're going to test on fencing uh just to see how good this true edge trimmer technology is. Today on Berbuilt, before I go ahead and set everything up and I screw this on permanently, I wanted to take off the true edge trimmer just to kind of show you a little bit about this piece. So, first off, we have this brush setup and it comes with a spare set and they're actually really easy to put on and off. It's just this clip tab right here. Uh so as these wear down over time, these are probably going to be brushing up against things. Uh these would be a replaceable item, I'm sure. And then when we look behind, uh we have not only the motor that's going to drive this trimmer. Uh but currently it's pointed in this direction, which means that we have pivoting action in here. This trimmer, as you can see right here, uh has a cut off. So, as the length of the string comes out, it will automatically cut it right here. And there's once you remove this screw, you're able to add in uh replacement trimmer cartridges on here.

[00:01:57]The only thing that we have to do to actually get this ready out of the box is three screws for installing the trimmer on the side. I like that this unit is flat on the back, so it actually stands up for maintenance. Although, whenever you do that, you need to make sure you're attentive with it. Uh, often times I'll even put some sort of support there whenever I'm working on any machine there because you don't want it falling down on you. Uh, on this guy, the trimmer has a plug on the back. So, you literally just insert it in on the side and there's a rubber gasket right here that we put one screw and then two screws here on the bottom. So, one tip right here. I thought I was missing a screw behind this rubber gasket. It tells you to install the third screw.

[00:02:41]It's already in there permanently mounted. So, just stick a standard handheld screwdriver in there because you do need to go in a pretty decent ways. And then just tighten it down and everything will be secure. And just put that rubber gasket back on. I'm here at my friend Ashley and John's house to run some testing here in the backyard.

[00:02:58]That's because they have this deck. Uh, this was a very specific thing I wanted to test with this machine. Most robotic lawnmowers that I've had utilize an RTK system. So, when you set them up, it communicates with satellite and so it helps with positioning. But, uh, your mower typically loses positioning when it's under trees. Uh, you have to be careful where you place its base station because it has to be able to communicate its positioning. With the Eovax Goat, I'm actually going to position for our testing today at least, uh, this underneath their deck. And this would not be able to work if it were an RTKbased system. But since the GOAT utilizes 360° LAR on the top as well as 3D LAR systems in the front, it doesn't need to communicate with anything in the sky. It's going to be able to navigate all on its own. In addition, you don't have to bear any wires for this uh perimeter barrier wires like you would with like a dog fence type of thing. Uh everything is inside this machine. We should just be able to turn it on and it should be able to start mapping out this property. Setting up the goat in the software is super easy. You're first going to open up the software and then scan this QR code that is at the front of your unit and then that's going to begin the pairing process where you can set up a personal protection pin code in here. Uh it's going to connect you via Bluetooth so that you control the unit from your phone. Uh and then it's also going to help you connect to your home Wi-Fi. Now that we have everything all set up, and I did a firmware update, we have the assembly and setup guide on here. So, if you, you know, maybe didn't jump ahead like I did, you can go ahead and watch that. But, we've already done it. So, let's go ahead and map. I'm going to start mapping out this backyard. But, there is a mapping setup guide here. And this has a lot of really wellput together videos on how to do this. And I really like this for people who have never done this before.

[00:04:56]Creating your boundary for your mower is the most important thing that you do. If you do a good job, if you do it right, uh, this mower is going to work all the time. You're going to get a great result and, you know, none of the headaches.

[00:05:09]So, you can see on the app, I have this little joystick inside here, and that's what's helping me to navigate this mower. And I'm going pretty slow. I want to take it easy. I want to make sure I do it right. Uh, I want to stay right at the edge of exactly where I want to mow at all times. Uh, this has a difficult area inside this lawn. So, using the automatic mapping feature for some houses will be very successful. But for something with difficulties like grass to gravel transitions, it might be a little bit more difficult. Now, as I'm going around this corner here, we're right up against the wall. And you can see the bristles. I want to make sure that they're always touching the wall here as I go across. Not too much uh so that I'm scraping against the wall, but I want to be touching it. And that's my indicator to know that I am striking everything with the trimmer. Uh, and I'm going to be able to make sure that weeds don't grow here.

[00:06:03]As we continue on the mapping, this lawn does not have trimmed flower beds. So, we're just going at the transition line between grass and uh uh pine needles here. Then later when we go against the fence, again, it's important to make sure that the brush head is touching the fence. Uh, it's important that you go in a clockwise direction around this space so the trimmer is always up against the exterior side when mapping. Now that I'm done mapping, this is something that I've never seen before. This is what the 360° LAR is for. It is actually creating a full virtual 3D map of the space. And so, uh, you can see here on the left there's the deck on the side of the house. Has all of the, uh, the grass areas. And of course, we have all these trees. I'm actually really impressed that it's capturing all the canopies of the trees really high up uh and giving it a a very full understanding of the space. This is really cool. Um and this is something that I've never seen before. So, this is going to help you stay within your boundaries and make sure that you're mowing exactly where you're supposed to be mowing. All right, let's get mowing. And this is incredibly quiet. You're actually going to hear my breathing a little bit more than the noise of the mower right here.

[00:07:24]Now, inside the software, you can establish no go zones. And so, this fire pit lives here all the time, but I didn't program that in. I wanted to see if the vision on this system is going to see it and avoid it, which it does. I really do like this one as a test because the fire pit is elevated on top of the blocks. I didn't know if it would see it with its vision.

[00:07:50]Uh, and it continually each pass stops, it does not make contact with it. It avoids it. Um, so even though this isn't something that's plotted inside the software, right now it is intelligently avoiding it. Uh, I have, if you watch some of my other reviews, I have had mowers slam in to these types of things if we do not have it in there, even if it has some sort of vision system on it.

[00:08:13]So, this 360 degree vision, the 3D in the front right now, which I'm sure this 3D is what's interpreting it as it moves closer and then decides, all right, we're going to go around.

[00:08:27]Very good job. So, while we're mowing here, I wanted to show a little bit inside the app. And so, up at the top, we have the 3D map button. So, uh now you can see the 3D map at my house since I've uh moved this back to my house right now. You can see the back of my house, the back of my new garage there.

[00:08:46]And so we can control the speed of the mower if you want it to be able to move very fast, what the height is. Uh, but this one up here, the change the mowing direction on a weekly basis. This is a great setting here because, uh, we want to make sure that we're not doing the exact same pattern all the time. You'll end up ruting your grass. And so by changing your direction all the time, uh, you're going to have a healthier grass pattern. And then we have the adaptive boundaries. And so what this is doing is while let's just pretend this circle here is an entire lawn. Uh you might not need to edge this entire circle. You might only have a wall that you need to edge. And so you can actually just color the area where you're telling it, hey, you need to edge here, but you don't have to edge in other areas. There are a ton of other good settings that you can dig into and really uh control the the minute things about this lawn mower. It's great. Uh definitely a fully robust system for robotic lawn mower. You know, I wish my drone that's filming this right now had the same 3D mapping capability that the Goat has because of course we wander over to the side and hit a tree.

[00:09:58]Back at my house, I've set up some demo walls here just to get a closeup on edging. Uh the robot will not edge if I'm too close uh with the camera even.

[00:10:09]And so I had to kind of make this setup here. Uh but you can see that it is pushing up against even a little bit too much here. But overall, as long as those bristles are touching, it is edging all of the grass right here in front of the wall. I moved the wall. And here we're going to zoom in and watch in slow-mo.

[00:10:27]And you can just see how much grass is being thrown out right there. Now, normally you would be maintaining your grass. You wouldn't let it get long like this. I let it get long just so it would be obvious for our examples here. But you can see that it's leaving a 3-in uh area near the wall that has been trimmed, and it's definitely getting directly up against that wall. Uh I don't see anything tall remaining behind here. I then put together a curved section of wall. And you can see here that the bristles were touching the entire time as it went through. And when we kind of look at an overlay here, you see that same 3-in pattern of uh grass that is trimmed. So the the trimmer is kind of um straight uh horizontal, let's put it that way, it's cutting everything in that 3-in circle. Uh you will notice I labeled a couple things in red there.

[00:11:18]I did miss a couple small items even though the bristles were touching the entire time. So, um, you know, this might be a thing where if you're noticing this happening, either you want to remap because perhaps you're not getting it in the exact right spot, or you might want to have it run two passes. It's a robot. It's not like you're wasting your time. Uh, but you can always tell your robot, "Hey, go do it twice." And so on the second time through, it might pick up uh a few of the small stray things that it didn't pick up the first time around. I reset the uh test again. another spot. And so here you can see the brushes are way over the actual uh paper wall right here. And so we do get the typical 3 in of uh trim. I highlighted in red a couple pieces that were left behind. But honestly, if I look back at the footage, I actually think this is user error. I have the bristles too far over the brick. And so, uh, the actual spinning plastic circle there is almost coming in contact with, uh, the brick. And so, there really isn't space for the the string line to whip around. So, I think this would need a remap. So, we've done traditional edging tests. I wanted to try something that it's not meant for.

[00:12:39]So, this is kind of an unfair test, to be honest. Uh, I let this area grow for 3 weeks before we're trying to edge right here. And uh with these types of mowers, when you first set them up, you don't want to have really long grass.

[00:12:51]You might need to mow your grass with the traditional mower first before you start a robotic mower out on the property. And that goes for all of these, not just this mower. Uh they're for maintaining. They're for cutting off a little bit every single day, every other day, every 3 days, just to keep the grass at that perfect height, not letting giant weeds like this grow. So, we sent it through right here. It took three passes to get to where we are now, which is still not perfect by any means, but we did remove a lot of material and we did cut in on this blocking. This was one of the things I was looking to see is, you know, it's not a perfectly flat wall. Can we get close enough? Can we cut in on that? Which we could. So, that's good. Um, again, uh, I wouldn't say that it passed this test, but this is a test that it shouldn't be doing in the first place.

[00:13:38]All right. So, the Eovax Goat here. Um, I've had this for about two months now and I actually took a trip to China during the middle of that and I came back to a nicely manicured yard. That's what robotic lawnmowers do for you. It does the work for you even when you're away. So, your lawn always looks good.

[00:13:55]Uh, I love that feature with these. Now, this particular mower has a lot of advancements that the other mowers that I've had, this is like my seventh robotic lawn mower here. Um, they do not have. So, I'm very excited with the advancements here. The Holoscope 360, very cool 3D mapping of my property. It gives me confidence that it's doing a very good job in understanding how my property looks, where its positioning is, and whatnot. Uh, the fact that it's all vision based and it does not rely on an RTK is nice because an RTK, while it does help with positioning of robotic lawnmowers, it's also a source of failure. And so, uh, I have regularly had to go venture out and find where's my mower? Oh, it's under a tree over there. It lost satellite signal. That will not happen with this machine, which is pretty cool. Uh, you also have your true edge trimmer on here. So, this is my first mower that has one. I had one other that it's an option, but I this is the first one that I've had one built into it stock. Uh, and so this one I would give it a B as far as the trimming capabilities. It did a really good job.

[00:15:03]Did it get 100% of everything all the time? No. But it's going to constantly be doing passes, especially if you're having it mow, you know, multiple days a week. It might miss it the first pass, but it might get it the second pass. Uh overall, the mower and the trimmer are meant to be maintainers of a good quality lawn. So, you're not putting this out when you have three foot tall weeds. uh you are putting these out after you've mowed one really good mow and then these are going to maintain that nicely mowed lawn for the entire season at that point. Uh the scheduling factor too is really nice because the mower is quiet. So I during the springtime right now when you have a lot of growth in the grass, I have it mowing every other day and I have it mow in the middle of the night. It's quiet. It doesn't bother anybody. It's not going to, you know, mess with my dog or anything. So, uh, middle of the night is good. The trimmer is a little loud. Um, quiet for a trimmer, but, you know, more loud than the machine itself. So, uh, the trimmer I have it do every 4 days, and I have it do it in the middle of the day because I obviously don't want to bother my neighbors and things. You also have the ability to make sure that you're only using the trimmer in certain areas where it's needed. And I like that because it is disposable on here where you have the line that will eventually run out and you have to replace it. So, uh, only firing it up when and where you need to obviously will save you money there. Uh, so there's a lot to like here. That's why I chose to actually review this one. There's a ton of mowers out on the market. I get offered them all. Um, and I, you know, have kind of decided I only want to review one or two every year now. Uh, and so this one had enough cool features that I thought, ah, this was one that I wanted to take a look at. And it didn't disappoint. So, uh, if you're interested in this one, I have a link down below in the description for it. Otherwise, I hope you got a lot of good information from this video. If you did, I hope you'll hit like and subscribe. It's what really helps me out. Stay safe in the shop, and I'll see you in the next one.