Gardena Sileno City Review: A Detailed Look at the Robot Lawn Mower

Introduction

Robot lawn mowers have become increasingly popular in recent years, offering a convenient and efficient way to keep your lawn looking neat and tidy without the hassle of manual mowing. The Gardena Sileno City is one such robot mower that promises to make lawn maintenance a breeze. In this review, we will take a closer look at the features, performance, and overall usability of the Gardena Sileno City.

Features

Our test unit came with the gateway, which connects to your router via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and gives you the scope to expand your garden automation into watering and beyond by buying more equipment that can connect to it. It’s a significant extra investment, however, and adds about £200 to the cost of the mower.

The robot itself measures 380 x 550 x 230mm (WDH), weighs 7.3kg and will cut lawns with an area of up to 300m² with a maximum incline of 35%. Its sleek blue and grey colouring isn’t as garish as the orange and black we see on many other robot mower brands, but it’s still not going to blend into your lawn.

It has a cutting system that’s 16cm wide and can be adjusted to cut your grass lengths between 20mm and 50mm. This is controlled using a dial on the top of the mower, where you’ll also find control buttons and a simple monochrome screen.

You can use buttons to start and stop the mower directly or set up a schedule, and it’s protected with a four-digit PIN to stop people meddling with your settings. Generally, though, I found it simpler to control the mower using the companion app.

In the box you also get the charging station, a 150m reel of perimeter wire to prevent your robot venturing into the flower beds, and enough pegs to secure it all to the ground.

Setting Up

Once you’ve chosen a location for the charging station, which needs to be within reach of an external power socket, you can start laying wire. All robot lawn mowers have to be corralled using a perimeter wire, which takes a bit of setting up. The Gardena comes with the added complication that most robot lawn mowers don’t bother with: a guide wire. This also connects to the back of the charging station, runs underneath the robot’s home and is reeled out on the other side.

The main hassle with this is that, at the other end of the guide wire, you have to break your perimeter wire and splice the guide wire into the circuit. Once everything is set up, however, I found connecting to the mower through the app and starting it mowing was relatively straightforward.

Performance

Where some robot lawn mowers locate their charging stations in line with the perimeter wire so the mower can follow the wire back home, the Gardena follows its additional guide wire back home, so the charging station sits at a right angle to the perimeter. This allows the Sileno City to mow around the front of its station and keep that area neat and tidy.

The extra guide wire genuinely helps the mower find its way around difficult-shaped gardens. If you have a garden with two areas, connected by a narrow strip of grass, for example, there’s only a slim chance that the mower would hit the gap in the normal course of mowing and, even if it did find its way there, it might well get stuck at the other end.

With the guide wire in place you can set the mower to start at the far end and divide the available mowing time between three areas. There’s also a corridor setting, which reduces the amount of time the mower bounces around narrow spaces.

It’s worth noting that, unlike robot vacuum cleaners, this robot mower doesn’t have any collision detection. It happily bounces off solid obstacles and you can protect precious fixtures with the perimeter wire, but it isn’t going to deal with a garden full of discarded children’s toys or sleeping pets.

Conclusion

Because of its extra guide wire, the Gardena Sileno City is perfectly equipped for unusually shaped gardens. It makes setup a little more complicated and time-consuming, but you only have to go through this once, and there’s a certain amount of setting up that needs to be done with any robot lawn mower.

However, the extra guide wire is only of benefit to those with complicated gardens. If your lawn is less challenging, you could easily get away with a cheaper model. Overall, the Gardena Sileno City is a solid choice for those looking for a reliable and efficient robot lawn mower.