Eufy Robot Lawn Mower E18 Review: Truly Wireless Plug and Play Tech

Eufy sent us the newest E18 to try out, and after running it across our two front lawns and a pretty big backyard, we’re not going back to following a mower around on weekends.

This was our first robot mower, and honestly the setup was way easier than expected. Base station took a few minutes, we charged it up, updated the firmware in the Eufy app, and that was basically it. The big thing that sold us before we even turned it on: no Real Time Kinematic (RTK) tower. A lot of robot mowers need you to plant a signal tower in your yard, which is a whole thing. The E18 skips all that and just uses cameras to map your lawn. It’s genuinely plug and play. You don’t need to painstakingly hammer in a perimeter line or manually control the mower along your lawn edges. It will figure it out all on its own, automatically.

The blades mulch the grass clippings back into the soil as it goes, so no bagging required. Good for your lawn too, though you’ll still want to dethatch and aerate every now and then so the soil can breathe. The kit comes with replaceable blades that you can just screw in.

It’s super easy to set up this mower. You just drill in some plastic screws for the base station and you’ll need a power source. We luckily have an outlet in the backyard so that’s where we set this up.

We started with the backyard. Mapping took a while, and before letting it run we mowed the grass down to about 3 inches to give it a clean slate. It did a solid job once it got going, handled a berm without any issues, and navigated around our trampoline legs without getting confused. We tossed out some basketballs and other objects in front of the mower. It stopped and went around, so no issues there.

There was one patch near some weed barrier it just wouldn’t cross and left untouched. The fix was setting up a multi-zone pathway, where you connect to the mower over Bluetooth and physically walk it through the new route so it learns the way. Worked perfectly after that.

Getting it to the front yards meant opening the side gate and teaching it a path across our front walkway. We also drew a virtual boundary so it wouldn’t start mowing the neighbour’s lawn, though honestly we’ve thought about it. Once everything was mapped we set up a weekly schedule and pretty much forgot about it.

A couple things worth mentioning: the max cutting height is 3 inches, which could be a bit short if your lawn is stressed heading into summer heat. The default mowing speed felt pretty slow for the backyard so we switched it to the faster setting. There was one moment it got itself stuck in a ditch along the fence, but the app has a live camera view so we could see exactly what was going on and sort it out. That camera mode asks for a passcode and the mower literally announces out loud that someone is watching, which is kind of funny but also smart (just so people know your robot isn’t being a total creep).

Here’s a picture of the E18 doing its job on the front lawn. You can get some mini stripes (you can also manually adjust mowing directions in the app). We didn’t do the initial prep mow low enough so the cut was a bit more than we wanted, so be wary of that. But the first cut was flat and smooth. Our neighbours were asking about the mower and it’s definitely a conversation starter.

Here’s the Eufy app showing the mapping of our backyard and front yards. It’s a lot of grass and it’s such a cool feeling knowing you don’t need to mow the lawn:

As for some downsides? Since it’s camera-based only, the mower won’t be able to mow at night in the dark. It will return itself to the base station to charge and continue the job the next day. So that leaves a limited window for your mower to operate since for larger yards it can take a while to mow, recharge and then get back out there to finish the job. To mow our backyard it can take about 4 hours or so. But that time doesn’t really matter since you’re not monitoring the mower at all.

Also, the Eufy E18 only has a single mower with three blades, while some other mowers have more. But from our tests in our huge backyard and the front yard, this wasn’t an issue. It was still able to get the job done with ease.

Now the hard part: it’s $2,399 CAD for Eufy E18. That’s a premium price. But if you’re paying someone $200 a month to cut your grass, this thing pays for itself in about a year. And unlike a lawn care crew, it won’t cancel on you. You also don’t realize how much of your weekend disappears to lawn stuff until something else is handling it. That part alone is hard to put a price on. Once you have this set up, it’s so much fun to check the Eufy app which shows an animation of your mower and real-time progress of the lawn cutting.

The Eufy E18 is some impressive tech. Just make sure your yard fits within the 0.3 acre limit (13,000 sq ft) and your grass stays under 3.5 inches before you let it loose. If you have a smaller yard, the Eufy E15 is cheaper at $1,999 as it covers up to 0.2 acres (8700 sq ft). Gosh, robots everything are taking over our lives and we’re here to embrace it.