Carving a path to efficiency: A closer look at the EcoFlow BLADE

I like to think of my self as a bit of a lawn geek, I love to take good care of it and get it looking as good as I can throughout the spring and summer months.

I’m lucky that the area of grass in my garden is quite small. Although recently, it’s taken a bit of a back seat and I’ve neglected it a bit.

It doesn’t actually take a lot of time or effort to give it a cut every couple of weeks, but it is a bit of a chore though. Especially because my lawn mower is pretty ancient and the cutting blades are almost blunt.

The EcoFlow Blade is an autonomous, robotic lawn mower that uses AI, Satellite and some pretty cool technology to mow your lawn to perfection. So, when EcoFlow asked if I wanted to try out the Blade, I jumped at the chance.

I’ve covered a bunch of different review metrics that I think are relevant. There’s also a demo video further down the review, that’ll give you a good idea of how this thing works it’s magic.

Is it any good? Well, let’s get into my review of the EcoFlow Blade and find out.

EcoFlow Blade Review

The EcoFlow blade arrived really quickly and I couldn’t wait to rip open the box and get started. I guess from a first impression perspective I was particularly surprised at how heavy it felt in it’s shipping box.

Most of that heft comes from the large battery and other components that make up the ‘home station’ and satellite beacon. When yours arrives, do take care when trying to lift the box, so you don’t damage your back!

I opened up the outer box and in typical EcoFlow style, I was greeted with a really great looking, branded packaging box. Now, in my haste to rip open the inner box and get started, I didn’t capture any photos of the box. But, trust me, it looks great.

One thing I really liked about the packaging is that, everything is neatly and purposefully tucked away in it’s own place within the box. Each and every component (and there’s not too many) is ready and waiting for you to remove it from the box and get the lawn mower put together.

It really helps the end user to firmly understand how to set the Blade up. For example, the cables are all letter-coded, so you put A to A, B to B for example. It’s easy to put together, even if you didn’t read the comprehensive instruction manual, It’s all self explanatory.

Speaking of the paperwork, the instructions are crystal clear and easy to read. They’ve been translated into several languages and make perfect sense. I’ve said it before on this blog, sometimes instructions, when translated from their native language, often have humorous and damn right weird translations.

But, as the professionals that they are, EcoFlow have done a great job at ensuring instructional information is perfectly legible.

Once I’d set the EcoFlow blade up, I got it connected it to the app, which is super easy to do by the way, I had it connected in less than a minute. If you’ve not used EcoFlow products before, it may take a bit longer as you’ll need to create an account etc.

Finally, with the whole thing ready to go, I took a step back to admire it, in all it’s glory. I especially love the striking, open shell design of the Blade, this things looks stunning and I can’t wait to try it out.

In terms of my first impressions, the Blade has almost left me speechless. It looks incredible, is really easy to connect to the app, is really robust and the entire unboxing and setup process has been engineered to perfection, what’s not to love?

Let’s take a look at the build quality and performance next, then.

Build Quality

The EcoFlow blade is incredibly robust. It feels like it’d take a bit of a battering and I thought I’d test that theory out.

Once it was up and running I lifted the front up and dropped it back down again, a motion that’s sort of like those low-rider cars that bounce using hydraulics. I’ll paste a GIF below, so you know what I’m going on about:

Anyway, it passed that test with flying colours, with zero damage suffered and it was able to complete it’s scheduled cut without any negative effects.

Because this unit was going back to the PR company, I couldn’t test this to failure, but my bounce test gives a good indication as to how tough this thing is, without causing any fatal damage on purpose.

The wheels are well made and engineered too. I wanted to see how strong they are by tugging at the outer edge of the rear wheels, they didn’t budge and are well secured.

At the top of the unit are some quick start buttons as well as the emergency stop button. These offer a good audible click and tactile feedback, so that you know you’ve pressed it. They’re finished with good quality plastic and should last the lifetime of the unit.

The whole thing just feels really well put together. There are no obvious gaps between components or plastic panels where there shouldn’t be, there’s no sharp or otherwise poorly finished edges either.

It’s been given an IPX5 rating, which means is essentially water proof. The actual definition is ‘protected against low pressure water stream from any angle’. Which, if I’ve read and understood the information correctly, it can be left outside permanently.

The IPX5 rating also makes cleaning it a breeze, you can simply hose it off after each cut, just don’t use a high pressure jet wash!

The Blade can be recharged with an EcoFlow solar panel, so, although the Blade is an expensive initial outlay, the energy costs to re-charge the unit are essentially zero.

Complaints

I do have a couple of minor complaints. I would have liked to report in this review, that I liked everything about the build quality and components. But, that’s not quite the case.

One thing I didn’t like about the satellite beacon, was the screw threads on the pole. They’re quite difficult to screw together if you don’t have it perfectly aligned, which is probably by design to be honest, to avoid cross threading it, I suppose.

I just found it a tiny bit frustrating. I personally, would have preferred push connectors, but that method of securing the poles together may not be as sturdy, so I guess that’s just personal opinion.

The first of my two main complaints are:

The three prongs that stick into the ground are overly sharp. I caught the edge of my palm on one of the prongs which left a minor cut on my hand. They don’t need to be as sharp as they are.

If they were blunt, they’d still be able to be placed into the ground with ease. Think of tent pegs- they aren’t sharp to a point and are still effective.

The second main complaint that I think does actually need some attention or changes in future versions of the Blade, are the pins on the cables. The cables are male to female pin connectors which then have a water proof screw connector.

I actually ended up bending one of the three pins, which was completely my own fault as I was trying to connect it to the wrong end. But, I didn’t use much force at all and felt it shouldn’t have bent at all.

I feel that they are a bit too weak and far too thin, thus enabling them to flex. I spent around 20 minutes trying to straighten one of the pins with a pair of long nosed pliers and a precision screwdriver.

Once I’d bent it back into position, it did still work. I’m just worried that the end consumers may not have noticed the pin had bent and then continued trying to connect the cables together, ultimately ending up in snapping the pin, rendering it completely broken.

There’s a lot of cool, cutting edge (pun intended) tech in the actual mower, I can understand why the cables took a bit of a back seat. But, having said that, that shouldn’t be the case in a fancy robotic lawn mower that costs north of £2600 / $2600.

I think overall though, the build quality of the main unit is really, really good. I don’t think I could ask for a better made product. The peripherals however, need a bit of work, particularly the cables.

Ecoflow Blade Review: The docking station is made to the same high standard.

Performance

This particular EcoFlow Blade model can manage garden lawns up to 1600m², which is a bit under half an acre, which is huge.

Before you can let the robotic mower loose on your lawn, you’ll need to connect it to GPS and trace the perimeter of your grass using the app.

It took me around 5 attempts to get the GPS to connect, it needs quite lot of open space and direct line to the sky to get a strong GPS signal. If there are any tall trees or fences nearby you’ll struggle, as I did. It did eventually connect though.

You simply move your finger on the in-app controls and drive the Blade around the edge of the area you wish it to mow.

I had a bit of difficulty driving it in a straight line to create my map. The in-app controls are a little clunky and the Blade isn’t all that responsive, but after a few goes, I’d managed to draw the boundary line.

Larger obstacles, such as trees, beds, borders or ponds, can be avoided by identifying them as areas to avoid in the app. You do this by essentially tracing another map around them and ring fencing them from the Blades cutting map.

Once that’s done, the Blade will head back to the home station and await your command to start cutting your lawn. Once it begins, it’ll drive out of the home station and head to a random starting position on your grass.

I had assumed it’d start with the edge that I’d just traced, but no, it’ll start at a random location in the middle of the cutting area. My lawn is small, the quickest time was around 8 minutes to complete a cut.

The longest amount of time it took was around 17 minutes, when I’d let it grow between cuts, in the three weeks I had the Blade on loan. It does do a great job to be honest. Although it does have it’s flaws.

One area it really could do with some work is the edges. The edge cut is left until last in the cutting programming.

It doesn’t actually get right up to the edge, though. There’s a margin of error of around 20cm.

This is despite me ensuring that when I mapped out my lawn in the app, that I actually over exaggerated the edges to ensure the middle of the blade was directly over the edge. It was far too cautious however, it didn’t cut the edges, it probably missed by 20cm or so.

Dog Vs EcoFlow Blade

Cutting

The EcoFlow Blade’s actual grass cutting performance is incredibly good, if somewhat erratic. I set the lawn height to 50mm and let it does it’s thing.

I did find it cuts much better without the lawn sweeper kit attached. This is because when it’s connected, it lifts the front of the Blade up ever so slightly, which means it then struggles to maintain grip and directional maneuverability.

Over the years, my lawn has had a complete hodgepodge of different grass seeds spread upon it. And, because of this, some patches of grass tend to grow quicker than others. This can make cutting the lawn with a manual electric mower, a bit more difficult. When trying to push the lawn mower over the longer, thicker patches for example.

It didn’t struggle with any of the areas where patches of grass differ in height. I really like that it automatically adjusts the height of the cut so that it can tackle the longer bits. It’ll then go over the same area again lowering the blades again and again until the pre-defined cut height is achieved.

Most mowers, manual or automatic still require human intervention to mechanically adjust the height of the cut. Being able to set it within the app is a great feature. It also helps keep your fingers away from the razor sharp cutting blades at the bottom of the mower.

It’s great watching it in person and I can only see this sort of tech improve exponentially over the next year or so.

Blades

Let’s take a look at the underside of the EcoFlow blade. I flipped it over to look at what type of blade they have used. EcoFlow have literally used razor blades, three of them in fact, hence the name.

It goes without saying that they’re incredibly sharp, so don’t touch them! If you do need to change them when they get blunt, there are a bunch of spares that come in the box, which is a nice touch.

There is an argument to be had that EcoFlow could make these spares an additional purchase and drop the base price of the unit, but it wouldn’t be by much, which is probably why they didn’t bother.

Getting Stuck

On more than one occasion the Blade did struggle to drive around my raised vegetable bed. It kept getting it’s back wheels caught on the right angled edge of the bed. It got stuck before the obstacle avoidance tech had the chance to alert me to it though, which was a bit of a let down.

I did also notice that sometimes it felt as if it didn’t quite have enough torque in the motor to force it’s way back into the docking station, when only slightly brushing past something.

The EcoFlow website describes it as being ‘high torque’, but perhaps it didn’t quite have enough to squeeze by the raised veg bed.

After a couple of times of this happening, I re-positioned the docking station and it made it’s way back home without much fuss, so maybe it was user error?

Whilst this isn’t the biggest pain point with the mower, it’s worth mentioning that it’s not quite as autonomous as I’d have liked it to be, it does still need a bit of user input and a common sense approach.

Wheels & Tyres

The wheels are quite a unique part of the design. At the back of the mower there are two larger wheels that push the Blade along, basically rear wheel drive. It goes left or right by turning like a tank does, driving one wheel forward whilst the other goes in the opposite direction.

Those rear drive wheels are spiked for grip, which have there pros and cons.

The pros are, it doesn’t get stuck that often and I guess, technically it could help aerate your lawn. But, the cons are that when it does get stuck and the wheels continue to spin, it does damage the lawn and the mud surface underneath.

It left me with a small bare patch of earth where it had ripped the grass out with it’s spiked wheels. The lawn wasn’t overly damp or anything, just slightly moist with morning dew.

The front wheels are fixed in position but they act sort of like castor-wheels, in that they allow the Blade to move in all sorts of directions.

Those wheels at the front are angled in-wards to point toward each other and at the edge of them are spinning rings that enable it to change direction. It is surprisingly maneuverable.

How Much & Where To Buy

The EcoFlow Blade is available to buy direct from EcoFlow or you can check it out on Amazon. It’ll set you back around £2600. Hit the buttons below to check it out.

Check EcoFlow Blade On EcoFlow Store

Summary & Verdict

It’s easy to forget that this is EcoFlow’s first foray into robotic lawn mowers, I think they did an exceptional job. It’s main con is the price point, it’s very expensive, which makes this a complete luxury purchase.

But, on the other hand, if people are unable to mow their lawns due to a disability, it’d be a good, albeit expensive, accessibility improvement product.

I think the EcoFlow Blade is pretty damn good, provided it’s the right type and size of lawn. My lawn is far too small to get the most out of it, it gets stuck on the raised beds and brick pathways a bit too easily. If you’ve got a larger lawn and fewer obstacles and you have a few grand burning a hole in your back pocket, it’s the perfect robotic lawn mower.

It might be worth holding out for an updated version that fixes the few flaws I’ve highlighted. EcoFlow have launched updated versions of other products in the past, so you never know!

Score: 7.5/10

I wanted to give it a higher score, but in the interest of a fair and honest review, 7.5 is a fair score.

The optional sweeping kit, which costs an extra £699. Is, in my opinion not really worth it unless you do have a larger lawn. It’s basically a grass box with a motorised brush, designed to pick up leaves, grass and small twigs to keep your grass tidy. It’d be useful in the Autumn when trees drop their leaves and seed pods, though.