Robotic Mower Installation and Servicing: Complete Guide (2026)

No manufacturer publishes its dealer margin, so please ignore any specific percentage you see quoted online without a named source. Garden machinery trade terms are commercially confidential and vary by brand, by volume, and by whether you are an appointed dealer or a sub-dealer under a distributor. What I can tell you with confidence is the direction: hardware margin is thin, it is thinner than it was five years ago, and it is thinnest on exactly the high-volume wire-free models your customers most want. You will usually find better margin in accessories, consumables, garages and covers, and in commercial machines that are not sold on Amazon.

Reselling carries a second, quieter cost too. Once you sell the machine, the warranty relationship becomes yours, along with the faulty-out-of-the-box unit, the returns handling and your customer's expectation that you will make it right. If you fit customer-supplied machines as an independent, you carry none of that. You also earn less per job, and you get the call when a machine someone bought from a marketplace turns out to be the wrong model for their garden.

Which model suits you is a genuinely open question. Reselling gives you higher revenue per customer, control of the specification, and a warranty hook that brings the machine back to you every year. Installing customer-supplied units gives you a lower-risk, lower-capital business with no stock, no financing and no dead inventory sitting in your unit in October. If I were starting out, I would begin as an independent installer, build a service base, and only take on dealership stock once I could see the annual service revenue that justifies the working capital.

Becoming an authorised dealer

The honest answer is that none of the major manufacturers publish their criteria, and anyone on a blog who claims to know them is guessing.

Husqvarna UK runs a public application form to become an authorised dealer. It asks for company information, years in business, brands currently stocked and product categories of interest, and says only that a member of the sales team will be in contact to discuss your suitability and ability to meet its customers' needs. No minimum stock level, training requirement, workshop specification or investment figure is published. Segway Navimow's UK distributor, Barrus, invites dealer enquiries by email and keeps its terms private. Mammotion sells through UK dealers and distributors without publishing a dealer specification. Stihl, Ecovacs and Worx likewise route dealer or stockist enquiries through application forms with no published criteria.

What you can read from public manufacturer documentation is that dealer status brings obligations along with buying rights. Husqvarna's own service documentation states that for its extended service contracts, authorised robotic mower installation is mandatory but not included, and that for the Warranty Plus contract, yearly maintenance of the product at an authorised Husqvarna dealer is mandatory for the warranty extension to remain valid. Notice what that tells you: the manufacturer is deliberately routing the annual service through the dealer network and making it a warranty condition. Inside that network, it becomes an annuity for you. Outside it, you cannot service those contracts at all.

Could you carry an opening stock order through a quiet winter? Think about that early, because my unverified but reasonable expectation is that your dealership application will involve some mix of trade references, an opening stock order, a physical premises or workshop, product training, and a commitment to stock genuine parts. Ask directly, and get the terms in writing before you commit any capital. Please do not assume the terms offered to you as a new one-van business match the terms an established multi-site dealer gets.

Laying boundary wire, step by step

That settles the money side. What follows is the few hours in someone's garden that everything else rests on.

It is worth understanding in detail even as it declines, because you will be repairing these installations for years.

Here is the sequence on a straightforward job:

1. Walk and mark. Decide your wire route and mark it with pegs or spray. The wire runs at a set offset from the edge, and that offset differs for a hard edge the mower can overhang, such as a patio, and a soft edge it must not touch, such as a flower bed or a pond. Get this wrong and your customer ends up with either an uncut fringe everywhere or a mower in the water feature.
2. Site the charging station. Level, in shade, near a suitable outdoor power supply, with a clear approach on the guide wire and nothing in the way. Husqvarna's guidance is to keep the station out of direct sun to avoid overheating during charging; its published temperature table gives operation and storage ranges of 0 to 50 degrees Celsius and charging 0 to 45 degrees Celsius.
3. Lay the wire. Either peg it on the surface of the turf, where it disappears under new growth within a few weeks, or slit it into the ground with a wire-laying machine or an edging spade. Buried wire survives scarification and aeration; pegged wire does not, and every autumn a share of pegged installations get cut by a contractor with a scarifier.
4. Cut in the guide wire or wires, running from the station out into the lawn to a distant boundary point.
5. Connect, splice and test. Splices are the classic long-term failure point. Use proper gel-filled connectors and leave the tape in the van.
6. Commission and test-run. Let the machine complete at least one full cycle to docking before you leave.

How long would a multi-zone garden take you today? Time on the job varies enormously, and this is where you can lose money if you are new. As a working estimate, and I want to be clear it is an estimate rather than a sourced figure, a simple rectangular lawn of a few hundred square metres with one zone and an existing outdoor socket takes you half a day. A multi-zone garden with islands, a narrow side passage, slopes and a long guide wire run takes a full day and sometimes two. Coolings' own price list, starting at £199 for up to 100 square metres, implies a job small enough to finish in a couple of hours including handover.

The tools that matter to you:

• A wire-laying machine. The single biggest factor in your speed and finish quality on wired installs. Petrol or battery slitting machines that cut a narrow slot and feed wire in one pass exist specifically for this trade. Buying one is a several-hundred-to-low-thousands-of-pounds decision; hiring one for your first season is a sensible way to test demand before you commit.
• A half-moon edging iron and a stiff-bristled broom for hand slitting and closing the slot.
• A wire-break locator. Either a dedicated robotic mower loop tester or a general cable fault locator. You will use it on every callback, and it pays for itself quickly.
• A multimeter for station output and loop resistance checks.
• A cable avoidance tool for scanning before you dig. See the section on underground services below. Treat this one as compulsory.
• Kneepads, a decent knee mat, and waterproofs. Unglamorous, and the difference between a trade you can keep doing and a bad back at fifty.
• Consumables: boundary wire on drums, pegs by the thousand, gel-filled splice connectors, spare blades and blade screws, spare charging station stakes.

Consumable costs vary by supplier and quantity, so check them against current trade price lists and trust no article on them, this one included. What is worth taking to heart is the ratio: on a wired install, the wire, pegs and connectors are a small fraction of your invoice, and the overwhelming majority of what you charge is labour. That is the opposite of a hardware business, and it is why wire installs held up as a margin line for as long as they did.

Because most of a wire install invoice is your labour, a long Saturday pegging cable round someone else's borders turns largely into household money once materials and travel are paid. A handful of those across May and June could be the beach trip your kids keep asking about, booked before the schools break up. Price your hours properly on your next install so there is something left to put aside.

RTK siting, and the gardens where satellites fail

There are two architectures in the field, and the difference matters to your business.

Local RTK uses a physical reference antenna installed on your customer's property, which computes its own correction and broadcasts it to the mower. It needs mains power, a cable run, and an unobstructed view of the sky.

Network RTK takes correction data from a regional reference network over a mobile connection, so no local antenna is needed. Segway markets Network RTK on newer platforms, and its UK site invites customers to leave an email address to be notified when Network RTK becomes available in their area, which tells you plainly that coverage is still patchy.

Either way, the mower itself still needs to see satellites. Here are the gardens where it fails, roughly in order of how often you will meet them:

• Mature tree canopy. The killer, and seasonally deceptive. A garden that surveys clean for you in March under bare branches can lose lock in June under full leaf. If you commission in early spring, say so in writing and tell your customer a summer revisit may be needed.
• Tall boundaries on the sunward side. Terraced gardens with a two- or three-storey wall down one side lose a large arc of sky for good.
• Multipath from reflective surfaces. Metal sheds, large glazed extensions, conservatories and rendered walls bounce signals and produce position errors that look like random misbehaviour. Your customer will rarely guess it is a signal problem.
• Narrow side passages between buildings. Almost always a dead zone.
• Deep, steep-sided or heavily walled gardens in general.

How many gardens near you have mature trees or a two-storey house on the south side? Those are the ones to survey twice. Manufacturers sell fixes: extension cables to place the antenna away from the station, secondary antennas, and signal enhancement accessories. Mammotion also offers RTK repeaters for complex layouts. These help. They cannot create sky where there is none.

The discipline this asks of you is simple, and most new entrants get it wrong: survey the reception before you sell the machine, and be willing to tell your customer that a wire-free model is the wrong choice for their garden. If you sell an RTK machine into a wooded plot, what you have really bought yourself is an unpaid support relationship and, very likely, a refund.

The faults that bring you back unpaid

Callbacks are where your margin dies. Every one of these is predictable, which means you can either prevent it at survey stage or charge for it, provided you wrote it into your terms.

Wire breaks. The commonest fault on wired installs. Causes: a scarifier or aerator, a spade, a fence post, a mole, a dog, ground movement, and splices that were never watertight. Finding the break with a loop tester is fast; digging up and re-splicing takes longer. Price wire-break callbacks explicitly, or bundle them into a service plan as Coolings does, or you will find yourself doing them free.

Poor loop signal. Long loops, loops laid too close together in a narrow passage, and loops running parallel to buried mains cable all cause instability. If you run two lengths of boundary wire down a narrow corridor, keep them far enough apart or the machine cannot tell them apart.

Slopes beyond specification. Every model has a maximum gradient, and the marketing figures are best-case. Husqvarna's own FAQ says all-wheel-drive models can handle up to 70% incline, and warns that on 50 to 70% slopes you must ensure there are no obstacles such as trees or stones in the path. A machine at the edge of its slope rating on damp grass will slip, scalp the turf, and eventually fail to climb back to the station. Survey slopes honestly, in wet conditions if you can.

Wet ground. Waterlogged lawns cause wheel slip, ruts and turf damage, and a rain sensor is no substitute for a schedule that respects British winters. Your customer will blame you for ruts left by a machine you installed.

Narrow passages. Most machines have a stated minimum corridor width. Below it they either refuse to cross or get stuck. On wire-free machines the matching problem is a corridor with no sky.

Pets and children. These are machines with rotating blades working unsupervised in family gardens. Every manufacturer says do not allow children or animals in the working area while the machine runs. In practice, your schedule is the safeguard: set it to mow during the working day, when the garden is empty.

Wildlife. This is a real and under-discussed issue in the UK, and it has been studied properly. Rasmussen and colleagues tested 18 robotic mower models against hedgehog cadavers in four weight classes across 216 trials, published in the journal Animals in 2021. Their finding was blunt: none of the mowers tested was able to detect the presence of dependent juvenile hedgehogs, and no model could detect the cadavers without physical contact. Design features made a large and statistically significant difference. Pivoting blades in place of fixed ones, front-wheel drive, skid plates, and three wheels in place of four all reduced damage. Some models caused no severe damage in the test; others caused severe damage in the large majority of trials. Researchers at Oxford later worked on a standardised hedgehog safety test for the industry.

For you, this turns into concrete advice to give every customer, and to record that you gave: do not run the machine at night, when hedgehogs are active, and check the lawn before a cycle. It is also a sales conversation, because it bears on which model they choose. This is a reputational and liability point too. A customer who finds an injured hedgehog under a mower you installed and scheduled will remember who set the schedule.

Theft. Machines are portable, valuable, and left outdoors. Manufacturers offer PIN locks, lift alarms, station pairing and GPS tracking on higher models. Husqvarna's own guidance to a customer whose Automower has been stolen is to contact their home insurance provider. That is the practical position for you as well: the mower is your customer's property and your customer's insurance risk, and your job is to configure the anti-theft features at commissioning and document that you did. Keep theft out of the liabilities you accept in your terms.

Electrical work: the line you must not cross

Up to here the calls have been yours to make. The next few sections are decided by other people, and getting them wrong costs you far more than a callback.

This is the single most commonly misstated point in this trade, so let's get it exactly right.

Your customer's charging station needs mains power outdoors. Many gardens have no suitable outdoor socket, so someone has to install one. The question is who, and in England the answer is more nuanced than the usual summary that outdoor sockets are notifiable.

Part P of the Building Regulations applies to the work. Approved Document P states that Part P applies to electrical installations in a dwelling-house or flat and to parts of the installation that are outside the dwelling, giving fixed lighting and pond pumps in gardens as worked examples, and to installations in outbuildings such as sheds, detached garages and domestic greenhouses. The regulations cover electrical installations in a garden, or in or on land associated with a building, where the electricity comes from a source located within or shared with a dwelling. A garden socket for a mower station sits squarely inside that scope. All such work must comply with the technical requirements, and in practice with BS 7671.

Notification is a narrower question. Notifiable work in England is set out in regulation 12(6A) of the Building Regulations 2010, quoted in Approved Document P as work consisting of the installation of a new circuit, the replacement of a consumer unit, or any addition or alteration to existing circuits in a special location. A special location in that regulation has two limbs: the zones around a bath tap or shower head in a room containing a bath or shower, and a room containing a swimming pool or sauna heater. The current England text leaves gardens off that list. Approved Document P then states that all other electrical installation work is not notifiable, namely additions and alterations to existing installations outside special locations, and replacements, repairs and maintenance anywhere. It gives the directly comparable worked example that connecting an electric gate or garage door to an existing isolator switch is not notifiable work, but installing a new circuit from the consumer unit to the isolator is notifiable.

So, in England, in practical terms for you:

• Running a new dedicated circuit from the consumer unit to an outdoor socket: notifiable. Building control or a registered competent person, full stop.
• Adding an outdoor socket as a spur from an existing circuit: within Part P's scope and required to comply with BS 7671, but not notifiable under the current England text.

Please read that distinction carefully, because it gives you no permission to do the work yourself. Compliance with BS 7671 for an outdoor socket means correct RCD protection, appropriate IP-rated equipment, correct cable selection and installation method, sound earthing arrangements, and inspection and testing with a certificate. If you cannot design, install, inspect, test and certify that work, you are not competent to do it, notifiable or otherwise, and you are personally exposed if someone is hurt.

Jurisdictions differ, and the divergence is real. The Institution of Engineering and Technology records that on 31 July 2014 the Welsh Building Regulations were amended, diverging from those used in England; Wales kept the wider pre-2013 notification scope, under which work in kitchens and outdoors was notifiable. Scotland operates a separate Building Standards system entirely, and Northern Ireland has its own building regulations. Check the rules for the country you are actually working in, and treat "the UK" as four places.

The registered competent person schemes authorised for full electrical installations in dwellings in England are listed by the government as BESCA, Blue Flame Certification, Certsure and NAPIT, with APHC additionally authorised for electrical work carried out as part of other installation work.

Do you already know a registered electrician you would trust in a customer's garden? Because the sensible answer for almost every robotic mower installer is the same: leave the electrical work to them. Build that relationship, subcontract the socket, take a referral fee or a modest handling mark-up, and keep the certificate in your customer's file. It costs you a little margin and removes a whole category of catastrophic risk from your life. Outside the UK the same logic applies under different names: electrical work on a dwelling is a licensed trade throughout Australia and in every Canadian province, and is licensed across almost all of the United States. In the US, though, the licence may be issued by the state, the county or the city, and a few states have no statewide electrical licence at all. Find out who licenses electricians where you actually work rather than assuming it is the state. Several Canadian provinces also issue homeowner permits allowing an owner-occupier to do electrical work in their own dwelling after passing a test, and that route is closed to you on someone else's home.

Digging near buried services

You are putting a spade, a slitting machine, a peg or a fence-post-sized station stake into someone's garden. Gardens hide buried electricity supply cables, gas services, water and drainage, often shallow, often undocumented, and often nowhere near where anyone expects. Do you know what is under the lawn you are quoting next week?

The relevant guidance is the Health and Safety Executive's HSG47, Avoiding danger from underground services, third edition. Its structure is the discipline I would urge you to adopt: plan the work, locate and identify buried services before excavating, and excavate safely. For you, in practice, that means asking the householder what they know, looking for obvious evidence such as meter positions and service entry points, scanning with a cable avoidance tool before you cut a slot or drive a stake, and hand-digging wherever you have any doubt.

This risk is real. A boundary wire slot is shallow, but a slitting machine is fast and unforgiving, and charging station stakes go in with a hammer. Striking a live supply cable can kill you, and at the very least it brings a repair bill and a claim. Striking a gas service is worse.

This is one of the few genuinely dangerous parts of your job, and it deserves a written method that you follow every single time.

Insurance

Public liability insurance is the one you cannot skip. You are working unsupervised on private property, digging, using powered tools, and leaving behind a machine with rotating blades that runs with nobody watching.

For a current, dated, published UK figure: Simply Business states that 10% of landscape gardeners paid £75.02 or less annually for up to £2 million of public liability cover between 1 January and 30 June 2026, equivalent to £6.25 a month excluding the extra cost of paying monthly, and adds that 91% of its customers take a £1 million limit and 9% take £2 million. Hiscox advertises landscape gardener insurance starting at £7.20 per month.

Read those numbers carefully, because they describe the cheapest tenth of a broad trade class. What you will actually pay depends on your declared turnover, the specific activities you disclose, and your claims history, and a headline "from" price is a starting point, never a quote. It is also essential that you disclose what you actually do: digging, any electrical connection work, working at height to site an antenna, storing customers' machines over winter. A policy written for lawn mowing may not respond to a claim arising from an excavation.

Cover to think about beyond public liability:

• Tools and equipment cover, especially if your wire-laying machine lives in a van overnight.
• Goods in trust, or customers' property cover, if you store machines over winter. This is the one people forget. If a fire or a break-in destroys forty customers' mowers in your unit, your public liability policy will not pay for them.
• Employers' liability if you take on any help, which is a legal requirement in the UK for almost all employers.
• Product liability if you resell hardware.
• Motor insurance rated for business use.

Treat insurance as part of the work itself. Find a broker who understands the digging and the storage, and describe your storage exposure to them explicitly.

Noise and neighbours

Robotic mowers are quiet next to petrol machines, though you can still hear them. They run for long stretches, sometimes at unsociable hours, and often in gardens where the house next door is a few metres away.

In England and Wales, noise can be a statutory nuisance under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 if it unreasonably and substantially interferes with the use or enjoyment of a home or other premises, or injures health or is likely to injure health. Where a council is satisfied that a statutory nuisance exists, it must serve an abatement notice. Councils also have powers over night-time noise between 11pm and 7am, and can issue fixed penalty notices and, on prosecution, fines.

For you, the practical answer is scheduling. A machine you set to run at 2am to keep it out of the family's way can bring a complaint against your customer, and a customer who then blames you. Schedule daytime running by default, which also happens to be the hedgehog-safe answer, and only change that after a conversation about the neighbours.

Seasonality, and the one real fix

This is a seasonal trade, and no amount of optimism changes that. In the UK, installs cluster hard into spring, roughly March to June, with a smaller autumn tail. From November to February your phone goes quiet. What would those four months look like for you, with no installs booked and the bills still arriving?

Manufacturers' own storage guidance tells you what the winter work is. Husqvarna's winter storage guide instructs a deep clean of mower and charging station, replacement of blades and screws to prevent rust, inspection of wheels, blade disc and body panels and of charging contacts for corrosion, a full charge before switching off, and indoor storage in a dry, frost-free location. Boundary and guide wires stay in the ground over winter. On NERA models only the top of the charging station needs to come indoors; the baseplate stays outside. For EPOS wire-free systems stored outdoors, the power supply should stay connected to preserve the virtual boundaries.

Watch for a genuine inconsistency in the manufacturer's own published guidance. The winter storage guide specifies storage above freezing, greater than 0 degrees Celsius. Husqvarna's separate temperature table gives a storage range of 0 to 50 degrees Celsius. But its robotic mower FAQ says to store the machine at a minimum of plus 5 and a maximum of plus 20 degrees Celsius, and to maintenance-charge the battery twice during winter storage. That is three different specifications on one manufacturer's UK website. The safe reading for you: heated, or at least reliably frost-free storage comfortably above zero, with the battery charged. That satisfies all three, and it is what a commercial storage service should offer. Check the current operator's manual for the specific model before you put a storage specification in writing.

Your fix for seasonality is to sell winter work as a subscription in spring, while your customer is enthusiastic and spending, and well before October, when they have stopped thinking about the lawn. A collect-service-store-return package turns your dead quarter into scheduled, pre-paid labour, smooths your cash flow, and (the underrated part) guarantees that you are the person who reinstalls the machine in March, which is when upsell and blade sales happen.

Winter storage needs premises. You need a lockable, dry, frost-free unit with floor space for however many machines you take, plus the insurance discussed above, plus a system for tagging machines so the right one goes back to the right customer with the right accessories. Where would forty mowers sleep this winter if you said yes to them all? This is a real operational commitment, and it is the commonest point at which a one-van operator decides the growth is not worth it.

Your recurring revenue, itemised

Here is what you can legitimately sell every year to a customer you already have:

• Annual service. Clean, inspect, replace wear parts, check the chassis, wheels, drive motors and charging contacts, test the loop or the reception, and update firmware. For customers on manufacturer extended warranties this may be mandatory: Husqvarna states that yearly maintenance at an authorised dealer is mandatory for its Warranty Plus contract to remain valid.
• Blades. Your highest-frequency consumable. Husqvarna's guidance is that main disc blades typically last 3 to 6 weeks under normal conditions, and EdgeCut disc blades 9 to 12 weeks, because they are only activated during edge cutting operations. It tells owners always to use original Husqvarna blades and screws, to replace the screws each time blades are changed because reusing them may cause blades to come loose during operation, and to avoid mixing blade types or new and old blades because it unbalances the cutting disc. Other published intervals differ: some retailer help pages recommend intervals as short as six weeks, though none could be named and dated for citation here. The correct interval for your customer depends on blade type, grass type and grit. What nobody disputes is that this is a several-times-a-season consumable, and that a customer changing them properly is buying genuine parts from somebody. That somebody may as well be you.
• Firmware and app support. Low labour for you, high perceived value for them, and the reason customers keep your number.
• Winterisation and storage. As above.
• Spring reinstatement. Re-siting the station, testing the loop or reconnecting the RTK reference, re-mapping if the garden has changed, new blades.
• Wire repairs and rerouting. Chargeable callouts, or covered under a plan.
• Out-of-warranty repair. Wheel motors, drive belts where fitted, charging contacts, blade discs, damaged body panels, and eventually batteries. This needs a workshop and parts access, which is one of the strongest arguments for you taking on dealership status.
• Battery replacement. Every one of these machines has a lithium-ion battery with a finite life. On an installed base of a few hundred machines that becomes a predictable annual revenue line for you.

Once a few hundred machines are under contract and the battery swaps come round on schedule, you become the name people on the estate pass along when a mower stops. If that base holds near 3,500 a month, the upper limit here, the relative who called it a summer job may be the one asking how your service plans work. Offer your next owner a plan you can reliably deliver.

Waste: batteries, wire and packaging

If you replace batteries, you will build up waste lithium-ion batteries, and they are regulated waste with real hazards.

Under UK waste battery rules it is illegal to send waste industrial, vehicle or other automotive batteries for incineration or to landfill. Producers of industrial batteries must accept waste batteries free of charge from end users where they supplied the new batteries and the chemistry matches what they place on the market. Portable battery producers fund collection through compliance schemes and carry no direct take-back duties. Your practical route is to return waste batteries through the manufacturer or distributor take-back route, or to an approved battery treatment operator, and to keep the paperwork.

Separately, if you carry waste away from customers' premises, you probably need to register as a waste carrier. Gov.uk states that you must register if your business transports waste, and publishes the fees: £191.02 to register, £130.25 to renew an upper tier registration every three years, and £49.62 to update your registration details, with registration free if you only transport waste you produced yourself. Registration is administered separately in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; check with the relevant regulator. Fees are revised periodically, so confirm the current figure on the gov.uk page before you budget.

Old boundary wire, packaging and dead machines are ordinary commercial waste covered by your duty of care. Lithium batteries in particular must never go into a mixed skip; they start fires in waste facilities.

Outside the UK, battery and waste-carrier rules differ by state and province. Check locally before a pallet of dead batteries builds up in your unit.

Registration and tax, country by country

United Kingdom. There is no licence to install robotic mowers. You register as self-employed with HMRC; the trigger is earning more than £1,000 in a tax year, and you must tell HMRC by 5 October following the tax year for which you need to file. VAT registration becomes compulsory when your taxable turnover over the previous 12 months exceeds £90,000, per current gov.uk guidance. Electrical work is the regulated part, as set out above, and the rules differ between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Waste carrier registration applies if you move waste.

United States. There is no national position; contractor licensing is a state matter and the thresholds are low. California is the instructive example. Under Assembly Bill 2622, effective 1 January 2025, the Contractors State License Board raised the handyperson exemption from $500 to $1,000: an unlicensed person may complete projects up to $1,000 provided they hire no workers and no building permits are needed, and any advertisement must state that the person is not licensed. CSLB is explicit about the consequences of going over it. Bidding above $1,000, performing work requiring a permit, or employing anyone without a licence exposes you to administrative fines of up to $15,000, jail sentences of up to six months, and fines up to $5,000, with harsher mandatory penalties for repeat offenders. A single robotic mower installation at typical pricing sits close to or above that threshold. Check your own state's threshold and classification before you quote. Electrical work is separately licensed everywhere.

Canada. Business registration and trade licensing are provincial. GST/HST registration is required once you stop being a small supplier, which the Canada Revenue Agency sets at taxable revenues of more than $30,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters, or in a single quarter. Electrical work requires a licensed electrician in every province, and provincial electrical safety authorities enforce permits for new outdoor circuits.

Australia. You will need an ABN, and GST registration is compulsory once your GST turnover reaches A$75,000, with the Australian Taxation Office requiring registration within 21 days of the threshold being reached. Electrical work is licensed in every state and territory, enforcement is strict, and you should leave it alone.

In all four countries the same principle holds for you: the mower installation itself is generally unregulated; the electrical connection generally is regulated. Where a jurisdiction runs a low-value contractor threshold, as California does, your ordinary job value may put you above it.

How to price, honestly

Here is a pricing structure you could defend as a new operator:

• A banded install price by lawn area, following the shape of published lists, with an explicit complexity uplift for multi-zone gardens, islands, slopes, narrow passages and long guide wire runs. Quote after a survey, never over the phone from a postcode.
• A separate line for the electrical supply, subcontracted, at cost plus a modest handling margin, with the electrician's certificate passed to your customer.
• A wire-free commissioning price that reflects your survey and mapping time, because the wire metres you used to charge for are gone.
• A published annual service price and a subscription that bundles service, blades, winterisation and a defined number of callouts. Publish it. Customers who can see the ongoing cost buy the install with less hesitation.
• A callout rate for out-of-plan faults, with wire breaks caused by third-party contractors explicitly chargeable.

The mistake I would most want you to avoid is pricing the install as though it were the product. It is what you pay to win a service customer. If you priced your install at £199 tomorrow, how many of those customers would you need on a plan for it to pay off? An install priced to be the cheapest in the area and sold with a service plan attached is better business for you than an expensive install sold alone.

Finding your first customers

You now know what you would do and what you would charge for it. This is the part that decides whether your phone rings at all.

There is no clever answer. Here are your sources of work, roughly in order of usefulness when you are new and independent:

• Local search. A Google Business Profile with real photographs of your completed installs, targeting the phrase people actually search, which is the brand name plus "installation" plus the town.
• Dealers who do not install. Plenty of garden machinery shops sell machines and have no wish to lay wire. Some will subcontract to you.
• Landscapers and garden maintenance firms who get asked for robotic mowers and do not want the technical side.
• Trade directories where local homeowners look.
• Existing installations. Every garden with a robotic mower is a service prospect for you, whoever installed it. The machines are visible from the street. How many could you count on a twenty-minute walk round your own estate this evening?
• Commercial and grounds work. Schools, care homes, hotels, sports clubs and business parks. Longer sales cycles, larger machines, better margins, and much less price-shopping against Amazon. This is where your ceiling is meaningfully higher, and where dealership status starts to earn its keep.

Every spring you wait, someone else knocks on the doors of the gardens you walk past each evening, and those owners sign a service plan with them. The machines are already out there, flashing their errors. Take one walk tonight and count the mowers, ring one dealer tomorrow, and write down the three closest addresses. Your first customer is probably within sight of your front door.

Who should skip this

Be honest with yourself as you read this list.

• You cannot do sustained physical outdoor work. This is kneeling, digging and carrying, in British weather, in other people's gardens.
• You need year-round even income from the outset. Your first winter has no installs and no service base yet. You need either savings or other work to get across it.
• You are drawn in by hardware margin. It is thin, the manufacturers compete with you online, and if that is your plan, your plan is wrong.
• You intend to do your own electrical work without being a registered electrician. This is the one that ends careers and occasionally lives.
• You cannot stomach unpaid callbacks. Some share of your jobs will go wrong for reasons that are arguably nobody's fault, and you will fix them free to protect a review.
• You live in a region with low garden density, low incomes, or mostly small or paved gardens. Your market is homeowners with lawns large enough to be a chore and budgets north of a thousand pounds. Survey your own area honestly before you spend anything.
• You want to scale fast. This scales through vans, staff, premises and stock, all of which take capital and management. Software will not shortcut any of it.

What the market data can and cannot tell you

You will see confident growth figures quoted for this sector. Please treat them with caution, because the published estimates contradict each other severely.

Global Market Insights values the European robotic lawn mower market at US$756.3 million in 2026, growing to US$1.25 billion by 2035 at a 5.8% compound annual growth rate. Mordor Intelligence estimates the same European market at US$635.8 million in 2026, reaching US$905.62 million by 2031 at 7.32%. Grand View Research sizes the global market at US$10.3 billion in 2026 rising to US$22.0 billion by 2033 at 11.4%. Fairfield Market Research asserts that Europe alone accounts for US$5.15 billion in 2026, 44% of global revenue. Those figures cannot all be right; the European estimates differ by roughly an order of magnitude between the lowest and the highest.

All of these are vendor-published summaries of paywalled reports with undisclosed methods. Keep them out of your business plan. What you can safely say is that adoption is growing and that wire-free technology has widened the market, which you can see for yourself in the fact that every major manufacturer has launched wire-free products, and that Husqvarna alone lists 35 robotic products on its UK site spanning roughly £990 to £32,000 across residential and commercial ranges. Beyond that, trust your own local survey: how many gardens in your area are large enough, how many machines you can already see, how many local competitors advertise installation. That is better evidence for you than any of these reports.

A realistic first year

I am not offering you case studies here, because there are no sourced, named, verifiable ones to offer. What follows is arithmetic, clearly labelled as an estimate, so you can swap in your own numbers.

Assume you start as an independent installer with no dealership, working solo, in an area with reasonable garden density. Assume you begin in late winter so you are ready for the spring rush.

In your first season you are learning, so allow for jobs taking longer than they should and for a few going badly. If you can win two to four installs a week through the March-to-June peak at a few hundred pounds each, plus servicing and repair work on existing machines, that is a real but modest gross. Out of it come insurance, fuel, consumables, tools, marketing and tax. Your first winter, if you have not built a storage or service base, produces close to nothing. Plan for your household to carry that first quiet winter on savings or other work.

Your second year is where the model either works or does not, and the test is simple: how many of your first-year customers are on a paid annual service arrangement? If the answer is most of them, you walk into year two with a base of recurring work that fills the shoulder seasons and a pipeline of referrals. If the answer is none of them, you have a summer job that starts from zero every March.

So set your target accordingly. The number to grow is machines under contract. Count those every month, and let the installs per week look after themselves.