Husqvarna Automower 405X Review : Perfect for smaller gardens

A very powerful robot lawnmower designed for smaller gardens, the Husqvarna Automower 405X packs in a lot of the features of its bigger brother. You get full app control via SIM, including height adjustment. A powerful cutter, this robot will have your lawn looking its best in no time, but my one minor complaint is that the app doesn’t give much help it setting up the right schedules for your lawn size.

Introduction

There’s been a growing number of robot lawnmowers designed for smaller lawns, with the Husqvarna Automower 405X the latest to join the ranks. Although it may be built for lawns of up to 600m, this model is built to the company’s highest standards, including full app control and automatic cutting height adjustment.

Excellent performance combined with the ability to go anywhere while avoiding obstacles makes this model stand out, but it could do with a little help to set up schedules.

Design and installation

• Looks incredible
• Simple-to-follow installation guide
• Flexible dock placement

As a smaller robot lawn mower, the Husqvarna Automower 405X is designed for gardens around 600m2 (plus or minus 20%).

As with previous robots we’ve reviewed from the company, such as the Husqvarna Automower 435X AWD, the 405X looks fantastic: if Batman made robot lawnmowers, they’d definitely look like this.

Two large wheels at the back provide the power to move the lawnmower, with two smaller guide wheels at the front. Impressively, the robot can climb slopes of up to 40%, which will take in the vast majority of gardens.

Flip the robot over and you’ll see that it uses a spinning disc with three blades for the actual cutting. These can easily and cheaply be replaced when they get dull, so there’s no messing around sharpening blades with this model.

If you’ve got a relatively simple garden layout, then you can self-install the Husqvarna Automower 405X. There is a professional installation option, which is better for anyone with a more complicated layout, including the need for the robot to visit different areas of a garden and fit down narrower paths. 

You can also have three different start points, carrying the robot to them for managing completely different parts of the lawn.

As my garden is pretty straightforward, I went for the self-installation option. As with other robot lawnmowers, you need to lay a perimeter wire around the garden. The manual tells you how far from borders and other objects the wire needs to be laid, and the lawnmower ships with a cardboard ruler on the box that you can use for the guide.

With this model, there are actually two wires you need to run. The first is that perimeter wire that loops around your garden back to the base station. The second is a guide wire that runs out from the docking station and hooks up to the main perimeter loop. 

This guide wire is used by the robot to find its way in and out of the dock. In my case, it meant that I could place the charging dock in the gap between the step the shed and the step to my office.

Installation is pretty straightforward: the wires are clipped into place with pegs that you hammer into the ground. You just need to make one join, using the provided outdoor connector box, where the guide wire meets the perimeter wire.

You then connect all of the guide wires to the back of the base station. If there’s a break in the cable, the lawnmower will not run.

After that, the base station needs power via an outdoor socket, and you can slide the robot onto the dock to start it charging. At this point, you need to go through the installation process, which requires a PIN: this has to be sent to you from Husqvarna after you register the robot.

Once you have the PIN, you can unlock the robot, create a new PIN and register it through the Automower app. You’ll also need the PIN if the robot gets stuck or is knocked over, in order to unlock it and continue cutting. Plus, the PIN is a security measure: if someone steals the Husqvarna Automower 405X they won’t be able to use it.

Features

• Full control over cutting height
• Clever cutting options
• Needs a little more help with schedules

Control via the app is the best way to operate the Husqvarna Automower 405X. As an ‘X’ model, the robot has a built-in SIM card for control, so you can use the app from practically anywhere.

At its most basic, you can send the robot back to its dock, or your can tell it to go and cut the lawn, choosing how long you want it to be out for, with a minimum of three hours. Alternatively, you can set a cutting schedule, setting when you want the Husqvarna Automower 405X to start and stop its cut, with a minimum run time of one hour.

During the active period, the robot will continue cutting, returning to the dock to recharge until the time is up. That’s a little different to the Honda Miimo HRM 40 Live, which knows how big an area it’s in and only stays out long enough to fully cut the lawn.

With the Husqvarna Automower 405X you need a bit more time to set up schedules properly, adjusting cutting times so that the robot is out for long enough but not for too long.

That’s not to say that you don’t have some clever automatic features. First, you can set the cut height directly from the app. The robot can cut between 20mm and 50mm, although the app presents this as a slider between 1 and 9, which is a little confusing, so you’ll also need to adjust this carefully to get the optimal height for your lawn.

I love the TargetHeight feature that lets you set the height you want the robot to cut at, and it then spends 10 days slowly lowering from max down to your limit. That’s great at the start of a season when you bring the Husqvarna Automower 405X out of storage to begin its work.

There are also a couple of neat weather features. Weather timer is an on/off option that will let the Husqvarna Automower 405X run for longer in periods when grass grows faster and cut its runtime when grass doesn’t grow so fast.

Frost Guard lets the robot check the local weather report and delay the start of its scheduled cut by an hour if there’s likely to be frost on the ground; after an hour, the weather is checked again. It’s a nice way to automatically protect fragile grass.

For cutting, there’s a Spiral cutting option, which lets the Husqvarna Automower 405X detect when it’s on a patch of longer grass, spiralling around the long patch to more thoroughly cut it.

As this is a connected lawnmower, you can use the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant skills to start or stop a cut with your voice. That can be handy if you’re in a period of bad weather, as you can get the robot to go and cut the lawn while the sun is shining.

Performance

• Cuts brilliantly
• Excellent obstacle avoidance
• Creates a lush and healthy lawn

The Husqvarna Automower 405X is very forgiving when it comes to the layout of your lawn. With the Honda Automower, I found that it had to follow the perimeter wire all the way around before it could cut the middle. Put a chair or something else in the way, and the robot would fail.

Here, the Husqvarna Automower 405X is much better, as it doesn’t need to follow the perimeter wire. Instead, the robot moves out and starts cutting in an almost random pattern, so as not to leave wheel marks through using the same path time and time again. 

GPS assistance lets the robot know where it has and hasn’t been, so it will automatically cover your entire garden without missing any areas. I certainly didn’t find any patches where the Husqvarna Automower 405X hadn’t been.

A few times, I’d left garden chairs out around the border, but that caused the 405X no problems, aside from the fact that it couldn’t cut that little bit of the lawn. It’s also a very forgiving robot when it comes to terrain. A few divots in the lawn (thanks cats) were just driven over, with those powerful wheels pushing the lawnmower on.

As for cutting performance, there’s absolutely nothing to complain about. I found the robot runs up to and slightly over the perimeter wire, so there’s only a small amount of garden that needs going over with a strimmer (check out my guide to the best grass trimmers for a suitable model).

With the spiral cut mode on, even some patches of longer grass were beautifully dealt with. After using the robot for six weeks, my lawn condition had improved. Grass clippings drop down to the soil, mulching down to feed the lawn. This helps improve grass growth and naturally fill in gaps.

Cutting is very level with this lawnmower, too. Provided you get the schedule right, your lawn can always have that ‘just cut’ look to it, for a professional look and feel without the hassle.

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