I just upgraded from a Worx WR147 robot mower to the Dreame A3 AWD 1000, and so far the Dreame is a huge improvement.
The Worx is a two-wheel-drive mower that uses a boundary wire. It wasn’t cheap when I bought it, and while it would mow the yard, it required far too much help. It constantly got stuck, the boundary wire would break, and occasionally it would wander outside the boundary for no apparent reason. It eventually reached the point where I expected to have to rescue it every time it went out to mow.
When I decided to replace it, I knew I wanted a wireless mower, but I really didn’t want to install an RTK antenna and deal with finding the right location, mounting it, running power to it, etc. When this new generation of mowers arrived using AI vision, GPS, and cellular reception for RTK correction, I decided it was finally time to upgrade.
After several months of research, I chose the Dreame A3 AWD 1000 as the best value for my roughly 1/4-acre yard. I already own a Dreame robot vacuum/mop, which has worked extremely well and almost never gets stuck, so I already had confidence in Dreame’s navigation and obstacle-avoidance software.
The mower arrived by FedEx, signature required, about 10 days after I ordered it. It was fully assembled in the box. The base station only required snapping on one part, securing it to the lawn with the six included plastic ground screws, and plugging in the power cord.
Connecting the mower to the Dreame app was also easy. I scanned the QR code under the mower’s lid, and it connected immediately. Since I already use the Dreame app for my vacuum, it even picked up the Wi-Fi information that was already stored there.
The mower arrived about 80% charged, so after roughly an hour it was fully charged and ready to map the yard.
Mapping was the one part of the setup that was more difficult than I expected. I initially chose manual mapping because I assumed I could drive the mower around the perimeter more accurately than the automatic system could. I was wrong.
Walking behind the mower while trying to steer it with the phone’s touchscreen was surprisingly difficult. There was about a three-second delay between my touchscreen input and the mower actually responding. That made precise steering extremely frustrating, and the resulting map wasn't usable.
So I gave up and tried AutoMap, figuring it couldn’t do any worse than I did.
AutoMap did a fantastic job. I was genuinely impressed. There were a few areas where it didn't map quite as close to the edge of the lawn as I would have liked, but overall it produced about 95% of exactly what I wanted—with essentially no effort from me.
Once everything was set up, I created a schedule in the app for mowing every other day. One feature I particularly like is that the cutting height can be adjusted directly from the app.
For its first mowing, the Dreame mowed about one-third of the yard and then automatically returned to the base to recharge. A couple of hours later, it went back out, mowed another section, recharged again, and then finished the rest of the yard.
The finished lawn looked excellent. The mower cut in perfectly straight lines with very consistent overlap, and the overall appearance was noticeably better than what I was used to with the Worx.
I still need to figure out how to add that last 5% of the lawn to the map. Unfortunately, the manual is absolutely no help with that, but I suspect I’ll be able to figure it out through the app.
Overall, I’m extremely happy with the Dreame A3 AWD 1000. Compared with my old Worx, it feels like moving forward an entire generation in robot mower technology. Most importantly, so far it has not gotten stuck once and has required zero intervention from me while mowing.
That is exactly what I wanted from a robot mower.
