Flymo EasiLife 350 vs Husqvarna Automower 305 for a 400-Square-Metre Garden

The Flymo EasiLife 350 quotes up to 350m2, while the Husqvarna Automower 305 quotes up to 600m2. A 400-square-metre garden therefore asks more of the Flymo and gives the Husqvarna spare capacity. That gap becomes visible once the lawn stops behaving like a flat rectangle: three tree circles, a curved bed, and a 14-degree bank change the job far more than the headline area suggests.

The patio bank tests the Flymo first

The EasiLife 350 is rated to roughly 25 percent incline. The Automower 305 is rated to 40 percent. On a mild, even lawn that difference may never show, yet a bank running down from a raised patio is exactly the place where it matters.

A 14-degree slope is about 25 percent. That puts the Flymo at the edge of its tolerance. Edge-of-spec mowing is where wet grass causes wheel slip, a wheel spins in place, and the mower can end up parked sideways after a tilt error.

The Husqvarna keeps climbing the same bank in rain and continues cutting. Its wheels are larger, and the drive has more torque low down. A genuinely flat 400m2 lawn makes this advantage less important, especially if price is the main concern.

Many medium gardens still have one awkward gradient, often beside a fence, patio, or retaining wall. A mower that has to cross that slope in every cutting cycle will expose the weakness quickly.

Both machines cross a slope better than they turn on one. Boundary wire should send the mower onto banks head-on where possible, since diagonal approaches make the EasiLife especially prone to beaching itself. The Automower is more likely to grind through the same awkward turn.

Boundary wire around flower beds

Both machines use a low-voltage boundary loop that the mower reads to stay inside the lawn. Around flower beds, the practical difference is the turning offset each machine leaves beside that loop.

The Automower 305 allows a wider or narrower offset setting and usually tracks tighter to the edge. That reduces the amount of strimming left beside the bed.

The EasiLife leaves a slightly wider uncut margin, often 8 to 12cm. On one short straight border this is only a small strip. Around a curved bed, especially the kind of sweep often used with Rolawn Medallion turf, the extra hand work becomes noticeable.

Hard edges need careful spacing. If the wire sits under 30cm from a paving slab, the mower turns early and leaves a missed strip. Move it too far away and the mower can climb into the bed.

Islands are the fiddly part of the installation. A single ornamental tree in the middle of the lawn needs its own loop out and back, pegged tight. The EasiLife is fussier about reading a tight island loop than the Husqvarna, so rushed pegging shows up sooner.

Allow an afternoon for installation either way. Buy 50 percent more wire and pegs than the box suggests, because at least one run usually needs re-routing once the mower has shown where it actually travels.

Buried guide wire is still vulnerable to small mistakes at the edge of a bed. A peg that looks fine in dry weather can lift after frost, and a slight kink around a tree can turn into a repeated missed patch.

Clippings, feeding, and compost plans

Neither machine collects clippings. Both mulch by dropping fine cut grass back into the sward, where it breaks down. Over a season on 400m2, that returns a meaningful amount of nitrogen to the lawn.

That return changes feeding. People often keep fertilising a robotically mown lawn as if the clippings were being removed, then end up with soft, disease-prone growth.

The clippings are too fine to rake up and they disappear into the turf, so they no longer bulk out a compost bin. Anyone who relied on grass to heat a compost heap will need green material from the kitchen, beds, and hedge trimmings instead. A hot heap still wants a rough half-and-half mix of green to brown material by volume, and a slimy ammonia smell points to a mix that is too green and too wet.

Charging and coverage across the day

The Automower 305 uses a 2.1Ah battery and cuts for about 70 minutes before returning to charge for around 60 minutes. The EasiLife 350 gives roughly 60 minutes of cutting per charge. On 400m2, both can keep the whole lawn short if they are allowed to work for most of the day.

The Husqvarna completes its work faster and spends more time docked. That matters in a garden where the machine needs to be off the grass while children are outside.

The coverage maths explains the schedule length. With a 20cm cutting width and sensible overlap, a robotic mower using random-pattern navigation covers roughly 150 to 200m2 per productive hour once turning and re-tracing are subtracted. Full coverage on 400m2 needs four to five hours of actual cutting time spread across charging cycles.

In daily use, that usually means an eight to ten hour window from first launch to final dock. A schedule that starts early lets both machines finish and park by mid-afternoon. A shorter window leaves the familiar patchy longer streaks where the random path never reached a corner.

Autumn overseeding interrupts the robot

Running the mower right up to overseeding creates a clash, because fresh seed and a spinning blade cannot share the same patch of grass. Early to mid autumn is the sensible window for lawn overseeding, while the soil is still warm enough for germination and the heat has faded.

Scarify or rake out the thatch first, sow the seed, then topdress. A peat free lawn topdressing, using a screened loam and compost blend, should be worked into the surface with the back of a rake. The seed needs soil contact without being buried.

After that, the robot stays parked. Both the EasiLife and the Automower should remain docked for two to three weeks while the new grass roots. Guide wire near bare repair patches may need lifting, otherwise the mower can scalp seedlings as soon as it is re-enabled.

Restart at the highest cutting height for the first pass, then lower the height gradually over later cuts. That lets young grass thicken without being shredded.

The operational tension is simple: robotic mowing favours constant light cutting, while lawn repair needs a period with no traffic and no blades. The schedule has to create that pause for either machine.

Noise under a bedroom window

The Automower 305 runs at around 60 decibels. The EasiLife is slightly louder, so a dock placed under a bedroom window can make the quieter Husqvarna the easier machine to live with.

Choosing between them on this lawn

A flat 400m2 lawn with fairly straight borders and no serious bank is within the EasiLife 350’s practical range, and it costs less. Paying extra for slope capacity makes little sense on ground that never asks for it.

Add a real slope, a tight island loop around a specimen tree, or curved beds that already make strimming annoying, and the Automower 305 earns its higher price through wider incline tolerance and a tighter edge cut.

Longer-term wear depends on the ground as much as the machine. Wheel slip on the same wet bank week after week wears the drive. A wire run pegged badly during installation can fail in the second winter when frost heaves the pegs. A mower that looks right on day one can feel less convincing by year three if the loop was laid carelessly.

Before choosing, the unanswered part is the route the mower will actually travel after rain. How much of that route still looks dry, level, and forgiving after rain?