Having the cold-weather battery makes sense, as the Yarbo started out as a snow blower. However, the tradeoff is that it only has a 500 charge cycle life. If it were just used for snow removal a few months a year, it could last for a decade.
However, most of the attachments and uses are warm-weather yard tasks (like mowing the lawn). The mower might be mowing most of the year and getting recharged daily. 500 charge cycles could easily take only 2 years. That expensive cold-weather battery is a terrible waste of operating cost.
A battery that will work over a reasonable temperature range towards the warmer side could cycle 5x as many times and last for more than a decade. We should have a second battery option that works for the warmer weather seasons, which has a much higher cycle rating.
Some of us would only want a warm-weather battery, and others might want one of each to get the best operating cost out of their mower.
Thanks for sharing your suggestion. I understand that, as a modular robot, Yarbo needs to take into account the needs of users who use it for different purposes. I’ll pass your feedback along to our product team for their consideration.
I was thinking about this earlier in the week too after watching a HandyDadTV video. A warm weather battery would be a great way to swap things out and it would be interesting to see if in additional to enhanced charging cycles whether it would help at all with some of the battery overheating (although I think that some of the firmware changes have helped that recently).
Mine returned to dock in the heat of the day with 94F ambient, 20% SOC, and battery at 45C. It took 7 hours to get to 80%. This is why I still need to run a fan on it.