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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

We have a small yard and a Landdroid mower we got 3 years ago. The yard is probably 1000sf It works quite well, though set up involves a perimieter wire which was a pain.

A critter eat through the wire this year, which means the mower stoped working. Figuring it out is was a perimeter wire break and where was a little tricky and involved using an am radio. Generally happy with the device.

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Same problem here! Squirrels have gnawed through my perimeter wire dozens of times. I have the Husqvarna Automower 450x, which allows for three shortcut home wires. Repairing the broken wire is easy...finding the break, however, is extremely difficult and time consuming. I've had the mower for 2 years and it's been awesome in every other way. I'm thinking of pulling up my entire perimeter wire and installing a new wire deeper. No doubt this will make finding future breaks more difficult, but I hope that by being deeper, the squirrel problem will go away.

Those squirrels....I found the break by turning the base on and using an AM radio to follow the wire around (it made a kinda tone). When the tone stopped I found the break. The hardest part was finding the radio And getting the batteries... I would assume it would work for the husqvarna perimeter too.

The squirrel trying to get to bird feeder :

https://youtu.be/cnNqi1hnHY8

Man look at that little critter fly!! I think the principles for using an AM radio are sound. I found two radios, and used them, but I couldn't quite make sense of what I was hearing. Perhaps there was a ton of localized interference. I stepped up my approach by purchasing an underground wire locator from Amazon. This gizmo sends an amplified steady signal down the perimeter wire and a separate portable device listens for the signal as I walk along the perimeter. This didn't work as easily as I'd hoped. My guess is that due to the existence of one very large perimeter wire and three intersecting shortcut-to-home wires, there's some interference/signal degradation that complicates finding the break, especially since there's normally multiple breaks due to the relatively large population of squirrels. There's got to be an easier way to find a break! I think the conclusion here is that I should just keep a bunch of loaded bird feeders to occupy their time!

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