By the numbers, yes — a robot is the quietest machine on this site by a wide margin. In practice, running at night is a decision about your neighbours and about wildlife rather than about decibels.
What the figure says
Robots carry the same guaranteed sound power marking as every other machine here, and theirs sits well below a mains mower and far below a petrol one. The cutting system is why: three small pivoting razors taking two millimetres, rather than a long blade moving a large volume of air.
What the figure does not cover
Duration. The whole design of a robot is that it runs for hours. A sound that is unobtrusive for twenty minutes is a different proposition at three in the morning for four hours, and no single figure captures the difference between intermittent and continuous.
Mechanical noise. The bump of a machine meeting a bed edge, the change of note as it turns, the sound of wheels on a hard path if the boundary allows one. These are not what a sound power measurement is capturing and they are exactly what carries at night.
The dock. Arrival, reversing and contact, at a fixed place and a predictable hour.
The reasons to avoid the small hours anyway
Two of them, and neither is acoustic.
Wildlife. Hedgehogs and other ground-active animals are out at night and a machine at ground level is a genuine hazard to them. Several manufacturers now say so in their own documentation and some offer sensing that is intended to help.
Rules where you live. Quiet hours are set locally and this site does not answer what applies to you. That the machine is quiet is not the same as being permitted.
What is a reasonable schedule
Daytime hours, split across the day rather than one long run, is the pattern most of these machines are set to out of the box, and it produces the cut the machine was designed for.
How this site handles it
Robot pages here print the guaranteed sound power level as marked, with the quantity named, and report what the maker says about scheduling and about obstacle or animal detection. No page here states that a machine is safe around wildlife — what it reports is what the manufacturer claims.
Wherever this page and the maker’s own documentation disagree, the documentation wins. Every cutting width, cutting height, stated area, pack capacity, flow rate, head, sound level and application rate on this page comes from the maker’s own published figures, with the unit as printed and the source named. None of it is measured here, and no figure is converted into another convention, because a converted number is a different number. And the pair of quantities this page will not merge: a guaranteed sound power level is not the loudness at your ear. The figure in the oval on the housing describes what the machine radiates and is a guarantee rather than a measurement; the figure in the manual describes a pressure at a position. Both are printed as decibels. This page names which one it is reporting, and says so when the listing does not.
The questions that keep coming in
Is the docking station noisy?
The charge itself is silent; what carries is the arrival — the machine finding the dock, reversing, and the contact. On a still night against a house wall that is a distinct sound at a fixed hour.
Do the wire-free machines make more noise?
Nothing about the navigation is audible. What differs between machines is the cutting system and the drive, and the small pivoting-blade systems most of them use are the quiet ones.
Last reviewed 26 September 2026