My First Tracked Mow: Real Data, Real Bugs

Yesterday I tracked my first real mow session with MowDaddy. Here's the raw data — including the bugs.

The Numbers

• Duration: 32 minutes 19 seconds
• Distance: 2.64 miles
• GPS Points: 1,488
• Average Speed: 4.7 mph
• Max Speed: 33.2 mph 😂😂

Yes, you read that right. 33.2 mph. On a zero-turn mower.

About That Max Speed

I did not, in fact, hit 33 mph on my John Deere. That's a GPS outlier — a momentary spike where the phone's location jumped and the app calculated an impossible speed between two points.

This is the reality of building with GPS data. Consumer phone GPS is good, but it's not perfect. Sometimes it drifts. Sometimes it spikes. And if you're not filtering for it, you get absurd numbers like "33 mph on a lawn mower."

Take a look at this: 😂😂

The GPS path is actually pretty close to accurate — except for that one long V where I apparently left my yard, cruised across a bean field, hit the highway, and then teleported back to my property. Just your average Tuesday mowing session.

These are the fun bugs that come with building something new. The product is evolving, and part of that evolution is hunting down these GPS gremlins.

We've already pushed a fix for this. The app now:

• Caps speed at a realistic maximum based on your mower type
• Filters out GPS fixes with poor accuracy
• Uses a smoothed average for the dashboard display

Building in public means showing the warts. This is one of them.

What the Data Actually Showed

Setting aside the speed anomaly, the rest of the data was genuinely useful:

49 turns total — 20 hairpins and 29 corners. The app detected my mowing pattern was mostly east-west, which matches what I was doing (lengthwise stripes).

53% coverage — This one's interesting. It means I covered just over half the GPS-trackable area. The rest is overlap, edges, and areas where the path doubled back. I'm curious to see how this changes with different patterns.

4.7 mph average — This feels right for a riding mower at a comfortable pace. It's a useful baseline for comparing future sessions.

The Honest Version

MowDaddy is in beta. That means some things work great and some things need fixing. The GPS tracking itself captured 1,488 points over 32 minutes — that's roughly a point every 1.3 seconds. The path on the map looks accurate. The turn detection worked. The timer worked.

The speed calculation had a bug. We fixed it.

That's how software gets built. Ship it, use it yourself, find the problems, fix them.

What's Next

I'm going to keep tracking every mow. Over time I want to answer questions like:

• Does a different mowing pattern actually save time?
• How does session length change through the season?
• What's the real difference between my riding mower and push mower?

MowDaddy is about building that history so you have actual data instead of guesses.

If you want to start tracking your own sessions — bugs and all — join the beta.