I'll bet you hate mowing lawns - but you can't avoid it. Want to live in a block of flats? no, me neither. Too many down sides for me, so mowing is the only other option.
For the last few years I have been mowing the lawn with a cable trailing behind the mower. Yes, I can already hear the guffaws from the back.
Well let me just provide some history.
When I was a boy I got the job of mowing the lawn while dad watched sport on teevee and drank beer.
I used a gas powered mower that was at best "unreliable". Sometimes it just would not start and my shoulder got sore pulling that bleeping handle. It made a racket and it stank.
When I needed a new one much later on I got electric. No noise, no complex problems with fuel, carbys and starting - just hit the switch and it goes. A great day for me. Okay, so you need to get long cables and a safety junction box to join them and spend a certain amount of time just moving the cables all over the place - but it was much better than the previous situation.
It always worked.
Well now I have got rid of the cable. I have been riding a battery bike for two years now so a battery mower seemed a great idea.
No, Lithium batteries do NOT catch fire unless you do stupid things with them like use the wrong charger. Every mophone on the planet has Lithium batteries but they don't catch fire either. Hey, stupid people can set a gasoline mower on fire too. :D
No, I am not a "fan" of electric vehicles: at best they are suited to short city trips but for anything longer distance or carrying heavy loads I strongly suggest petrol or diesel fuel - the energy density of these fuels make any and every battery look silly. They also take a very short time to "recharge" unlike battery vehicles.
Hybrids are a good idea since a lot of braking energy can be recycled and an electric motor has more torque and efficiency than a basic combustion engine but that makes everything more complex too and more parts means more parts to fail.
I bought a battery mower and assembled it out of the box following the instructions and took it on its first mow and it looked great.
Bigger mowing circle thus more mown in each swath, a metal frame and 36 volt power - pretty good I thought. I folded the handle and put it away for use next day . . . .
. . . . but there was a small catch. The switch cable that runs from the body to the switch box on the handle got stretched when I folded the handle and when I got it back out it just didn't go.
This was a new mower so I took it back and got a refund, then bought a replacement.
This time I carefully assemble it so the cable goes OVER the crossbar and not under as shown in the assembly instructions. All good. I did call the support line and told the makers of this problem and I suspect that this is not the fist time it has happenned . . but what do I know? I'm just one end user.
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| The cable running over the bar, the right way to do it |
So yes, I am happy with it and think it is a good deal but make sure that you don't make the same mistake I did. I have a fairly big lawn so I also got two more batteries (it uses two 18V batteries at a time) so I can always have two on charge if the lawn turns out to be that big of a job. It's quiet, even more so that the cable one, and it has a wide range of height adjustment. It also has a catcher but I didn't show it here.
