Just saw an ad for an electric lawn mower. I know it saves the world and all that, but there’s one simple problem.
When your gas mower is out of gasoline, you add some gas and you’re good to go. It takes about a minute.
If your electric lawn mower is out of juice, you have to charge a battery for several hours.
This is the main problem with electric whatevers. Before they will catch on, they need a quick recharge option.
On the other hand, you can generally judge how long it takes to mow your lawn, and it’s not too likely that you would want to spend much longer than normal mowing your lawn. So you only have to make sure that the mower you buy has sufficient battery life for your lawn. I realize that if you let your lawn grow longer and it has to work harder, it will use up battery faster, but such things are predictable and generally within the user’s control.
That’s why electric is much more useful for something like a tool or piece of lawn equipment that is predictably used for a given amount of time on each occasion, than for a car, unless you have a situation where you are able to ONLY use the car for fixed commuting or similar reasons.
You raise a good point about the relative niches of electric vs. gasoline-powered tools. Perhaps that’s how things will play out.
Well, I read the advertised run times for riding mowers at Home Depot and they were saying 2 acres in 1.5 hours… ha. Found that hard to believe… that you could mow 2 acres in 1.5 hours or that it would last 1.5 hours.
I have 1.7 acres. To do just the riding part takes over 2 hours. The hard part is the ditches… have a corner lot and nearly 300 ft on one side and nearly 300 on the other takes me and hour and 20 minutes with a push mower to do my ditches and around the shrubbery near the ditches. And, they are too steep to use a riding mower. My neighbors not on a corner lot are lucky…
When the ground is still a little soft after some hard rains or spring in general, I wonder how much the heavy batteries cause the mower to sink into the grass?
Yeah, I doubt we’re there with riding mowers yet. I was thinking of push mowers, for sure. It seems like at least for the present, the smaller the device, the more likely it is to work well with electric.
Good point about the extra weight.
I’ve often wondered why a battery can’t be recharged by swapping out the electrolyte. It would make the process a lot quicker. More dangerous, probably, but quicker.
It doesn’t seem like a big problem to me.
QUOTE: If your electric lawn mower is out of juice, you have to charge a battery for several hours.
Some electric tools have removal batteries so that you can replace a depleted battery with a fully charged one instantly. Of course, that costs more typically but it makes it more convenient to operate when one battery charge won’t complete a job.