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My only quibble is that electric lawn mowers today are rather better than "same, but electric". Battery electric mowers can run forever with a single spare bat

My only quibble is that electric lawn mowers today are rather better than "same, but electric". Battery electric mowers can run forever with a single spare battery because the batteries charge faster than they're drained. And my Ego push mower will also fold up to store vertically, which is great with limited garage space. Plus it starts every time at the push of a button, no trips to the gas station, maintenance, tough starts, etc.

ashtonkem 5y ago
It’s reached the point where I now look at people using two stroke lawn mowers and instinctively think its weird that they’re using such crude and uncivilized technology. The noise alone is a reason to switch, imho.
- winrid 5y ago
  There are some people who are "nerdy" in a different way, and actually like the noise, for example. Different strokes for different folks :)
  - jeddy3 5y ago
    And live in a neighborhood were everybody else is "nerdy" about the noise?
    - winrid 5y ago
      Nobody ever said there was a neighborhood :)
      - jeddy3 5y ago
        Fair enough.
- StillBored 5y ago
  two stroke mower? Where do you live? In the US, the only major brand selling two stroke motors was lawn boy, and I can't remember the last time I saw one of those. They were always a bit odd. Just about any mower you see is 4 stoke, which is far cleaner.
  - xxs 5y ago
    two strokes are brush cutters, tend to be. They are no push mowers, though... and electric ones are absolutely no replacement due to sheer lack of power (or battery life). @grand parent - Mowing ditch/stream slopes with anything but petrol brushcutter is just next to impossible. Saying that as owning - a battery strimmer, a 4-stroke petrol push mower, a battery robot mower and 2-smoke brush cutter. I have tried using even a battery powered hedge trimmer. In other words - not everything is a nice flat rectangle short grass cover.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    I honestly assumed they were two stroke. The last lawn mower I used at my parents house was two stroke IIRC (smelled like it at least), and I never bought a gas mower once I bought a house. I went straight to electric.
- tempestn 5y ago
  Oh, yeah, I didn't even think of the (lack of) noise. Can easily listen to a podcast or whatever while I mow.
- Angostura 5y ago
  And I have a good old fashioned manual cylinder mower that I push along and think? Why on earth do people need electricity?
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    I've used one of those for the last several years, it's terrible if you get behind even a little bit, the long grass doesn't make it into the knife. I'm gonna a buy a battery mower this year.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Depends on the size of your yard and how quickly it grows. My current yard is on the edge where power is a nice to have, my parents’ old yard would have taken hours to do with a non-powered motor.
- alex_duf 5y ago
  I know I'm going to sound like an unpleasant person, but I now get that same feeling every time I drive by a petrol station (with my electric car).
- gtvwill 5y ago
  My mowers getting on 10 years old now. It's probably gonna do another ten. I don't like waste. I'll probably try convert it to run off ethanol. I'd buy more battery gear if it wasn't designed to be so wasteful and the market wasn't full of so much lock in. Getting stuck in one brands battery goes against alot of my ethics re. Tech purchases. I hate vendor lock in.
  - tempestn 5y ago
    My Ego mower is 8 years old now. (I got one as soon as they were available in Canada, as it was the first mower to operate at >40V.) Still works like new. Don't think they're inherently any more wasteful than gas. And of course, they don't waste gas. Yeah, you're locked into the battery, but at worst, if you don't use the battery for anything else, that's no worse than the gas mower. With a few tools though (leaf blower, string trimmer, maybe hedge trimmers...) you end up saving a bunch.
nightski 5y ago
Also bought an Ego when we moved into our first home and I love it for all the reasons you mentioned and more. It's fantastic. The only gas item I still have to keep around is the snow blower as we get a significant amount of snow. Fortunately I really don't run it that much at all over the course of the year. Maybe 5 gallons of gas a year. But when I need it, I really need it.
- Kon5ole 5y ago
  Just in case you didn’t know - Ego has a 2-stage snowblower in their system as well. (I’m guessing everyone who has one Ego device is interested in more tools to defend the investment in batteries. Like myself.) ;-)
  - nightski 5y ago
    Oh yeah very interested! Unfortunately we do have about $1500 invested in our current machine, so it would be hard to justify. It works very well too. But if we ever have problems with it or it dies out we'll definitely make the switch.
    - chayesfss 5y ago
      You’re not missing out, paid like 1500 for the machine, another 900 for 2 10ah batteries then ran over a newspaper day one while helping the in-laws. This promptly broke the thing, main shaft wouldn’t turn anymore. Contacted ego who asked for some vids which I sent, they wanted me to bring it 1.5 hrs away which I wasn’t interested in so they they shipped me a new one. Finally got it 3 days after the very last snow storm. So yea, I switched to electric this year for the snow and got lots of exercise this last year. The issue I’ve got with them is it’s driven off a gearbox that honestly doesn’t seem too strong where’s a gas powered shaft is coupled to the engine via a couple of belts that can be serviced with basic tools at home in the mists of dealing with snow, the ego absolutely can not.
taeric 5y ago
Yeah. I don't think I can explain how awesome it is to be liberated from a bucket of gas in the garage to make it through the yard. That it also stores nicely and I can use the same battery for a chainsaw and weed eater? Battery powered devices really did get usable while people were not paying attention.
- grecy 5y ago
  I think this speaks to a similar problem with BEV adoption. Plenty of people tried them, or read a ton of press about them back in 2016-2018, when they really weren't all that great. People now hold onto those ideas, not realizing how much they've improved in the short years in between. The first battery lawn mowers were terrible. Today's are excellent.
  - taeric 5y ago
    Yeah, this is what I meant by saying that they got good. I remember the first batch of battery screw drivers/drills. Could do basic work, but that was about it. Now, my blower, chainsaw, mower, and weed eater are all battery. And all work great.
- rexf 5y ago
  Having an ecosystem of batteries + tools is great. The question is which of the endless ecosystem options (ryobi, dewalt, milwaukee, bosch, etc.) to pick
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    I bet you can make adaptors for those different batteries.
    - danuker 5y ago
      Just don't short them accidentally. And check the voltage and charge/discharge power. And maybe check the thermal probe still works.
  - 5y ago
dylan604 5y ago
my non-electric mower folds up and stores vertically, so this isn't that unique. strange that this is something called out in gas vs battery discussion
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  It’s generally not a good idea to store a gas mower with a tank of gas in it (plus oil) on its side or on its end for a long period of time.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- tempestn 5y ago
  Do we mean the same thing by "vertically"? What model is your mower? I'm surprised a gas engine could be stored on its side.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    I don't know the exact model of my mower, but here's a similar model from Home Depot[0]. I don't really know what other meanings of vertical you can come up with, but the implication that I don't know what vertical means is quite insulting. [0]https://www.homedepot.com/p/Troy-Bilt-XP-21-in-149-cc-Vertical-Storage-Series-Engine-3-in-1-Gas-Walk-Behind-Push-Lawn-Mower-TB170-XP-Space-Saver/311512185 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Troy-Bilt-XP-21-in-149-cc-Vertic...
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      Unless he edited his comment, he didn't imply that you don't know what "vertical" means, but rather that you could have different ideas about what it means to store a lawn mower vertically.
      - dylan604 5y ago
xxs 5y ago
Alternatively get a robot mower - does the job better, takes even less space and effectively requires no work/maintenance, aside replacing the blades every few months.
- krzyk 5y ago
  Are there any that work like robot vacuums? I mean NO funny cables around a garden that show robot a no go zone? I want robot to build a map of garden just like Roborocks.
  - xxs 5y ago
    I have had ideas to build a GPS based prototype on my own as a hobby project (both the hardware and software)... other than that I don't know of commercially viable ones. However, in practice the cables are no issue - you can have them installed and dug in the soil rather trivially (the cable is shot in). Once done - you'd never notice them ever again. No go zone can be organized with magnetic strips (also buried).
  - Zanfa 5y ago
    Roomba was developing a system without a boundary wire at some point, but it doesn’t look like they ended up shipping it. Not sure why nobody else is working on it. Could it be that the ToF sensors in indoor robot vacuums are just not powerful enough to operate in sunlight? Maybe it’s because the boundary wire installation is a matter of minutes and only needs to be done once?
    - gruturo 5y ago
      The boundary wire was not a matter of minutes for me - far from it, more like half a day - but that's because I wanted to bury it out of sight. I guess they still rely on boundary wire because it's very reliable - you don't want a couple unlucky GPS readings to cause your robot mower, armed with very real spinning blades, to end up in the neighbor's yard or on the street and hurt somebody.
      - 5y ago
gostsamo 5y ago
Funnily enough, lawns are not very eco friendly. The uniform green looks of them are water intensive and a food desert for local insects. Putting a mix of local flora might be even better if environment is what you are concerned for.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  I think we can presume that this is widespread knowledge at this point.
hedgehog 5y ago
I have childhood memories of how much of a pain it was to get our gas mower started. And stinky.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Ha ha, me too. I confess though that modern gas mowers I have owned have been much easier to start. Maybe it's because I'm not a kid anymore ... or they are making the engines better. My next mower will be electric though.
  - hedgehog 5y ago
    You know, that reminds me of the other fun part. Because it was gas the mower was stored in a shed in the back yard. A shed full of thousands of really large spiders.
moron4hire 5y ago
Yes! I have an electric mower as well as an electric weed whacker that takes the same batteries. My favorite aspects are that they don't vibrate the hell out of my RSI-inflamed elbow and don't cover me in 2-stroke exhaust. Yes, my electric yard tools are superior in every aspect to a gas ones. I've even managed to convince some of my neighbors to switch to electric and the resulting reduction in neighborhood noise levels has been GREAT! I don't have a leaf blower. Leaf blowers are stupid noisy and not any faster than a good rake.
- Cd00d 5y ago
  My electric leaf blower is actually not very loud - I stopped bothering with ear protection even. The 2-stroke models the professional crews use are a bane.
  - tempestn 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm a fan of my electric blower too. I don't generally use it in situations where I'd use a rake, but it's great for things like blowing debris out of the garage or cleaning off a patio. Also drying cars after washing, if you want to avoid water spots.
Merad 5y ago
> Battery electric mowers can run forever with a single spare battery because the batteries charge faster than they're drained. The problem with electric tools is that the battery life heavily depends what you're doing. I also have an Ego mower (the top model/largest battery as of 2020). The only way my battery might actually last the advertised hour (with a ~40 min charge time) is if I religiously mowed twice a week. I'm usually lucky to get 30 minutes of real world mowing, but sometimes it's less than half of that. I used to prefer mowing in the morning to avoid the heat, but any amount of moisture in the grass slaughters the battery life. Likewise if the grass is higher than normal, say goodbye to the battery life. All in all my electric mower is quite a bit inferior to a decent quality gas mower, but not inconvenient enough (so far) to push me to switch back.
- tempestn 5y ago
  Huh, certainly not my experience. Maybe it's because the mower is bigger? I've got one of their smaller ones, and two medium/small batteries (one 4Ah and one 2Ah iirc), and never have problems, even with damp grass. Only on the most overgrown day have I gone through both batteries, and thrn the first one was charged and ready.

ashtonkem 5y ago

It’s reached the point where I now look at people using two stroke lawn mowers and instinctively think its weird that they’re using such crude and uncivilized technology. The noise alone is a reason to switch, imho.

winrid 5y ago
There are some people who are "nerdy" in a different way, and actually like the noise, for example. Different strokes for different folks :)
- jeddy3 5y ago
  And live in a neighborhood were everybody else is "nerdy" about the noise?
  - winrid 5y ago
    Nobody ever said there was a neighborhood :)
    - jeddy3 5y ago
      Fair enough.
StillBored 5y ago
two stroke mower? Where do you live? In the US, the only major brand selling two stroke motors was lawn boy, and I can't remember the last time I saw one of those. They were always a bit odd. Just about any mower you see is 4 stoke, which is far cleaner.
- xxs 5y ago
  two strokes are brush cutters, tend to be. They are no push mowers, though... and electric ones are absolutely no replacement due to sheer lack of power (or battery life). @grand parent - Mowing ditch/stream slopes with anything but petrol brushcutter is just next to impossible. Saying that as owning - a battery strimmer, a 4-stroke petrol push mower, a battery robot mower and 2-smoke brush cutter. I have tried using even a battery powered hedge trimmer. In other words - not everything is a nice flat rectangle short grass cover.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  I honestly assumed they were two stroke. The last lawn mower I used at my parents house was two stroke IIRC (smelled like it at least), and I never bought a gas mower once I bought a house. I went straight to electric.
tempestn 5y ago
Oh, yeah, I didn't even think of the (lack of) noise. Can easily listen to a podcast or whatever while I mow.
Angostura 5y ago
And I have a good old fashioned manual cylinder mower that I push along and think? Why on earth do people need electricity?
- maxerickson 5y ago
  I've used one of those for the last several years, it's terrible if you get behind even a little bit, the long grass doesn't make it into the knife. I'm gonna a buy a battery mower this year.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Depends on the size of your yard and how quickly it grows. My current yard is on the edge where power is a nice to have, my parents’ old yard would have taken hours to do with a non-powered motor.
alex_duf 5y ago
I know I'm going to sound like an unpleasant person, but I now get that same feeling every time I drive by a petrol station (with my electric car).
gtvwill 5y ago
My mowers getting on 10 years old now. It's probably gonna do another ten. I don't like waste. I'll probably try convert it to run off ethanol. I'd buy more battery gear if it wasn't designed to be so wasteful and the market wasn't full of so much lock in. Getting stuck in one brands battery goes against alot of my ethics re. Tech purchases. I hate vendor lock in.
- tempestn 5y ago
  My Ego mower is 8 years old now. (I got one as soon as they were available in Canada, as it was the first mower to operate at >40V.) Still works like new. Don't think they're inherently any more wasteful than gas. And of course, they don't waste gas. Yeah, you're locked into the battery, but at worst, if you don't use the battery for anything else, that's no worse than the gas mower. With a few tools though (leaf blower, string trimmer, maybe hedge trimmers...) you end up saving a bunch.

nightski 5y ago

Also bought an Ego when we moved into our first home and I love it for all the reasons you mentioned and more. It's fantastic. The only gas item I still have to keep around is the snow blower as we get a significant amount of snow. Fortunately I really don't run it that much at all over the course of the year. Maybe 5 gallons of gas a year. But when I need it, I really need it.

Kon5ole 5y ago
Just in case you didn’t know - Ego has a 2-stage snowblower in their system as well. (I’m guessing everyone who has one Ego device is interested in more tools to defend the investment in batteries. Like myself.) ;-)
- nightski 5y ago
  Oh yeah very interested! Unfortunately we do have about $1500 invested in our current machine, so it would be hard to justify. It works very well too. But if we ever have problems with it or it dies out we'll definitely make the switch.
  - chayesfss 5y ago
    You’re not missing out, paid like 1500 for the machine, another 900 for 2 10ah batteries then ran over a newspaper day one while helping the in-laws. This promptly broke the thing, main shaft wouldn’t turn anymore. Contacted ego who asked for some vids which I sent, they wanted me to bring it 1.5 hrs away which I wasn’t interested in so they they shipped me a new one. Finally got it 3 days after the very last snow storm. So yea, I switched to electric this year for the snow and got lots of exercise this last year. The issue I’ve got with them is it’s driven off a gearbox that honestly doesn’t seem too strong where’s a gas powered shaft is coupled to the engine via a couple of belts that can be serviced with basic tools at home in the mists of dealing with snow, the ego absolutely can not.

taeric 5y ago

Yeah. I don't think I can explain how awesome it is to be liberated from a bucket of gas in the garage to make it through the yard. That it also stores nicely and I can use the same battery for a chainsaw and weed eater? Battery powered devices really did get usable while people were not paying attention.

grecy 5y ago
I think this speaks to a similar problem with BEV adoption. Plenty of people tried them, or read a ton of press about them back in 2016-2018, when they really weren't all that great. People now hold onto those ideas, not realizing how much they've improved in the short years in between. The first battery lawn mowers were terrible. Today's are excellent.
- taeric 5y ago
  Yeah, this is what I meant by saying that they got good. I remember the first batch of battery screw drivers/drills. Could do basic work, but that was about it. Now, my blower, chainsaw, mower, and weed eater are all battery. And all work great.
rexf 5y ago
Having an ecosystem of batteries + tools is great. The question is which of the endless ecosystem options (ryobi, dewalt, milwaukee, bosch, etc.) to pick
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  I bet you can make adaptors for those different batteries.
  - danuker 5y ago
    Just don't short them accidentally. And check the voltage and charge/discharge power. And maybe check the thermal probe still works.
- 5y ago

dylan604 5y ago

my non-electric mower folds up and stores vertically, so this isn't that unique. strange that this is something called out in gas vs battery discussion

alasdair_ 5y ago
It’s generally not a good idea to store a gas mower with a tank of gas in it (plus oil) on its side or on its end for a long period of time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tempestn 5y ago
Do we mean the same thing by "vertically"? What model is your mower? I'm surprised a gas engine could be stored on its side.
- dylan604 5y ago
  I don't know the exact model of my mower, but here's a similar model from Home Depot[0]. I don't really know what other meanings of vertical you can come up with, but the implication that I don't know what vertical means is quite insulting. [0]https://www.homedepot.com/p/Troy-Bilt-XP-21-in-149-cc-Vertical-Storage-Series-Engine-3-in-1-Gas-Walk-Behind-Push-Lawn-Mower-TB170-XP-Space-Saver/311512185 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Troy-Bilt-XP-21-in-149-cc-Vertic...
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Unless he edited his comment, he didn't imply that you don't know what "vertical" means, but rather that you could have different ideas about what it means to store a lawn mower vertically.
    - dylan604 5y ago

xxs 5y ago

Alternatively get a robot mower - does the job better, takes even less space and effectively requires no work/maintenance, aside replacing the blades every few months.

krzyk 5y ago
Are there any that work like robot vacuums? I mean NO funny cables around a garden that show robot a no go zone? I want robot to build a map of garden just like Roborocks.
- xxs 5y ago
  I have had ideas to build a GPS based prototype on my own as a hobby project (both the hardware and software)... other than that I don't know of commercially viable ones. However, in practice the cables are no issue - you can have them installed and dug in the soil rather trivially (the cable is shot in). Once done - you'd never notice them ever again. No go zone can be organized with magnetic strips (also buried).
- Zanfa 5y ago
  Roomba was developing a system without a boundary wire at some point, but it doesn’t look like they ended up shipping it. Not sure why nobody else is working on it. Could it be that the ToF sensors in indoor robot vacuums are just not powerful enough to operate in sunlight? Maybe it’s because the boundary wire installation is a matter of minutes and only needs to be done once?
  - gruturo 5y ago
    The boundary wire was not a matter of minutes for me - far from it, more like half a day - but that's because I wanted to bury it out of sight. I guess they still rely on boundary wire because it's very reliable - you don't want a couple unlucky GPS readings to cause your robot mower, armed with very real spinning blades, to end up in the neighbor's yard or on the street and hurt somebody.
    - 5y ago

gostsamo 5y ago

Funnily enough, lawns are not very eco friendly. The uniform green looks of them are water intensive and a food desert for local insects. Putting a mix of local flora might be even better if environment is what you are concerned for.

DiggyJohnson 5y ago
I think we can presume that this is widespread knowledge at this point.

hedgehog 5y ago

I have childhood memories of how much of a pain it was to get our gas mower started. And stinky.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Ha ha, me too. I confess though that modern gas mowers I have owned have been much easier to start. Maybe it's because I'm not a kid anymore ... or they are making the engines better. My next mower will be electric though.
- hedgehog 5y ago
  You know, that reminds me of the other fun part. Because it was gas the mower was stored in a shed in the back yard. A shed full of thousands of really large spiders.

moron4hire 5y ago

Yes! I have an electric mower as well as an electric weed whacker that takes the same batteries. My favorite aspects are that they don't vibrate the hell out of my RSI-inflamed elbow and don't cover me in 2-stroke exhaust. Yes, my electric yard tools are superior in every aspect to a gas ones. I've even managed to convince some of my neighbors to switch to electric and the resulting reduction in neighborhood noise levels has been GREAT! I don't have a leaf blower. Leaf blowers are stupid noisy and not any faster than a good rake.

Cd00d 5y ago
My electric leaf blower is actually not very loud - I stopped bothering with ear protection even. The 2-stroke models the professional crews use are a bane.
- tempestn 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm a fan of my electric blower too. I don't generally use it in situations where I'd use a rake, but it's great for things like blowing debris out of the garage or cleaning off a patio. Also drying cars after washing, if you want to avoid water spots.

Merad 5y ago

> Battery electric mowers can run forever with a single spare battery because the batteries charge faster than they're drained. The problem with electric tools is that the battery life heavily depends what you're doing. I also have an Ego mower (the top model/largest battery as of 2020). The only way my battery might actually last the advertised hour (with a ~40 min charge time) is if I religiously mowed twice a week. I'm usually lucky to get 30 minutes of real world mowing, but sometimes it's less than half of that. I used to prefer mowing in the morning to avoid the heat, but any amount of moisture in the grass slaughters the battery life. Likewise if the grass is higher than normal, say goodbye to the battery life. All in all my electric mower is quite a bit inferior to a decent quality gas mower, but not inconvenient enough (so far) to push me to switch back.

tempestn 5y ago
Huh, certainly not my experience. Maybe it's because the mower is bigger? I've got one of their smaller ones, and two medium/small batteries (one 4Ah and one 2Ah iirc), and never have problems, even with damp grass. Only on the most overgrown day have I gone through both batteries, and thrn the first one was charged and ready.