Battery-powered mowing: One year after starting

Battery-powered mowing: One year after starting

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last year, as the attentive reader may recall, I made the switch from ICE (internal combustion engine) mowing to battery-powered mowing.  I gave periodic reports on that last year and it all went great, as experiments like that always do.

When you make a switch to something it is because you want it to work.  You think that it is cool and everything you do is colored by the glow of your desires.  This is why the scientific method was developed: We know that we lie to ourselves, so we set up a structure to try to keep us honest.

I didn’t do any of that when I got my new battery-powered Ryobi mower. It was 2020 and I had absolutely no desire to take the glow off of anything. I needed all the glow I had, as I am sure you did too.

Now we’ve had winter; I’ve been fully vaccinated; the mask mandate has been lifted. There ain’t nothin’ but blue skies ahead now, Bro.

How is the battery-powered mower holding up now?

I believe I can be objective now because the shine has literally been worn-off of it. It is plastic so that means instead of scratching the paint you scratch the plastic.  And it has scratches.

But nothing has broken so far.

It is lighter than a metal mower and I do believe that has reduced the fatigue factor involved in mowing.

I absolutely do not miss the gasoline aspect.  It was awkward to go get gas for my gas mower.  In my dad’s day, that was easy. You filled up your car tank and then filled your mower using a siphoning hose.  Get ready to mow and gargle with gas at the same time; the chick’s really dug it.

But I found having to put a gas can in your car, schlepping it to Casey’s, filling it up, and then schlepping it back to be inconvenient.  

Now I have two batteries and I keep one of them charging all the time.

I have been asked whether I have to have the two batteries.  This is to say, can I finish daily mowing without changing the battery?

Let’s put this in context.  Back in the day when I was young, and my heart was an open book, I used to mow my whole lawn, front and back, in one go.  In those days, I would stop after the front was mowed and refill the mower with gas; this is the moral equivalent of a battery change.  But this ever-changing world in which we’re living made me older, so I now mow the front yard one day and the backyard the next.

When I did that, I didn’t have to stop to refill anymore.  Now I can mow the front yard with one battery and it is not even close.  The backyard is a closer thing.  When I do the first mowing of the year, the grass is very thick, so in the two season inaugural mows, I’ve had to change the battery both times.  

Last year, the first mowing was the only mowing I had to use two batteries.  This year the rain has mixed things up.  The first mowing, as I said, required both of my batteries, but then I went a few mowings with just one battery. Yesterday, the rain had forced me to go nine days instead of seven or eight.  And the grass was wet.  I had to use the second battery for just a few minutes.

Are battery-powered mowers a panacea?  No, no they aren’t.  You do have to modify the way you do things.  But they are quiet; they are convenient; there is less upkeep.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

Hiking the Appalachian Trail

Hiking the Appalachian Trail

By Bobby Neal Winters

I came home from work last Monday evening, changed clothes, started up the mower, and mowed the front yard.  I got hot and stopped until I cooled off, which happened this Saturday morning.  I try to take care of my lawn and not just when I get those letters the city send out when the neighbors complain. (I know who you are and I know what you did.)  Mowing, as you may recall, is my last chance to get into heaven.  I’ve given up on faith and I’ve given up on works, so a good lawn is the only path left.

This time of year, though, keeping your lawn up can be dangerous.  When you mow out in the heat, you can get overheated before you know it.  This can have dire consequences.  If the city can get on your case for having a pile of brush, what are they going to do for having an unburied body on the front lawn? And it’s not like your kids are going to take care of it either. Your wife would be stuck with the job.  That is if you are not like Mark Sanford, Governor of the great state of South Carolina.

It is my opinion that every man should live his life in such a way so that his wife would give CPR to him if he fell of heat prostration while mowing.  I am thinking that breathing life into her husband’s hot, sweaty body might not be a high priority with her right now.  But then perhaps if the dear governor had been spending more time on his own lawn (wink-wink, nod-nod) he wouldn’t have strayed off on the Appalachian Trail, as it were.

Having mentioned that, I’ve got to wonder how his Argentine girlfriend liked being referred to as the Appalachian Trail.  It’s curvy and beautiful from a distance, but up close it’s full of bugs and a lot of guys have hiked it before you. (Wink-wink, nod-nod.)

It brings me to mind of the wealthy and powerful Eliot Spitzer,  who paid over four-thousand dollars for what our boys in khaki could get for a pair of nylons and a couple of Hershey bars back during WWII. I’ve shared with you before the remarks from the table at Rotary when that story was broken, but they are too precious not to share again.

“Four-thousand dollars an hour?  What do you do for four-thousand dollars?”

“An hour?  What do you do for a whole hour?”

But I digress.

My point is that one of the ways that lawn care gets us into heaven is by keeping us out of such mischief.  If you are pushing a mower, trying to avoid stepping in any of the “presents” left by the family dog, then you are not thinking about “hiking the Appalachian Trail” as it were.  And what is more, if, when you are done with your chore your wife should bring you a tall glass of iced Fresca—on her own without you asking—you couldn’t possibly image straying from the straight-and-narrow road.

But, like I said earlier, you’ve got to be careful when you’re mowing in this hot weather.  Avoid getting over-heated, but when you do stop and take a break.  If you have a large task, break it up into smaller tasks and take a break to cool off between them.  And most importantly, don’t do anything to annoy the person whom might have to give you CPR.

(Bobby Winters is Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Mathematics, and Interim Chair of the Department of Chemistry.  It’s a long story. )

Male enhanced mowing

By Bobby Neal Winters

Because I have an extensive network of infiltrators, I am aware my readers in Oklahoma have been mowing for a couple of weeks now, but here in our little corner of Kansas because of our more northerly location, the start of the season comes a little later. After a winter like the one we had, we need to know there’s something good about living up north.

As I write this, it is the Thursday of spring break.  It has been a long tradition that spring break is either the last bitterly cold week of the year or the first rainy week of the year.  This year we followed the second pattern and have received abundant warm rain.  The effect of this has been to bring out the leaves on some of the less conservative trees and to bring up the grass.  As a consequence, the mowing season will soon be upon us, and it is time for those of us who’ve learned the value of preparation to ready ourselves for that eventuality.

At the beginning of last year, I was of the opinion that I was at a turning point in my mowing life.  For many years, I had contented myself with a 3.5 horsepower mower, but after much consideration as to whether such a loathsome sinner as me was worthy, I made the move of going to a 4.5 horsepower machine.  It was a honey, let me tell you, and I came to call it Little Darlin’.

Little Darlin’ cut my mowing time by one-third and used less gas in the bargain.  This was because I didn’t have to pickup the youngest child’s toys anymore.  I could just mow over them, and no sign of them would ever be found.

“You’re looking for your soccer ball?  No, I haven’t seen it.”

But I let it go to my head.  I got cocky and forgot the cardinal rule of mowing:  Stumps aren’t toys.  On the very last mowing of the year, I found the stump of a cedar tree I’d cut down several years ago. They say trees aren’t intelligent, and naturally you’d think that stumps were even less so, yet I believe this stump was seeking revenge.  It has done this to me before, so the argument can be made it’s smarter than I am.  Maybe it’s not smart, but something else is true.

I try to live a good life, the way folks on TV tell me, but I keep getting mixed messages.  We are taught we should recycle and repair, and I believe that, yet when I went to my Names and Numbers yellow pages I could only find one lawnmower repair man, Bob by name. I gave Bob a call and all I got was a recording.  Bob, it seems, is no longer in business.  In a world market where the folks in China can make it cheaper than folks in Kansas can fix it, I suppose this is a natural thing, but there just some sort of wrongness about it.

In any case, in spite of all my good intentions, I was forced to buy a new mower for the second straight year.  This was a good time for it because it seems the lawnmower business is undergoing a paradigm shift.  What I mean to say is that last year, everything I looked at was listed by horsepower, but this year there are many models that are only listed by CC. There were 148CC engines, 160CC engines, and so forth.

You must understand that this puts me in a quandary because I don’t really know what any of this technical jargon means.  Even the horsepower thing I only use with the idea that bigger is better with the vague idea that is has something to do with the amount of work a horse could do.  It’s sort of like Smilin’ Bob in all of those male enhancement commercials. (Maybe male enhancement just means he can burp louder than he did before.)  Ego wouldn’t let me take the chance that I might be slipping back a notch on my mower, so I got a machine that was listed with both horsepower and CCs.  It is 6.5 horsepower and 190 CCs.

I am taking a real chance by going up by 2 horses in one year, but my ego needs it having lost my Little Darlin’ so soon.  I think that subconsciously I’m hoping to get a machine powerful enough to do to stumps what Little Darlin’ could do to toys. 

But I get the feeling if I try to find out I will be writing this article again next year.

(Bobby Winters is a Professor of Mathematics at Pittsburg State University, writer, and speaker.  You may contact him at bwinters1@cox.net. )

The mowing life

By Bobby Neal Winters

My in-laws just got back from the north land where they had been refugees from the Kansas heat during the months of July, August, and part of September.  Upon returning, my mother-in-law inquired as to the health of our mutual friends Bill and Beth.  It seems Bill and Beth’s lawn had not been mown recently, and, upon seeing this, my mother-in-law immediately feared for their well-being.

This is was no idle worry.  I have noticed myself that the one of the first things people do when they die is to give up mowing.  This first occurred to me on a road trip to Oklahoma with the family.  My youngest was pointing out “haunkted” [haunted] houses.  Sure enough each of the houses she pointed out to us had an un-mown lawn, a sign of the unnatural if there ever was one.

My mother-in-law need not have feared as our friends are in good health.  I can’t say it for a fact, but I rather suspect they, like me, are thinking about their mowing end-game for the year.

How and when to finish is an aspect of the sport all but the most serious participants in the sport of mowing completely ignore even though it is the most important part of the mental aspect of the game.  You heard me right.  There is a mental part of mowing that is too often neglected.

It begins at the first of the season with the question of when to begin.  On one hand, there is the natural temptation to put off the first mowing as long as possible.  However, this has a downside in that if you wait too long, it becomes quite a difficult operation.  What is the point in mowing once instead of twice when it takes more than twice the effort to do it?  What all we mowers must keep in mind is that the point is to expend the least amount of effort that is humanly possible within certain constraints as to your lawn’s appearance. We need to husband our strength for more important matters, but we don’t want our neighbors to think we’ve died. (I have to wonder what it would mean “to wife” our strength.  Maybe my wife will tell me if she ever sits down to take a break.)

After that first mowing, the weather here in Kansas guarantees we are pretty much locked into a weekly schedule for a while, or so I thought.  A few years ago my friend Paul—who is an engineer with a practical turn of mind—told me about the 8-day method.  If you mow every 8 days instead of every 7, after 7 weeks you’re one mowing ahead.  The practical mathematics of this appealed to me immediately. If you start mowing before the first of May, then you can get ahead by the 4^th of July. 

The 4^th of July is an important date in the mowing game just as it is in other sports.  In this part of the country, there are some years in which you can switch from a weekly schedule to a biweekly schedule at that time.

Let me tell you what, if you can switch into that biweekly schedule, you are in the clover, as it were.

That did not happen this year, and I personally blame it on the shifting in weather patterns that is due to global warming. (It is my belief that our president didn’t sign the Kyoto Treaty because he is in the back pocket of Briggs and Stratton.)

When you get into the month of September, you really have to start watching your game.  Regardless of the year, you can pretty well count on the fact that you are going to have to mow twice in September, but the strategy is to place your mowings so that (a) you only have to mow once in October and (b) that one mowing is at the optimal time.

If it’s too early, then that makes the first mowing in the spring more difficult.  If it’s too late, you might get caught by rains and have to postpone your last mowing until November, which is a time when the pros have gone on to other things like Autumn-League Leaf Raking.

Bill, the mutual friend of me and my in-laws, is a real pro.  Those of us who take our mowing seriously watch him closely for hints.  If his lawn looks a little scraggledy now, you can be dang sure there is a good reason for it.  He has some strategy that will rock the mowing world.

You can count on it.

(Bobby Winters is a professor of mathematics, writer, and speaker.  You may contact him at bobby@okieinexile.com or visit his website at www.okieinexile.com.)