Confessions of a Lawn-Mower Communist

From National Review.com.

Despite the foibles of battery-powered machines, I’ll never go back to gas.

I’ll admit it: Out of a combination of sloth and a desire to be free of fussy gasoline, I have long desired to have an entirely battery-powered fleet of lawn machinery. With the recent improvements in battery technology — faster charging, stronger motors, and longer battery life — I figured that for my lot size (about a quarter of an acre) such machinery would be sufficient. And it mostly is. But the future comes at a cost, and regulators aren’t making it easier to defend battery machines when California uses their existence as an excuse to halt the sale of all gas-powered machines by 2024.

For starters, one cannot reasonably acquire the best tool from each brand. As with all other battery-powered tools, once one buys into a battery platform, all future purchasing decisions will be influenced by this association unless you’re be-monocled wealthy sod, in which case you can have someone else mow your lawn while you breast-stroke in your treasure vault. The battery that powers the mower powers the trimmer that powers the snowblower. The problem with this battery-loyalty system is that there are a lot of ugly stepsisters in the Ryobi, Kobalt, Ego, and even Toro families. Like an Old Testament marriage, you may find yourself with all sorts of wives you could live without.

Two years ago, I went with Lowe’s Kobalt 80v line, immediately purchasing their push mower half off ($250) and the string trimmer ($200), with plans to grab the snowblower, too, when my Toro two-stroke bit it. No more cord-yanking, plug-hunting, or first-start-of-the-year supplication before the Divine while cursing myself for not having run the mower dry before storage to prevent the fuel from gelling in the filter or hoses. The battery mower is indeed lovely that way. Save for topping up the batteries before winter and washing out the undercarriage, there’s naught required. Because the combustion engine is removable, storing the mower upright is simple, done without fear of gasoline leaks — reserving that role for one’s mildly incontinent motorcycle.

The weight difference is profound, making the mowing process much less taxing, but the battery mower has a habit of bouncing around. Instead of an implacable 90-pound chunk of steel, it’s a flighty 45-pound steel-and-plastic contraption that creaks and wobbles and generally feels chintzy. But, for all the foibles of the battery machines, I would never go back to gas.

Freedom is the ability to mow the lawn at 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. without bothering the neighbors. Given the low hum of the mower, even basic headphones can be used to listen to music; sound-canceling earbuds will erase the noise entirely. Forty-five minutes of mowing time allows for easy listening to podcasts such as National Review’s The Editors. No more slogging deaf and dumb behind a Cub Cadet as it bellows its discontent into the void. Should my wife come up to talk, I can cut the motor, chat, and then simply depress a button to restart the mower; no more pull-cord antics or perennially dead start-assist batteries. I can be sitting at my desk, writing, at 6 p.m. and be slicing blades by 6:02 after slipping into grass-stained Adidas Sambas (it is not till fatherhood that a man earns the status symbol of New Balance 608s).

What is sacrificed on the altar of turf futurism is power — and we like power. Even the premier Ego and Toro mowers cannot offer the muscularity of gas-powered machines when mulching and chewing through lawn detritus such as sticks, weedy bits, and the neighbor’s Pomeranian, Doug. Battery mowers bog down in the damp, look at you sideways if the grass is taller than five inches, and generally have an attitude about cutting anything that isn’t an eighth of an acre of manicured fescue. These are the trade-offs: having to pick up sticks and rake clumps of grass post-mow. The top-end Ego now offers a double-blade system that mulches better, but it’s prohibitively expensive compared with a gasoline Honda ($900 vs. $550).

While the machines themselves present real trade-offs, the battery-powered peripherals are almost all winners. Weed eaters and shrub trimmers especially, which require relatively little power, are positively wonderful to use without the limited reach and ergonomic constraints of a cord or the noxiousness of gasoline use. One can walk the yard and angle the implements any which way without cables’ diving into the shears (R.I.P. to my 100-foot, twelve-gauge extension cord: gone but never forgotten). The models I own use the Ryobi 18v batteries that work on dozens of other tools, and the batteries are small enough that their weight is negligible when contorting trimmers in a way that the Kobalt 80v brick could never allow. The weed eater isn’t a world-beater, but it’s much more comfortable.

I most regret buying the Kobalt weed eater. Maybe if you have fine, tall grass, it would be worth the money, but it’s not strong enough to get through one-to-three-foot weeds that can crop up under tree cover. It’d be much wiser to get the daisy cutter from Ryobi for a third of the price, and some weed-killer.

Battery-powered leaf blowers should also be avoided. A high-CFM battery model (which moves a lot of air and, thus, material) hovers around $300, which is absurd when a wall-powered Toro blower with the same specs retails for $69. Unless one cannot stand the idea of an extension cord, the chasm between the two power types is too vast. But I know some (retired men) enjoy using a blower to push around leaves along the property line while smoking a cigar or nursing an old-fashioned, so there could be valid, meditational reasons for purchasing a battery model.

Reasonable people can disagree about the relative merits of gas and battery. You gaseous folk can call me a communist, and I can call you troglodytic Neanderthals, but what I hope we can agree on is telling (in the words of Jeremy Clarkson) the “enviro-mentalist” bureaucrats — who think lawn care can and should be done without fossil fuels — to butt out. Relinquishing the best equipment for commercial operations in the name of green idealism is ridiculous, and it reveals that these regulators don’t mow their own lawns.

Regulators pretend battery-powered landscaping equipment will be able to replace their gasoline-powered brethren in the near future. Preposterous. These aren’t robust enough, require an absurd number of batteries for multiple yards, and do not mate with efficiently sized equipment for commercial lawn maintenance. Battery-powered lawn-care equipment is for a homeowner with a small- to medium-sized yard. There, and only there, does this gear make sense. Bugger off, bureaucrats, and leave the lawn marketplace be.