Thus spake dmc ( snipped-for-privacy@ukc.ac.uk) unto the assembled multitudes:
Four years ago I bought a rotary petrol mower (some obscure rebadged Chinese make) from Focus, for 89 quid, expecting at that price for it to last only a couple of seasons at most. Still going strong, does a great job, and always starts on the first 'pull'. The plastic fuel tank did spring a leak last year but that was easily fixed with some plastic repair goo. Changing the oil is weird though: you remove the filler plug and tip the machine upside down to drain it out of the filler hole...
I would have agreed with you, until I discovered the two German induction motor mowers I have now.
It's probably a fair comparison between a petrol and universal motor mower like the flymo. But it doesn't work as a comparison between petrol and induction motor, but then neither does a power comparison between universal and induction motors, because the induction motor torque profile is perfect for grass cutting, whereas a universal motor is exactly the wrong torque profile (and it seems the universal motors used are always crap efficiency). I found the cutting power of a 3.5HP petrol to be the same as a
1.5kW induction motor (although to be fair, the petol did have a 10% larger cutting area). Again, this may be because the torque profile of a petrol engine isn't as good for grass cutting, although not as bad as that of a universal motor, and to some extent mitigated by the speed/trottle feedback loop.
snipped-for-privacy@DENTURESsussex.ac.uk explained on 10/05/2009 :
We have about a third of an acre to be cut, some of it quite rough and due to the underlying clay, it can get quite boggy.
Over the past twenty years we have gone through a whole series of mowers, with none of them proving to be long term up to the job reliability wise, or very long lasting. We started with a small electric cylinder type, which didn't last a season. We then got a large electric hover, that managed about three years before the motor burned out, followed by a JAP engined hover which lasted a little longer. It started to fall apart and its hover skirt wore out.
The last one was a B&S engined, self propelled 4HP rotary. The rear plastic wheeled drive of that slipped on the grass, and the under the skirt drive belt and pulleys would choke up continuously with grass - so the drive was never much help and we gave up on it and just pushed it. It still runs fine and cuts well, but not capable of tackling a first cut of the season due to constant stalling from overloading. Last year it was so very wet, it was only possible to cut it a couple of times.
We decided last year our next one would be a ride-on. We looked at the cost of yet another self propelled rotary and found they were about £300 for something of a respectable size. The cheapest new ride on about £1200. These have quite small wheels and would likely still get bogged down unless it was very dry. We then started looking at second hand ride on small tractor style ride on types and found a retired guy out in the wilds selling them all, irrespective of make or model, at between £500 and £700 - this was a couple of weeks ago. He buys in part exchanges, does a quick refurb and resells them. We ordered one, he agreed to deliver, then said he had another which might suite us even better. It did, a bit narrower and Direct Collect, so we agreed to that.
What we have now is an MTD 4140, 14HP 7 gears with automatic Transmatic drive, electric start, with a 30" cut single blade - not really much bigger overall than the 4HP self propelled one, but it does the job in just a fraction of the time and for the first time it is fun :-) An easy 15minutes ride around, versus at least an afternoon's struggle with the alternatives. You can even empty the collector without getting off it.
The whole thing is much more robust, much easier to service and you don't get covered with grass when using it. It is designed to be capable of a much larger acreage, so it should last us a very long time. It is about 5 years old, with no signs of any real wear and they cost new about £2,200.
About 10 years ago our Flymo died (one of many) and SWMBO went to Argos & bought one of these
formatting link
LAWNMOWER.htmIt was badged Power Devil at the time.
I berated her about wasting money at the time. Wrong again. Bloody thing won't die! Been used every year and bear in mind we tend not to get round to mowing until the grass is too long, so its had a lot of stick.
Ours has an induction motor, don't know about the Challenge version.
That seems like a lot. You can get a new ride-on here for $1000 with 42" cut which looks pretty reasonable (and they actually discounted them to $800 a few weeks ago - I went out for a box of nails and almost came home with a new mower :)
B+S engine, but I don't recall the HP now - but it certainly wasn't something where I thought it'd be an issue.
Yeah, takes me a couple of hours with our current ride-on, largely because it's ancient and cuts really badly, so I keep having to go back over spots. I'm really regretting not buying one of those $800 ones...
No, as posted previously that's mowed with a 55HP tractor fitted with a
1.85 metre wide flail mower. The garden is still fairly large though.
The Nitwittical Philosopher's point such as it is, is bunk. Hayter mowers don't contain many parts made by Hayter. They are assembled from the usual collection of bits from the same makers as anyone else. So Hayter use Briggs and Stratton engines, which are exactly the same ones fitted to Power Devil and Sovereign mowers. They use the same carburettors and spares for the engines will fit models across different manufacturers. Hence it doesn't matter that he paid £400 for his mower, the engine is cheap enough to be fitted to a £80 mower and for the maker to turn a profit.
The view that one should pay five times more for a mower in order that it makes economic sense to pay £100 for a carburettor is one for which the logic escapes me. Given the interchangeability of parts it's probably cheaper to buy a Sovereign or similar cheap brand and transplant the engine to the Hayter than to pay for it to be repaired by a Hayter agent. TBH since I don't see Hayters as being particularly well built I found it to be easier to swap the entire mower for a new one. The old one had lasted since 1990 and the failure was trivial - the push button pump for priming the carburettor had failed. However the part isn't available as a replacement it has to be the entire carburettor.
I ended up with a Power Devil self-propelled mower. It's too early to say how long it will last, but it has done three years so far hence if it lasts another couple it will work out cheaper per year than a Hayter.
The ride on's seem to be mostly of US import into the UK. Until recently even the second hand tractor types fetched over £1,000. I had not come across the even smaller scooter style until this year and was initially thinking of buying one of those new, until we came across the second hand tractor style we actually bought.
Steve Firth coughed up some electrons that declared:
And buying a reasonably powered petrol push mower makes a cutting the grass on a 100' x 75' property (grass all round) painless compared to using a crap electric that a) can't cut anything except 2" bone dry grass; b) involves the faff of an electric cable that always gets in the way.
Point: a decent normal mower takes 70% of the effort out of the job even before worrying about powered or drive on :)
I agree with you and for that sort of area powered doesn't help. In fact you spend more energy fighting the powered mower that you would pushing an unpowered one. After all lawns in general do not look like the alps so it's not hard to push a mower around.
The one part Hayter DO make, or used to, was the actual CAST chassis.
This has seen 14 years of service plus. It hasn't bent., or rusted throug= h.
My Ride on is equipped with the same B&S enegine everybody else uses.=20 That's not what makes it good though. What makes it good is the massive=20 steel deck, and the simplicity of servicing it.
You are in fact proving my point. The make of engine is irrelevant.=20 Because its a small part of the machine. What counts is how the rest is=20 put together.
I have never actually beyond a valve re-grind needed to service that B & =
S engine at all. Its on its original carb.
I can only speak of that particular Hayter, that has done 30 years with=20 no major work on it. Not even regular servicing.
Thus spake Steve Firth (%steve%@malloc.co.uk) unto the assembled multitudes:
Further to my earlier posting, I would like to add that I gave a surplus-to-requirements electric Flymo hover mower, inherited from my late dad, to my GF back in 2000. The mower was by then already at least 10 years old. I split up with her in 2001 but we got back together recently. She tells me that she still has the same mower and it's still working fine.
So that's an at-least-19-year-old electric Flymo still working, so they can't *all* be crap. Perhaps this one was the last of the line of non-crap ones before Flymo's design team decided on a drastic change of direction.
For some values of "not crap' I suspect. Flymos can keep working for years. They make a noise, they scare the grass a bit, they cut to an unevena and unpredicatable height and you have to cut the grass several times a week rather than once a week or month.
That might explain it, then - maybe the mower's the same rough price as here, but you're getting screwed for huge shipping costs :-(
The wife's brother has one of those scooter ones, but it has to be a good
20 years old, maybe older; they must have been around for a while (at least this side of the Pond). It does surprisingly well, but doesn't exactly feel stable compared to a proper ride-on, even on level ground (we've got some pretty steep ditches here, and I have to sit with my backside hanging out over the back wheel even on the ride-on; I suspect a scooter type would just keel over)
(Today's task is to check the ride-on over; it's been laid up over Winter, but I'll need to start cutting in the next week or so)
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