|
Interesting thread. We have about 1/3 acre of grass and we've had the same Honda gas mower + Echo trimmer for the last 14 years now. I change the oil on the Honda every year or two but neither has needed any other work in all that time, not even spark plugs.
We also are on our 2nd snowblower, the yard isn't that big partly cause our driveway is a little ridiculous.
I will definitely go electric when/if anything breaks.. but I am real curious about it all. One big annoyance with the ICE stuff is oil is annoying to dispose of here.
I think our mowing + trimming is not real heavy duty, but the snowblower is the one that strikes me as tough. We have an Ariens Pro with a 450cc motor, it is a pretty darn big snowblower. Our previous one was a Toro and it had a lot of issues with it breaking.
Our local hardware store sells Ego and what got me is the Ego snowblower is absolutely tiny. It's literally like half the size of the Ariens, and considerably smaller than the Toro was too, I am really curious how it performs. Obviously electric motors are very powerful, but with a snowblower it is everything else in the design which is critical. The Toro never, ever had engine problems, it was everything else which would break. The Ariens clearly had much more attention paid to the design of the blower/chute, drive unit, controls, belts, belt tensioners, etc.. As a result of that it basically never clogs, it's never broken anything, it doesn't eat belts, etc..
Maybe the electric motor can be used to simplify some of the design elements since it can go down to 0 rpm when you stop. But it still requires a lot of safety involved.
|