Childhood Rehash of Sorts
I mowed the lawn over a combination of today and yesterday (due to the exceptionally short battery life of the mower...about 15 minutes from full charge to nothing ;-)). I haven't done that in a long time. My parents gave me an essentially permanent loan of their old lawn mower since they now have a robot that does that task. My lawn had been starting to bug me; it wasn't full-on overgrown but there were a number of weeds, and everyone else near me had nicely mowed lawns, and I didn't want to be the odd one out.
I haven't mowed in...so, so many years. I think I was 16 years old last time I mowed the lawn; I may have been 17. Some of the older folks in my audience may laugh at eight years being considered a long time, but it's one third of my total lifespan to date, so it counts. :)
Posted by Luke at 10:56 a.m.
2 words...gas powered. That lasts until the tank's empty. :)
Posted by Chris on 2007.04.01 at 5:10 p.m.
You can get a good cheap weed-eater brand gas-powered mower from Wal-Mart for $135. If you have the cash, though, go for a self-propelled one. They're much easier.
Posted by Aaron on 2007.04.02 at 2:12 a.m.
Gas powered lawn mowers are insanely bad for the environment. The stats vary depending on where you're looking but it's unanimous that running a lawn mower for an hour is exponentially more harmful than driving a car for an hour. A lot of states are considering EPA laws to regulate lawn mower emissions.
If you're thinking about buying a new one, I'd stick with electric. Just don't mow over the cord like I always did :)
Posted by Elli on 2007.04.02 at 2:46 a.m.
Good luck starting it, though. *shudders*
We had a gas mower for awhile and I hated the damn thing.
Posted by Luke on 2007.04.02 at 3:01 a.m.
I never actually did that (we had a corded mower for awhile). I remember when I was a kid that I used to "fling" the cord to keep it away from where it needed to be.
This mower is battery operated. Yay. :)
Posted by Luke on 2007.04.02 at 3:06 a.m.
Nah, get an electric. Gas mowers are horrible for the environment. I feel bad everytime I start mine up. The city of austin is doing an exchange right now where they'll give you 20% off an electric mower if you trade in a gas powered mower.
http://www.cleanairforce.org/
Gas lawn equipment makes up 5% of urban air pollution. That's a frightening number for something most of us do every two weeks.
Posted by Tim on 2007.04.02 at 3:45 a.m.
Eh, I don't care enough about the environment to switch. I've used electric mowers and I've used gas mowers. The gas mowers were about a billion times better and faster.
I'm not buying into all of this "global warming" scare. Oddly enough, only 30 years ago there was a "new ice age" scare. Hmm... how exactly can the enviro-nazis go from "we're going to freeze to death" to "we're going to have our skin melt off our bones" in such a short amount of time?
Here's an awesome article about global warming:
http://patriotpost.us/pub/07-08_Digest-print.htm
Posted by Nathan on 2007.04.02 at 12:30 p.m.
While I'm not an expert in science, I'm pretty sure that emissions from either automobiles or lawnmowers don't have a great deal to do with either global warming or global cooling; rather, they have to do with the overall cleanliness and purity of the air.
It does make sense that lawnmower emissions would be a bigger issue than automobile emissions simply because there isn't any regulation surrounding them. Automobile manufacturers are subject to a number of ever-increasing emissions standards, which contribute to the overall air quality and such...obviously, it's a trade-off, since the cost of such things are added to the cost of the vehicle. I'm not aware of any such laws regarding small appliances, although I've been wrong before, and don't pay much attention to stuff like this.
Posted by Luke on 2007.04.02 at 4:03 p.m.
Yeah, and the big problem with lawn care equipment is that you're basically using an engine that's about as efficient as using one from the turn of the century. Add into that the fact that most people don't change the oil or air filter on their equipment and you have a horribly polluting engine. This affects people with Asthma the worst, and keeps many of them in doors.
As for car emissions and global warming, it's a matter of scale. Whether or not you believe in global warming is somewhat irrelevant. Gasoline cars are horrible for the environment. Especially our local environment. A coal plant is going to pump tons of pollution into the environment. But it's also creating a lot of electricity for that pollution. So even though it's bad for the environment it's better to have one large coal plant then everyone having a gasoline generator attached to their house. Especially, since we can locate the coal plant away from other sources of pollution surrounded by trees and create a buffer for the pollution. And that's the problem with cars. You've got millions of tiny inefficient power plants clustered together, creating massive amounts of pollution in a localized area. Generally without enough surrounding plant matter to absorb the pollution. That's why low emission vehicles are good. It's about scale. And keeping the pollution from being so localized.
My problem with the patriotpost style of debunking global warming is that it's highly political, and that it just makes small nit-picking claims. The argument goes, if we can find flaws in "An Inconvenient Truth" then we can say that Al Gore is wrong, and therefore Global Warming is not happening. This is somewhat interesting rhetorically, but it's not science. More interesting would be an article by someone studying the trends and coming up with a different, but plausible explanation for the increased global temperature fluctuations.
Let's be honest. Anyone can see that the United States' standard of living is unsustainable. We are creating far too much trash. We are paving over far too much of our green spaced. And we're accelerating. I would contend that we've already hit a point where over half of the products sold in stores are disposable. Does anyone really think we can sustain 75-100%?
Posted by Tim on 2007.04.03 at 3:36 a.m.
Starting it's not too hard if you prime it right. That's the key. You can't just crank it up cold. And as far as the environment or clean air, or you name it, when they make an electric with the same power as gas and make it cordless (and by cordless I mean last longer than 15 minutes), AND make it no more expensive than the gas ones, then I'll switch. It's like the Hybrid cars, sure they get better mileage and are better for the environment, but they cost so much more, then when you have to replace the battery and you have to fork out the cash for that bill, it's just not financially wise.
Posted by Chris on 2007.04.04 at 4:20 p.m.
I have no clue what you need the power for in your lawnmower. I just cut a neighbors lawn this past weekend that had 4 foot weeds with a bottom of the line Craftsman mower. It can be a pain to have your engine stall, but it's pretty easy to rectify.
As for hybrids, not to criticize your new sources, but those theories about hybrids are quite old and have been prooved to be false.
Hybrids have proven to be far more reliable than standard gasoline engines, and the batteries apparently are lasting well over the original estimates of 100,000 miles (they're now expecting about 300,000). The real cost factor in hybrids is the approximately $5,000 premium you pay over an enconomy car. Depending on the price of gasoline that is either a good deal or not. If we go over $3/gallon hybrids make sense. If gasoline doesn't, they don't.
But there are plenty of better deals out there. My Scion xB gets better mileage than the Ford Escape Hybrid, and costs about half the price. Of course the Escape contributes about half to a third of the air pollution, so we all loose there.
At the end of the day we have to pick our battles and do what we can. Too often we get caught up in trying to justify what we do as not being harmful, rather than just admitting it's harmful and keeping an eye out for ways to change. We can't change overnight, but in the long term we'll have to. And let's be honest, it doesn't look like we'll need lawn mowers in central texas in a couple of decades. So we should enjoy our grass while we can.
Posted by Tim on 2007.04.05 at 2:43 a.m.
Now I'll certainly agree with you on that. Of course, we have had plenty of rain, but that seems to be unusual.
As far as Hybrids, my Mazda 626 averages about 420 miles per tank, so I'm happy. I wish my minivan got that mileage.
Posted by Chris on 2007.04.05 at 5:54 p.m.
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