Any lawnmower recommendations?

[bungeejumper]

It comes down to two things, your budget and your terrain. We could have spent the thick end of a thousand pounds on a Honda, but the bumps and rocky bits would have hurt our egos before they killed the mower.

Instead we've had two Briggs & Stratton mowers (£200-£300) in 25 years, and we haven't regretted it yet. (Not counting one complete pile of own-brand Chinese expletive deleted which went back to the shop after its gearbox disintegrated after four months of use.)

Our present mower is one of the Webb models with 140cc engine and crucially, with oversized rear wheels. Like this: https://www.gardenlines.co.uk/shop/lawn ... lawn-mower . It seems to keep on winning Best Buys from Which?, but we bought it because it was on offer at one of our local stores (£250, IIRC) and we thought it looked rugged. It is.

BJ

[sg31]

I'm not sure if anyone has already mentioned it but try to get a mower that can mulch the clippings.

With a large area of grass you can collect clippings at an astonishing rate. With a muching facility you can return them to the lawn to rot down and feed the grass.

Best move I ever made.

[UncleEbenezer]

We have had a gardener do it since we have been in this house, but I have not heard from him yet this side of the new year. He is normally in touch by now. With the coronavirus stay-at-home plans I may end up doing it myself.

Blessed are the cheesemakers, for their sheep and goats shall tend the lawn.

Just wait for your instructions, as in viewtopic.php?f=64&t=22343 .

[sg31]

I was tempted by the robotic mower but they are controlled by defining the boundary of the area to be cut with buried wires. With a large garden like ours with several Island flower and shrub beds scattered around it would be a massive job to install the wires. The one I looked at passed a curent through the wires and I'm not sure it would make it all the way through a wire that long.

When I looked at them over a year ago the one I would need for our main lawn was £3k or £4k. At that price some thieving toe rag would be bound to make off with it.

[tea42]

My Hayter mower blew up because someone left a rock in the grass. Just purchased a new Aldi self propelled rotary job for £180. 3 year warranty!

[quelquod]

I think the Honda recommendations need to be qualified. I prefer a roller mower because I like the stripes (the wheeled mowers with a flappy bit dragging at the back don’t cut (?) it for me) and I have numerous edges to cut over. A Honda roller of the smaller sizes talked about at any rate is a shiny steel cylinder incapable of traction except on the driest, firmest, flattest terrain. Also it’s not split and extremely unmanoeverable. Lastly my previous Honda - a HRX476QX? at the best part of £1000 now - persistently failed to start with a stuck-open valve despite dealer attention and finally burned the valve seat and I dumped it in disgust. While it worked a snail could outpace it’s pathetic single speed.

I’m contemplating a Cobra - they get decent reports but I don’t actually know anyone with one. I was tempted by a Hayter Harrier but the reviews come down on build quality and grass collection. For the moment I’m using a £160 16” 4-wheeler from B&Q which starts first time every time, pulls itself and me along nicely, and picks up the current longish wet grass well. I just can’t work out where the cost comes from in some of the more exalted rotaries.

[rabbit]

I have an ageing (getting on for 20 year old) Castel Plus (Italian made) mower with a Honda GCV160 engine. It's been used and abused in quite a large domestic garden and has been 100% reliable throughout that time. The only maintenance it's needed has been routine stuff - blade sharpening, one replacement drive belt, a new spark plug, and a couple of oil changes. Honda engine every time for me.

[Hypster]

I’ve got a Hayter with a Briggs & Stratton engine but I’ve only had it for about five years so not as long as most folks on the thread; but so far it’s been reliable. One thing I’ve never been able to fathom is how to get the lawn stripes to stay. It looks lovely when cut but by the next day the stripes have disappeared. The local colleges (I’m in Cambridge) look immaculate all time time.

[bungeejumper]

One thing I’ve never been able to fathom is how to get the lawn stripes to stay. It looks lovely when cut but by the next day the stripes have disappeared. The local colleges (I’m in Cambridge) look immaculate all time time.

The lawn stripes are merely telling you that the grass has been flattened (or bent down) in alternating directions! They may look nice, but whether that's actually good for it is another matter.

The lawns at the Cambridge colleges are probably mown every second day by some ancient retainer who uses a fifty year old cylinder roller mower, which weighs as much as a motorbike and which he hand-sharpens during those evening hours (like Monty Don) when everyone else is watching the telly.

My son in law had a mid-sized British cylinder mower, which produced beautiful stripes at the speed of a three-legged tortoise . Once a year, he would send it away to be sharpened and serviced, and to have all the bits that had broken off replaced. He has now switched to a rotary.

BJ

[Sorcery]

Well my recommendation would be to wild the lawn.
That is rotavate the entire lawn (with the money you saved from not buying a lawnmower) and plant perennial native wildflower seed. Maybe a little of the exotic foreign seeds too.
Watch it grow, watch it feed the bees, moths and butterflies, and birds.
At some point in August/September/October cut it all back and wait for next year for it to all happen again.

There is a little more to it than that, I dig out saplings, anything really spiky like thistles or gorse and anything else I think is poisonous to mammals.
That's it, enjoy what grows, enjoy the invaders (things you didn't plant), and relax. 8 years in to it now and don't regret it for one minute.

Cheers.

[quelquod]

And enjoy your next-door neighbours’ narking or worse about the weed seed infestations to their own gardens and (if you own a council house around here) a few threats from the council regarding your tenancy unless you keep your garden tidier. Even the local council plant their wild meadows a suitable distance from people’s gardens.

[tjh290633]

Well my recommendation would be to wild the lawn.

I can recommend that. Some years ago I found a strange plant growing in my front lawn and it turned out to be a wild orchid. Now there are so many that I have to leave a large area uncut until they have died down. There are also violets in flower now, soon there will be cowslips, primroses, bluebells, and it is carpeted with celandines at the moment.

Keep selective weedkillers off it and you may be pleasantly surprised at what comes up. I have common spotted orchids, twayblade and pyramidal to enjoy.

TJH

[Clariman]

Daft question - what petrol does a petrol lawnmower use? Is it just normal unleaded that you get from your local garage or something else?

[ReformedCharacter]

Daft question - what petrol does a petrol lawnmower use? Is it just normal unleaded that you get from your local garage or something else?

Just normal unleaded I'm pretty sure. IIRC mine said so when I bought it a few years ago.

RC

[tea42]

My new £180 Aldi petrol self propelled job does the business ok. Very simple to use, doesnt give a striped lawn like the Hayter which relied on its heavy rear roller to achieve this. In comparison its very light and manoeverable and although our lawn has a small slope you dont really have to engage the self powered feature at all. With its 3 year warranty its a no brainer. I would really have liked to buy a battery powered job but parting with £600 in the current circumstances was a no no.

[Gaggsy]

what petrol does a petrol lawnmower use?

Yes, normal unleaded from the petrol station. The engine is pretty frugal and doesn't use much. I switch off the supply for the last bit of the garden and let the engine run out. Apparently it's best not to leave fuel in the carburettor. Also, fuel can get 'stale' so don't buy in large quantities.

[UncleIan]

We have a medium sized lawn to the front and a fairly large one at the back.

What is "medium" and "fairly large"? Roughly?

We have a cheap battery one that does a 25m x 8m lawn + a postage stamp out the front. Great to not have to faff about with petrol and the body is mostly plastic so it isn't rotting away. I'd imagine if you could get a wider one, adjustable speed, extra batteries so you could just swap batteries when it goes flat, you might be sorted. The key is the speed and width, the narrower it is, the more times you have to walk up and down the lawn, the longer it takes basically.

[bungeejumper]

Apparently it's best not to leave fuel in the carburettor. Also, fuel can get 'stale' so don't buy in large quantities.

It certainly used to be recommended to leave as little fuel as possible in the carb, but I haven't read that in some years. I think the worry used to be that sediments or additives might hang around and block the jets after the petrol had evaporated.

That could still be a potential issue with two stroke engines, which used to be an absolute pig to start in the bad old days when they were in a bad mood (I remember the blisters!), but I think things have also got better in recent decades. YVMV. Electronic ignition beats cleaning and gapping the points and plugs, hands down!

Petrol will certainly lose its "top notes" if it's left in a can over the winter, but I don't think I've ever had to throw it away in the spring - it just takes another couple of pulls to get the mower started for the first cut of the season. (And the car will run fine on it in its octane-depleted state.) I usually buy a summer's worth of petrol for the mower (two 5 litre cans) in one go. Maybe I've just been lucky?

BJ

[sg31]

Apparently it's best not to leave fuel in the carburettor. Also, fuel can get 'stale' so don't buy in large quantities.

It certainly used to be recommended to leave as little fuel as possible in the carb, but I haven't read that in some years. I think the worry used to be that sediments or additives might hang around and block the jets after the petrol had evaporated.

That could still be a potential issue with two stroke engines, which used to be an absolute pig to start in the bad old days when they were in a bad mood (I remember the blisters!), but I think things have also got better in recent decades. YVMV. Electronic ignition beats cleaning and gapping the points and plugs, hands down!

Petrol will certainly lose its "top notes" if it's left in a can over the winter, but I don't think I've ever had to throw it away in the spring - it just takes another couple of pulls to get the mower started for the first cut of the season. (And the car will run fine on it in its octane-depleted state.) I usually buy a summer's worth of petrol for the mower (two 5 litre cans) in one go. Maybe I've just been lucky?

BJ

Check your home insurance policy. Many of them limit you to storing 2 gallon of petrol. Any more and you risk the insurer refusing to indemnify you in the event of a claim.

[bungeejumper]

Check your home insurance policy. Many of them limit you to storing 2 gallon of petrol. Any more and you risk the insurer refusing to indemnify you in the event of a claim.

Good point. So instead of buying 10 litres, I need to buy 9.1 litres. Consider it done!

BJ