It must be somewhere between eight and ten years now that I have been using a push mower to harvest my lawn, which means that is a lot of petrol that I haven’t had to buy then burn and it has been great. But (you always know there is going to be a “but”, don’t you?) there are still occasions when the back lawn gets so high and thick that the poor old push mower has trouble coping and this year because of the constant rain that seems to be happening more often.
So, I decided to look into what else was out there to make it a bit easier on the old body (the increasing grey in my beard is not due to hair dye!) and what I found were electric mowers. I remember those from my childhood too but there is a wide variety of designs available these days and after considerable review and debate I decided on the Ozito brand ECO 320 – it seems you can’t sell anything these days unless it is “eco” or “green” or “enviro” or some such! Anyway I picked the ECO320 because it was relatively inexpensive and at a power consumption of 1100 watts still left some capacity to play with when powered by my largest inverter, which can pump out 1400 watts continuously. So you can see that the way were are going to use it, powered by the sun, really is eco-friendly.
It was reasonably easy to put together, but the grass catcher that allows me to harvest the lawn has a tendency to fall off, which is frustrating. It is powerful enough to cut the longer grass easily and does not suck the batteries dry of power, so it does work quite well.
Note: If you do decide to get an electric mower, regardless of how you power it PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make sure there is an earth leakage circuit breaker (ELCB) also called a residual current device (RCD) or safety switch between you and the power supply. If you have a newer house and plant to use your household supply you may be covered, but check first to be absolutely sure there is a safety switch fitted. If there isn’t or you will be using some form of standalone power system like ours, get hold of a portable RCD and plug your mower into it. If you run over the cord the RCD can be a life saver.
The mower has a button that has to be depressed before the off/on switch will work to prevent inadvertent starting, which is good. The mower has three height settings by moving the back axle up or down but due to some quirk of the design the axle tends to slip down to the lowest setting, causing the mower to labour or stop and if it does keep going it cuts the crap out of the grass. I will need to modify the chassis of the mower by drilling a couple of holes near the rear axle so I can wire it up and stop it slipping back down into “kill the grass” mode.
Apart from that is works well and if the grass gets away from me it lets me get it back under control without killing myself.
