Low-pollution lawn mowers
The most hippy solution for lawn mowing is a push mower - it's silent (no noise pollution), human powered (no emissions aside from the ones you make anyway) and does a better job on the grass anyhow. But sometimes we're not as pure as we'd like to be. If you have to use a powered mower, make sure it's electrical rather than gas powered, because the engines on lawn mowers are about as polluting as motorcycles. So you want to go electric. In which case, if you've got the cash, may we recommend you check out a nice little robot mower? We've got a coupla options while we wait for the solar sheep.
The Electrolux Automower is a little green pod with rechargable batteries that operates on £0.50 to £1.50 worth of power per month. (And at £1499 from Crocus you're going to need every extra penny.) It requires contact with its base station so it is (supposedly) useless if stolen. (Realistically, these things are worth £1500, some clever geek will figure out how to reprogram them. But anyhow.)
That price surely makes the Robomow look appetizing, having three models ranging from £599 to £1499. The cheaper ones only do smaller lawns; presumably they have less powerful batteries.
All of these mow automatically in a pre-set area, are, at around 60db, much quieter than a typical lawnmower (90db-100db), mow in the rain without trouble, and mulch the clippings into fertilizer.
Scotts manual reel pushmower, $130 at home depot... just picked one up and i love it, it's kinda weird to be able to hear the birds sing while mowing the grass
Posted by: matthew | May 4, 2006 5:50 AM