New 80 volt push mowers

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Warren

100 kW
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
1,652
Yesterday, I bought gas for the mower for the first time this year.

https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=78828&start=25#p1171712

Last year, my neighbor with a Nissan leaf, and PV panels, asked me about an electric mower to replace his lawn tractor. We discussed it and I explained how much it would take to run a riding mower. Since he is quite athletic, I suggested it made more sense, financially, and environmentally to get a push mower. There were a few reasonable mowers running 14s, 58.8 volt systems. But he waited. This spring his lawn tractor needed work, so he junked it, and bought a 20s, "80" volt unit. Basically, these appear to be very similar mowers to last year's, but running higher voltage. He bought a Greenworks.

http://www.greenworkstools.com/80v-pro/commercial-lawn-mower/

In this review from April, 2015, it sounds like the best one.

http://www.protoolreviews.com/tools/outdoor-equipment/lithium-ion-powered-lawn-mower-round-up/13560/

The Kobalt tools are a Lowes in-house brand, and they have now discontinued theirs.

I'm thinking of taking the plunge. Any of you electronics gurus have any sage words to offer here?
 
If you want to spend your summer pushing a lawn mower back and forth. Yea buy it. Me? I would rather spend my time on tasks that require more thought then walking in circles in the grass. I bought a robot and have never been happier.
http://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/robotic-lawn-mowers/
Does a better job then a human and all I got to pay is a few cents of electricity.

Also if you want to push and don't mind the noise. Gas is great and costs less.
 
Makes me wonder if there are valid technical reasons for using potentially lethal voltages, or if its just marketing. I really dig the idea of branded warrantied batteries that can be used for ebikes.
 
gogo said:
Makes me wonder if there are valid technical reasons for using potentially lethal voltages, or if its just marketing. I really dig the idea of branded warrantied batteries that can be used for ebikes.
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Yeah but you pay for that, on multiple occasions I've compared store tool batteries to buying cans and DIY.
To me its not worth buying from the store, but yeah its a great idea. To be able to walk into a Home Depot, buy a battery pack and a charger and walk out with receipt in hand having a warranty, and an easy place to return the item. The price is just enough far apart that I should really be looking for sales. EGO and ECO brands are at Home Depot. I found some $5 or maybe it was $10 battery packs at Walmart, it had the stem so I bought 4 and opened them up. I believe the price vs what the cans were did not gain a good buy. I think they were $10, 5 can so $2 a can, when I can buy $3 cans from ru.nkon.nl, or $5 cans from Tumich.
 
By having more volts, you can run the device with fewer amps. Fewer amps makes the BMS and the controller cheaper and less likely to fail as a warranty claim.

Since a fully charged 14S lithium pack is 58V, I wonder if these are 14S or possibly 15S? The packs are advertised as 4.0-Ah, so they might be 2P 18650's or possibly 1P 26650's...
 
There's discussion on the batteries here - https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=46110

I want to know if you could run the mower off of some retired e-bike batteries?? I've got a bunch of '3000 mile' LiPo sitting around inside a cinder block sarcophagus, that would love to get used once a week.

There are 4 pins on the batteries. They have a PCB inside that does balancing, temperature monitoring, and who knows what else.. Proprietary DRM? Hope not, and doubt it. Maybe it's a deal like with the server power supplies how you have to provide power to certain pins to get the thing to work?

I would love to buy some 80V tools if I could use my LiPo packs with them.

My gas mower does the job- but it is loud, and it smells.. This mower will still probably be fairly loud when the blade's running, and it's not self propelled, and you have the charge the battery... But it would be so nice!

Greenworks 80V Brushless mower w/o batteries is $250-$300 http://www.amazon.com/GreenWorks-GLM801600-21-Inch-Cordless-Included/dp/B00SSBL02U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459891456&sr=8-1&keywords=80v+mower

Also Kobalt has an 80V brushless, and there are twin blade 40V mower that might be quieter. The holy grail would be a $500 robotic lawn mower, IMO.

file.php
 
Also thought about making my own mower. For a few hundred bucks you could get 4-5 outrunners/controllers/prop adapters/4s LiPos from hobbyking. Make 8-10" blades that go on the prop adapers. Mount the motors on some angle iron (maybe two rows for some offset) and fashion a guard out of some plastic and you're done! You can size it however large you want by adding more motors. A 36" mower would get my medium-sized lawn done pretty quick! If all that would work you could make a mower twice as good as a Greenworks 80V for half the price.
 
"Snapper is selling 60V cordless yard tools now, through Walmart."

The Snapper website says this mower has a Briggs & Stratton motor. I wonder if this was developed by John Fiorenza, the B & S, Etek, Motoenergy guy? In the answers section it says the the mower is supported by Green Works Globe. It is identical to the Green Works 80 volt 21" mower.

Green Works makes 40 volt and 80 volt mowers, and (apparently) the Snapper 60 volt. They figure the cells at 4 volt, so 10s, 15s, and 20s. They do 2 amp hour and 4 amp hour packs, so 1p, and 2p.

I suspect the choice of voltage has more to do with hitting price and weight targets.

What a great group this is! Thanks for the link to the pack tear-down video.
 
Re the lipo, my old mower is only 24v, but running it on tired old lipo is exactly what I do with it.

My mower came with lead originally, but I ditched that in the first summer and started running it on 6s or 7s when the grass is very thick. Since I'm using worn out packs with crazy high resistance, I run at least 10 ah, and preferably 20 ah, just to get a 5 ah run that is enough to do my yard.

No reason at all you can't use old batteries to run the new 80v mowers. Chances are when they say 80v, they mean fully charged. The current 40v stuff is 36v nominal. So two old 36v ebike packs would run an 80v mower.
 
FYI, even those old B&D plug-in mowers can run well off 80-100VDC. If you rig it up, it will mow...
 
To go electric I'd have to put a gate opener on the side gate. I just open the gate and let a couple of horses in from next to cut the grass and fertilize the yard. They appreciate it since their field can't support the number of horses they have, and eating fresh grass is better than dry hay. Once the rains come reducing yard work here in the tropics to occasionally cutting some weeds the horses don't like is the berries. 8)
 
Warren said:
John,

Yeah. I keep telling my wife that we should check out CR.
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That's funny. I've been telling mine CR is getting too Americanized, and we should check out Nicaragua, which is tied with Vietnam as cheapest place to live as an expat.
 
I ended up buying the entire 80V line. I love all the tools, but I also don't have much experience with other battery tools to compare them to. I bought them all on sale or through ebay, a couple used. I don't like to pay retail for about anything :lol: (well expect some ebike stuff).

Mower - Works great, depending on yard size you might want the larger 4AHr battery. I only use the 4AHr battery to help reduce the wear on the cells. The 2AHr battery would just barely mow my entire lawn, but only after I used it about 5 times to get it broke in. Mine had a wobble to the blade and after some warranty work (they sent a new mower) I figured out the problem, and really, it's a design flaw. The green plastic piece the blade mounts to is weak and can angle the blade if you tighten it too much. I bought a spare piece just in case that happens to the new one.

String trimmer - I wish it spun up faster and had a bit more RPM. Works fine otherwise, would rate it as average. You aren't suppose to use it as an edger I guess, as you can't rotate it, except that you can. It has a hole that a pin goes through to lock in it alignment. But it has a locking coupler anyway to hold it, so I just rotated it without the pin-lock and BAM, I have an edger.

Snow thrower - Worked fine the one time I used it. I bought it in summer (ebay used once, looked new) and we had a bad winter the previous year, so I was excited. Well, it only snowed a couple times and I only got to use it once at about 4in of snow. Way better than my gas one, but it was shitty anyway. 4AHr battery doesn't fit, or at least the cover won't cover it, odd design choice.

Hedger - Awesome, heavy.

Blower - Awesome, heavy.

Chainsaw - Used once, worked fine the one time.

The batteries go on sale periodically, be on the lookout!

4AHr:
http://camelcamelcamel.com/GreenWorks-GBA80400-4-0Ah-Lithium-Battery/product/B00SSBL07U

2AHr:
http://camelcamelcamel.com/GreenWorks-GBA80200-2-0AH-Lithium-Battery/product/B00SSBL0NE
 
My neighbor is loving his new mower. He did the first cutting of the season, Wednesday. He did his entire, big lawn in 2 hours, with one additional charge more than half way through. He has several golf greens, a rough, and a fairway for practice. He said he actually walks faster than his gas lawn tractor went.
 
Last week the wife said it was time to cut the grass. She does all the yard work, including mowing, and hates our noisy, smelly gas mower. I wanted to be sure she could actually cut our hilly, bumpy lawn with an electric before spending the money, so I borrowed the neighbor's Greenworks. He had fully charged the battery the day before. All three green LEDs were lite. I put my VC99 multimeter on it and it read 82.7 volts, so 4.135 volts/cell on the 20s2p, 4 Ah pack. I needn't have worried. The wife cut the whole lawn in 50 minutes. The mower was off perhaps 5-10 minutes of that time, while she moved around chairs, hoses, etc. At that point there were still two green LEDs lite...between 35% and 75% charge per the manual. The VC99 showed 73.4 volts, 3.67 volts/cell.

Ours arrived this am. The battery showed two lite LEDs, 72.0 volts. I put it on the charger briefly, to make sure it worked. I ran it through my Kill-A-Watt meter. It ramped up slowly, over a minute, to 340+ watts at the wall. The charger seems solid, with a strong, quiet fan.

The one odd thing is that this supposed 21" mower comes with a 20" blade. They make a 21" corded mower, which comes with a 21" blade. They sell 16", 18", 19", 20" and 21" blades for their various mowers. But all their literature states that this 21" mower uses a 20" blade. I can only imagine this was a last minute change. Perhaps the current draw was too high?
 
Thanks for the info Warren. IIRC this mower is not self-propelled. It is also probably lighter than its gasoline brethren. It is kind of awkward to push around and handle on slopes and bumps?

I say this because using our gas push mower, the self propelled feature is really nice. In a way, the mower 'drives' itself. The way you can turn the mower around by feathering the self-propel is really nice. It sticks to the ground on bumps.

Also how noisy is it compared to gas? Maybe you could download one of those cheesy decibel meters on your phone and give us some third-party numbers. My thought is to get a truly quiet mower you might have to go to a mower with smaller blades, like a dual blade mower.
 
spinningmagnets said:
I REALLY like the front wheel drive feature on my mower. I just walk behind, no pushing. If I ever get an electric mower, I would have to fabricate one for it...
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I used a front wheel drive push mower once, and I didn't understand why you'd want a front wheel drive mower. It didn't get as much traction, especially on a slope. Turning around the mower got a lot harder.

I would think rear-wheel drive is the way to go. Maybe there are other advantages to a front wheel drive mower?

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-physics-of-a-front-wheel-drive-lawn-mower/
 
I have the 40v greenworks mower, trimmer and chainsaw and love them all. The mower is small, but extremely light and easy for my teenagers to push around. The trimmer is far superior to any gas trimmer I have ever used and with 2 4ah batteries I can trim and mow my half acre yard easily. :) The 80v trimmer looks a lot like the 40v version. The greenworks trimmer is compatible with ryobi expand it attachments and I have the tree pruner attachment on it and it works good too. I am going to order the cultivator for it soon. I don't miss the 2 stroke motor at all!
 
Can't tell how it compares to a self-propelled mower. Have never owned one. The weight is almost the same as our gas push mower. Both have 8" front wheels. The electric has 10" rear wheels, to the gas mowers 14". That is what had me most concerned about its ease of pushing. But it seems indistinguishable. The main thing we noticed is the complete lack of vibration, smell, and the noise is much less. I couldn't hear it through the thermal-pane windows. There was never any doubt when the gas mower was running. Just like our corded electric chainsaw...no earmuffs required. I don't think I can download a decibel meter to my old flip phone.

OK. It is cool, dreary, and threatening rain. I took the old spring bathroom scale from the garage, that I use for weighing bikes, out to the garden shed. I rolled each mower's front right wheel up onto the center of the scale, and carefully lifted the handle to balance the mower over the wheel. These are the highest steady readings.

Gas mower: Side chute, full crankcase, empty tank (although it still managed to leak stinking gas onto my hand). 65 pounds. Figure 71 1/2 pounds with gas.

Greenworks: 55 1/2 pounds with side chute and no mulch bag (came with it, but we don't use one). Battery 6 pounds, so 61 1/2 pounds total.
 
I only mentioned front wheel drive because that's what I have. After some thought, I do agree that rear wheel drive (Or electric AWD?) Would be better, especially on hills (as you mentioned)
 
The vast majority of the watts goes into the blades spinning wind turbulence. I have an older 48v Craftsman which pulls 450w on a 13s battery. When I push it into moderate grass, the wattage only goes up to 550-600w.
It's still a lot quieter than a gas mower.
But If I run it on 33v, it is super super quiet, like barely audible from 20 ft away. The funny thing is that is still cuts fairly okay on the lower voltage if the grass isn't too tall.

I got a free gas mower today. 6.5hp Toro. Fixed it up and cut my back yard. Maybe the blades could be sharper, but it didn't cut as well. The stink and polluted air sucks to be breathing that in when you are working up a sweat. Tomorrow I will test it on some tall grass to see if it can handle the big stuff better than my electric.
 
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