Choosing Between Lawn mowers: Some Helpful Tips

For flat, small yards, manual lawn mowers can be the simplest solution. Yes, in a sense this is reverting to a time before the innovations of gasoline powered lawn mowers, but if you’ve ever used a manual lawn mower you know that while it may take more than one pass to get the same results, it is possible to keep lawn perfectly manicured using a person-powered lawn mower.

The pros of using a manual lawn mower are that they’re inexpensive, quiet, do not pollute the environment, are safe to operate and require sharpening or repositioning of blades much less often. The drawbacks, as contrasted to powered lawn mowers, is that it can be more difficult to clip very tall grass, the grass will not be as perfectly uniform in terms of length, and there isn’t the option of collecting grass clippings in a bag attached to the mower as can be



done with powered lawn mowers.

Electric powered lawn mowers alleviate the pollution con by not directly polluting the air, but then again, many types of electrical power are produced in environmentally harmful ways. Also, electric lawn mowers are no better than manual mowers at cutting tall grass, and with an electric mower you’re limited to the range that the cord length allows.

Gasoline powered lawn mowers can handle tougher and taller grass, but produce exhaust emissions, are noisy and tend to require regular maintenance of some type or another. Also, they are much more expensive than other types of lawn mowers.

If you decide to go with a gasoline powered mower, many models can handle mulching, bag collection of side spitting of grass clippings, but few perform each of these tasks equally well. If you know which type of clipping handling that you prefer, your best bet is to choose a mower that is best with that particular type of clipping discharge. For more detailed information on this and other lawn mower features, I invite you to browse through the lawn mower reviews at a consumer interest website, such as http://ConsumerReports.org.


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