Saving the world one electric lawn mower at a time..

James -

For the past 9 years my John Deere 155c riding mower has severed me quite well, faithfully mowing my 1 acre plot of land year after year. There were a few times during the ownership experience where I wanted to get rid of it for one reason or another. Each time boiled down to issues where it would fail me just as I was desperately counting on it. Here is a small list of the failures to this point.

  1. 2012 – Main Steering Bushing Failure
  2. 2013 – Alternator failure
  3. 2013 – Rectifier failure
  4. 2015 – Another alternator failure
  5. 2016 – Steering Bushing failure again...
  6. 2017 – Electric PTO Failure (Shot bb's all over when it failed it was pretty impressive)
  7. 2017 – PTO destroyed some of the wiring which had to be replaced
  8. 2013 - 2019 – New battery every year because it trashes it. Installed a battery disconnect which interestingly didnt help as well as i figured it would.

So as you can see not terribly bad given the mower has 350 hours on it. Since the mower was aging and I wanted to stop buying gas altogether it was time for a change. I started to look around for options to replace the mower in the summer of 2017. Upon searching I only came across a couple options that would be viable to with the amount of land I had to mow. Cub Cadet RZT S zero Electric Riding mower, and the Ryobi 480E.

The Cub Cadet was the first mower I found which could work for me. It was a zero turn which I thought would be a nice feature, and it was made by a company that I trust. Thinking that I  just found my future lawn mower I set up an appointment at my 'local' dealer 3 hours away. He was the closest store with the mower in stock unfortunately. When I got there I started to ask the guys a few questions. First what do they think of it.. I was immediately told that it was interesting, but to expensive for what it is and that I should just buy one of the other gas models as they performed better. Along with that it was very heavy which makes it get stuck more often, and it was not as fast as the other models which could be purchased for less money. After hearing the people responsible for selling it just tell me that it was a POS I walked out of there disappointed. At this point in time the RM480E wasn't even on the market.  Just a heads up to anyone selling anything I appreciate the honesty :)

After that failure I keep looking and a few months later I stumbled across the RM480E which is sold at Home Depot. By this time it is Spring of 2018 and the mowers are only at a few Home Depot's. I check availability online at homedepot.com and head on over to my local store with my wife, truck and trailer. I was pretty confident this was going to be the mower for us after reading way to many review online.  We get to the store I am pumped, but my wife pretty much hates it immediately. The seating position is awkward, it looks 'weird', has a pretty small deck @ 38", and it was the smaller 75ah model instead of the 100ah. When looking at it compared to our super sweet John Deere 155c it really does look like a toy. My wife talks me out of buying it and I think that I am going to wait for the world to make a 'normal' electric garden tractor version lawn mower.

Then one night I started thinking, I own an electric car that has tremendous range 265 mi, it looks good, its normal looking, and performs better then any other car I have ever driven.  (2014 Tesla Model S 85 w/ AP1) How has no one else made an electric mower at this point? Well I started to google electric garden tractors instead of lawn mower and came across a guy selling a kit to build your own electric garden tractor. I reach out and based on the specs I think man this might work for me.

The site I found is https://electriclawntractor.com/ . Brian the guy who came up with the design, sells kits and plans states that the mower will mower over 2 acres, run pretty quietly, require little to no maintenance. All things which I thought sounded great! In addition to that the mower will look normal, and operate just as if was a 'normal' gas mower. So.... without telling my wife I preordered and signed myself up for a DIY electric lawn mower conversion project..