Tesla Model 3 - Now I get the hype.
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deonb
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I have an Ego lawnmower now, before that I had gas, before that an older battery model, before that a corded.
(I have about a 1/3rd of an acre to mow.)
The Ego is by far the best model I've owned. MUCH better than the Ryobi One 40V or 18V stuff. I'm now on the 4th of 5th year of the initial battery and it's as good as new.
So not the snowblower I know but it has the same battery system and pedigree - if that helps.
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I got a greenworks 80v snowblower a few years ago, and it does fine with our relatively mild mid-Atlantic winters.
I would so like to ditch my gasoline lawn mower, I'm tired of getting hydrocarbons blown in my face for an hour and a half. What I'd really like is a battery powered self propelled reel mower, I have zoysia grass and I think it would do better. As far as I can research, I don't think such a thing exists.
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I have the Ego trimmer and blower, both use the 56v battery, and both are excellent. I've had the trimmer for 5 years, and the battery is still going strong. I bought the blower this past spring as I was tired of dealing with the hassle of a corded blower. As for now, I'm using an old Scotts reel mower to cut the grass, but someday armstrong power will lose it's appeal. When that time comes, I'll have no reservations in buying the Ego mower, they manufacture good stuff!
As for Tesla, I'm not a Tesla or EV hater, they just don't make economic sense to me, and I get no charge out of blowing an extra $20k to be an early adopter. I'd rather blow that dough on another bike, boat, etc.
tspear
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I had a greenworks corded lawn mower. The larger 13amp one. It died each year, and they replaced it three times.
The engine just burns out and starts to smoke. Likely related to the rather crappy lawn we have.
Tim
I have what I consider to be a long narrow driveway, although others might consider only medium size. I have a detached garage that is in the back of my property, and the drive extends the length of my property to the street in front of my house. It's long enough that it's a bit of a job to shovel it by hand, as I have been doing. I haven't measured it, so I can't really say for certain how long it is, but my best guess looking at Google maps is that it's about 120 feet long. It's one car width for most of it's length, but it widens to two car widths at the garage. If it were small, I would just keep doing it by hand. But I am also getting older, and don't want to throw my back out and be hobbled for days. I am in central Indiana, so we do get a few heavy snow falls, but generally only one or two big ones a season. If I were to go this route, I would probably buy the upgraded 7.5Ah batteries. But that package is an extra $200, so you are looking at $799.00 plus tax. I start to wonder about the value at that price point.
It's not 2 stage. And I can see where that would be important for some people, and particularly in your case living up North surrounded by the Great Lakes. I used to use my mother in-law's two stage John Deere self propelled monster to do her driveway. That was a beast, and a lot of hard work to use. Provided this is at least big enough for my job, the simplicity, lack of weight and quiet operation are appealing. Of course, those considerations are irrelevant if it's not up to the job. But it's gotta be better than shoveling by hand, right?
Thanks. I have read some comparisons between the models, and it seems the Ego compares favorably to that model, as well as the Snow Joe.
Thanks. I have heard similar positive reviews of the other products.
tspear
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@PPC1052
One other consideration. How frequent do you need?
If you use it weekly, a gas option is not that bad.
What I do not like with my current gas snow blower is not just getting the gas; but dealing with the adding gas stability stuff, the oil change needed every year for a single use (last year, only home for one snowfall of 3-5in of heavy wet snow).....
Tim
One other consideration. How frequent do you need?
If you use it weekly, a gas option is not that bad.
What I do not like with my current gas snow blower is not just getting the gas; but dealing with the adding gas stability stuff, the oil change needed every year for a single use (last year, only home for one snowfall of 3-5in of heavy wet snow).....
Tim
Here in central Indiana, we don't generally don't get lots of snow fall. We can get a couple of large snow falls. I probably shoveled 5 or six times all winter, and only 2 of those were more than 2 - 4 inches. On the occasion when it's really deep, I have just paid someone to come plow it with their pickup truck. I usually do that only once a season.
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I've been happy with the performance of the greenworks 80v mower as well, but it's a bit heavy to lug out of the garage, so the sun joe 40v brushless mower has caught my eye...
Matthew
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My neighbor has en Ego mower. It's really quiet. The other day I was unloading some stuff from my car and she was in her yard, right next to my driveway. We said hi, and she was pushing the mower to her back yard...I thought...she was really mowing her front yard. It was so quiet I though she was just pushing it around to the back side of the house.
I had an electric mower; got rid of it when we downsized to a townhome. The quietness was one of my favorite parts. I could actually talk to someone while it was running.
David7700
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How big was your lawn?
Matthew
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Our neighbors have approx 1/4, not a big yard. I did ask about charging, she said it shows plenty of charge left after she finishes. It's self propelled and she also bags, so it's hauling around extra weight. Pretty sure she got it at HD. From their website I see they have several different models. I don't know which one she has.
David7700
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I just can't imagine it would work at my house. But my "grass" is mostly weeds and thick undesirable grass. I am letting things go until the kids are gone. Just no sense maintaining it for them to tear it up playing football and lacrosse.
flyingcheesehead
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Blue area? You mean, like, liberal/CA/NY/MA?
Tesla doesn't avoid "red areas" with the Supercharger network if that's what you mean. For everyone else, yes that can be a problem.
Not true - It's all the driver. If you let off the pedal all the way in an instant, yeah, it might feel jerky. But it's easy to drive smoothly too. Or, for those who can't handle that, you can change your driver profile to turn off the regen when the pedal is released. Most Tesla drivers prefer the single-pedal experience, though.
For someone with a reasonably small driveway/sidewalk, maybe.
For me, it rates a solid "Meh". My driveway is about 170'x20' ish, and with the way our property is oriented and the proximity of the driveway to the house, the winds are constantly changing and swirling along the length of the driveway. The E-Go blower makes you adjust the chute by hand. No way that's going to work for me, it might be easier to shovel! I have a Simplicity Legacy garden tractor with a 46" snowblower that lets me adjust both height and direction of the chute from the driver's seat.
The other reason I have the Legacy is for the 60" mower deck and "turbo bagger" that makes reasonably quick work of mowing and leaf removal.
I would REALLY like to replace it with something(s) electric. I've heard that lawn tractors are about ten times as bad as cars from an emissions perspective, because there aren't any controls on small engine emissions. I believe it - The exhaust from my tractor makes my eyes water. It's also noisy as hell.
Unfortunately, nobody makes an electric tractor with a deck near the size I want.
I could live with a walk-behind snowblower if it was big and strong enough, and they're getting pretty close now. Snow Joe is getting there with their ION 8024. It has a metal auger, is two-stage, has headlights, is self-propelled, has electric directional chute control, etc... But where it fails is that it's still only 24", while some of the gas-powered walk-behinds are over 30", and has no chute height control from behind (I'm not sure any of the gas ones have this either, but my attachment does). I expect that within another year or two there'll be something I'm happy with.
But on the mowing side of things, it's not looking as good. I could get a zero turn from Mean Green, but they're pricy and I'm worried about support. They also don't have any options for collecting clippings/leaves. Unfortunately, nobody else to my knowledge has a deck over 42" yet. It seems that every year there's another entrant with a slightly larger one, but they've got a ways to go.
It's quite unfortunate that electric isn't more common. On my tractor, even though I have shaft-drive attachments, there are still belts, chains, and pulleys, hydraulics, transmission, etc that could all be replaced with direct-drive electric motors. GE's 1970s ElecTrak tractors are a great example of how it should be done, but they haven't been produced in a long time and support is pretty much nil, so it's only enthusiasts that keep them going. I wish Simplicity, John Deere, or somebody would make a line of electric tractors and attachments like the ElecTrak only with modern motors, batteries, and materials. I bet they'd do pretty well.
It was small. Property was 0.75 acre, but only the front yard had grass, and there are a couple of "island" with trees and shrubbery in that. The side and back are wooded.
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I had one too, spent more time dorking around with the cord than cutting the grass.
deonb
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Not sure what you're comparing against, but for reference, the EGO outperforms my previous Toro/Briggs & Stratton 163cc mower (about 5 HP I think) on tall grass/weeds.
David7700
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Briggs & Stratton. Well maybe I'll have to try it out. Ahem . . I mean, my kids will have to try it out. I do not cut the grass while capable teenagers live at my abode!
David7700
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Here's what we are dealing with. We cut the front and back and across the road in the median, because, well . . . County.
chartbundle
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I had a corded electric Black & Decker Lawnmower in about 2005. Worked fine, just always cut in the proper path to not run over the cord. But that house had fairly normal rectangular lawns.
Now I have a gas mower because getting to the street to mow the ditches with a cord would be a pain. The back yard I'm just letting the grass go to seed this year and hitting it with the string trimmer for the highest spots. I'm glad my HOA doesn't really care about crimes against grass height.
Now I have a gas mower because getting to the street to mow the ditches with a cord would be a pain. The back yard I'm just letting the grass go to seed this year and hitting it with the string trimmer for the highest spots. I'm glad my HOA doesn't really care about crimes against grass height.
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hmmm, I wonder how big of a battery it will take to mow three farms and two miles of roadside ditch twice a week during the season?
Matthew
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A 12V Interstate should get that mower started.
It's especially baffling for anything that rolls because the weight aspect of providing sufficiently battery power to finish the job is less of an issue. On handheld stuff, okay, I get it. It's something that gets schlepped around. But not on a lawnmower or snowblower. They could put humongous batteries on it and make it self-propelled if they wanted to.
Maybe they just want to use the same batteries for everything.
Rich
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I think a lot of the FUD that gets spread about electric cars gets mentally applied to anything electric.
I've bought into the B&D 20V Max tools pretty extensively, so I have 5 batteries for the system now. The tools are great, and I can pick the right size battery for the job too (I have 2 1.5Ah, 2 2.0Ah, and a 4.0Ah). I don't have to worry about maintenance, they're quieter than the gas stuff, etc...
I think some people just think they won't last long enough to get the job done ("range" anxiety), that they'll have to replace the batteries due to degradation, or that somehow they'll have less power.
Maybe some people do. Others just have a lot of lawn to mow or snow to move and would prefer a machine with humongous batteries to one that has to be charged in the middle of a job. It's a similar problem to range in a car, but an easier one to solve because the whole machine is devoted to the task at hand. You don't have to worry about passengers, climate control, styling, and so forth. If I were designing one, it would be practically all battery.
On a related note (and more apropos, sort of, to the topic), both the milk truck and the truck that did the diaper swaps in my neighborhood in Brooklyn when I was a kid were electric. I asked my father about it a week or so ago just to make sure my memory was accurate, and he confirmed it. I also found out that the trucks dated back to WWII, when fuel rationing was in effect. Lots of businesses switched over to electric vehicles for local routes and kept using those trucks until the wheels fell off.
By way of clarification for the younger members: Back in olden times, when buffalo roamed freely through the streets of Olde Brooklyn and not even Pong had been invented, people wrapped their babies' butts in cloth diapers. A truck came by a couple of times a week to collect the dirty diapers and swap them out for clean ones.
The diaper services were very popular, even in less-then-wealthy neighborhoods like my own. The cost was offset by not having to buy diapers (they were owned by the diaper service and leased, as it were, to parents), not having to buy new diapers as the baby grew (you just told the driver you needed bigger ones), and not having to feed the machines at the coin-op laundromats. The trucks that hauled those diapers were electric.
Milk was also delivered and the empty bottles swapped out. Every customer household had an insulated milk box made of galvanized steel outside the front door. The customer would put the empties in the box, and the milkman would replace them with full bottles. If the customer wanted something more or different from what the empties represented (butter, cottage cheese, orange juice, etc.), they'd leave a note in the box. The truck that hauled those milk and dairy products was electric.
The forklifts I operated as a kid also were electric. When I was 9 years old I got an after-school job in the shipping department of a sweatshop two doors away from where I lived. The manager, Charlie, was a very generous guy and paid me $2.00 / hour in cash, which was well above the minimum wage at the time, out of his pocket. I had to go through the tickets, pick the coats (which often involved using the forklift), box and label them, and load the boxes onto the truck for shipment (again using the forklift). The last thing I did every evening was plug the forklift in so it could charge.
They also had an electric forklift at Times Square Stores on 62nd Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, where I started my first legal job when I was 14. That was also when I became a union member, largely because I knew how to operate a forklift. Part-timers in general weren't required to join the union, but only union members could operate the forklift. Whether or not it was legal for 14-year-olds to operate forklifts, I don't know. I do know that TSS was actually pretty good about adhering to child-labor restrictions (they never let me work outside the allowable hours, for example), so it probably was.
The forklift we had at my high school was also electric, as were the ones we used when I was in the service. We also had a little electric vehicle that we used to scoot around the base when we were ashore. It was more of a golf cart than a car, but it did the job.
My dad also had two electric forklifts at his shop, as well as an electric pallet jack sort of thing. In fact, the first forklift I remember using that wasn't electric was when I was working at JFK.
So really, electric vehicles aren't a new idea at all. They've been around for a very long time. They just sort of took a hiatus in development some time around the late sixties or early seventies. It's kind of odd when you think about it because they were doing some seriously heavy work before then. If development hadn't basically stopped for all those years, I suspect we'd all be driving them now.
Rich
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Velocity173
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Get a Volt!
flyingcheesehead
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Absolutely! I figured that went without saying. If I wanted to mow my lawn slower (due to a smaller deck) and stop in the middle to charge, I'd already have an electric mower.
I do know a guy who took an old lawn tractor that needed a new engine, ripped the busted engine out, replaced it with a motor from a scrapped forklift and about a half-dozen plain old lead-acid batteries, and uses it regularly. It is missing out on many of the potential advantages of a purpose-designed electric tractor, but it works.
Interesting! I'd heard plenty about the popularity of electric cars a hundred years ago, but didn't realize there were newer trucks. Cool.
Electric forklifts are still common. There are systems to swap out the whole battery at the end of a shift so they can be run 24/7 now too, or they can be plugged in at night for the non-24-hour locations. There's still also a lot of propane ones, though, and I think the propane ones outnumber the electric ones... But I can't be sure of that, they're both common.
I think you may have just blown some minds.
This man talks sense. I suspect that he's an engineer or scientist of some sort. It's obvious that he's a pragmatist rather than an ideologue.
Rich
flyingcheesehead
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That's what I have! And it's an OK compromise vehicle, and a GREAT first step into EVs. And it does give most people 90% of the advantages of an EV for less money than a Tesla.
Unfortunately, and ironically, it no longer meets my needs because it doesn't have enough range.
My daily commute (round trip) is 65 miles to my office downtown or 75 miles to the airport on the days I fly. We're moving into a facility at the airport that will have car charging for me on the days I'm not flying, and in another year or so I'll be able to charge on the days I am flying, so that will certainly help... But in the dead of winter, or on my downtown days, I'll still be burning gas every day.I like how they do their calculations in the video, but they make a couple of assumptions: One is that everyone is production-constrained when it comes to batteries. That's not true - Nobody can't get the batteries they need to build their EVs at this point, and even if we do become production-constrained overall, Tesla makes their own batteries and still isn't production-constrained.
It would have made a little more sense to look at a distribution of yearly earnings in the US and see how much car people can afford, and look at it from that angle instead. The Volt still compares favorably there. I got mine for under $10K, so it's quite economical.
Amazingly enough, the Teslas are holding their value so well that I may well end up with a brand new one when I do make the leap. I'm seeing used prices for cars that are a couple years old with 30K± miles on them for within 5% of new prices. That value retention is unheard of in the automotive industry!
Katamarino
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I don't know why anyone would buy a gas car. You have to take them to a station to refuel, and they cost money on maintenance and replacing parts. It's idiotic.
I'll stick with my horse. I can refuel it on grass anywhere, and the maintenance costs are negligible. None of this stupid new technology for me. It'll never catch on.
I'll stick with my horse. I can refuel it on grass anywhere, and the maintenance costs are negligible. None of this stupid new technology for me. It'll never catch on.
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I doubt your maintenance figures. I once had a “things you should own once in your life” conversation that went like this:
“You should own a convertible. You should own a horse. You should own an airplane. You know horses are EXPENSIVE.” emphasis the speaker’s...
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We had the galvanized milk box on our stoop, but the milk trucks were Divcos.
I recall the milk trucks going obsolete in the early to mid-70's?
FastEddieB
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We test drove a Volt and liked it a lot. But then looked at and tested our Clarity and it was the winner in a lot of areas. We have 23,000 trouble-free miles on ours in just under a year, including many road trips where it yields 42 mpg as a hybrid when you can’t conveniently plug in.
Aggravatingly, Honda is shipping all new Clarity PHEV’s to California. They allegedly can be ordered from dealers nationwide, but word has it many dealers are reluctant to do so. Hope that changes for 2020 - it’s a great transition car as EV’s and their related infrastructure continue to improve.
We had the galvanized milk box on our stoop, but the milk trucks were Divcos.
I recall the milk trucks going obsolete in the early to mid-70's?
Some time around then. I think it coincided with more families owning two cars. In addition to milk, many other products were either delivered or sold door-to-door back then. Few families in Brooklyn owned two cars (and many women didn't even have drivers' licenses) back then, so the delivery services and door-to-door salesmen were useful to and popular with stay-at-home housewives and moms. That started to change in the 70's.
Rich