TreeHugger reviews the SunLawn LMM-40 Push Reel Mower ($140 on Amazon) and gives it a thumbs-up for normal length grass — “smooth as butter” &;mdash; but says it bogs down a bit in the long stuff. (Typical of most reel mowers.)
TreeHugger Review: SunLawn LMM-40 Push Reel Mower [TreeHugger.com]
Related • iRobot’s lawnmower patents
• Custom Lawn Choppers
• Irony, Thy Name is Amazon (Great discussion of gas-vs-electric-vs-manual in lawn tools)
I bought a reel mower after moving into a townhouse. I figured it’d be all I’d need.
I still think they’re smart in some cases, but it, too, bogged down in tall grass. (Here in Illinois, there are some weeks where our grass grows very, very fast…) It also can’t get too close to obstacles.
I ended up getting a gas mower on clearance…
Just mow every single day and hope to god you don’t get kudzu.
Reel mowers work fine as long as you mow early and often. If you forget every so often, get a safety scythe (or a real one) to trim things back down to reel-mowable height.
I went with electric, used, partly for this reason and partly because it mulches, and gathers leaves, better than a reel mower.
I had a youngish kid doing it, I’d definitely go with reel mower — much safer — but I’d also consider that enough work and time to be one of the paid chores.
$140 for a push mower?
That’s a bit steep. You should be able to find one at your local friendly hardware store for around $50. Home depot has one for $75 online.
Anyway, if you mow with a gas mower every few weeks and do something about weeds, a reel mower works fine. But if you’ve a big lawn, you’re crazy if you use one on it.
Everyone in my neighborhood has a reel mower, I was actually a little surprised when I noticed. But I guess it makes sense, because most everyone has like three small 9×6 patches of grass to mow instead of one large one.
$140 is pretty steep unless it’s extremely heavy and well made (most of the new ones aren’t). Look at garage sales or on the curb for old ones since they never wear out but people seldom maintain them correctly and they go out of adjustment and are discarded or sold for a pittance.
Having been the repairman for a community tool-loan program in a past life, I’ve seen some of the problems that people have with these: If you’re going to use a reel type mower you owe it to yourself to learn the art of keeping one adjusted – most people assume that you use them out of the box and they stay that way. Not so. There is a cutter adjustment (where the blade just touches the cutting bar) that has to be re-adjusted every so often, usually by turning bolts or screws along the underside of the cutting bar until the blades *just* touch the bar — you can tell by the ringing sound they make.
That and sharpening the blades every so often will make your reel mower an unstoppable scythe of destruction for anything in its path (except maybe kudzu).
I think the average price for these is now around $100. I bought one a month ago for my mid-sized lawn. I had to go over the lawn six times to get it all, and then go back to get the long seed sprouts and weeds by hand. It took about three hours. Then I promptly took it apart, cleaned it thoroughly, put it back in the cardboard box it came in, and returned it to the store and bought a cordless electric model. Now it takes about twenty minutes to mow my lawn.
#6 wrote: “That and sharpening the blades every so often will make your reel mower an unstoppable scythe of destruction for anything in its path (except maybe kudzu).”
For anything less than six inches high, maybe. Taller than that, and you can go over it again and again and again, it will never cut.
These are the best mowers around.
Nothing comes close to clearing the field of view around the zombie perimeter, except for brush fire.
A brush fire wastes all that wonderful biomass that can be usd to run the gasifier in the bunker.
When I bought my house, I bought a Scott Classic reel mower, after my wife told me about all the horrible emissions gas mowers produce. But after a few weeks, I threw in the towel. I was having to mow the same patch two and even three times, with swaths at 90 degrees to each other, to get the grass cut. I bought a new Toro and it’s the only way I’d cut grass now.
That said, we’re planning to replace as much of our grass as possible with perennials and veg, so I’ll be mowing less and less. I still hate the emissions, the smell, and the noise, but it’s worth it to have a tidy lawn. At least until we kill it and replace it with garden.
I have a Brill. I paid around $140 for it and I love it. It replaced a gas-powered self-propelled Toro. My lawn is hilly with lots of obstacles. I find the Brill much less work than the big Toro for anything but really high grass. I haven’t used a cheap model but probably the weight differential is important (the Brill is less than 20 pounds).
I also have a Brill. I love it! They’re so light (mine’s 16 pounds).
I do not have a garage, so indoor storage of any mowing machine is important for me. I also don’t want to deal with gas cans in the house!
Of course, the longer the grass the more difficult it is to cut with a reel mower, but if you set the blades higher it can work better.
The Brill is also nice because it only needs sharpening every 5-10 years instead of every few lawns.
Not only do you need to keep your grass fairly short to use these (just mow a little more frequently), but your lawn also has to be fairly flat. The latter killed my attempts to use a reel mower. Every rut and divot in my lawn was the end of the line for it.
There is a large difference in ease of use between the cheep reel mowers and the good ones. I got a one of the higher end German ones for $200 and it works great. Very light and easy to push. I tried my neighbors $100 one and it was much harder to push and tended to tear instead of cut the grass. Still if you live in a moist area down south where you can almost hear the grass growing, i would get a regular mower.
I live in the moist South and my reel mower works like a charm on the St. Augustine grass. I mow weekly and the only drawback to this over a strimmer (on my dainty patches of lawn) is that if I had a strimmer I could tip it sideways and do the edging too. That said, I do edging with a pair of shears, and where would I recharge the strimmer batteries in the post-apocalypse?
“— “smooth as butter” &;mdash; but”
Mmm. Gotta love that mdash.
I hate these mowers. I live in a share house where I do most of the work. I don’t have time nor the will to mow our lawn more than monthly. Last time I mowed I had to use one of these and whilst I did feel a great deal fitter and stronger after the 2 hour ordeal I was left with all the longer patches which just didn’t cut and had the shorter patches really short. Essentially 2 hours of difficult physical work left me with a lawn that looked considerably worse than beforehand.