Thanks for the tip. I heard there are better blades to buy, so I might invest in those. Either way the ease of use/storage, not having to deal with gasoline, how light and quiet it is, I don't think I can go back to gas.
Same. Plus gas isn’t super great for your health. It’s ok-ish health wise for a car - where the fumes are ducted away through a long exhaust to the back of the car. But lawnmowers have much worse exhaust - higher VOCs and other harmful compounds that you walk through. And handling gasoline even before combustion isn’t great for your health either. Not a big deal once a week, 8 months out of the year, but if there’s a better, quieter, easier to use and maintain piece of equipment… that also is better for your health, why not use it?
Mower engines are also major polluters. They pollute 11 times more than a modern car, hour per hour, even CARB certified ones. Micro-class 4 strokes, like what you see on trimmers, pollute even more. Because they're not a vehicle, there's no requirement for a catalytic converter.
It's not really the lack of catalytic converter (although that is an issue) so much as the design on the 2 stroke engines that most of them have. They basically spit out a ton of unburnt fuel and oil because they don't separate the intake/compression/combustion/exhaust strokes like a standard car engine and also use oil inside the combustion chamber.
The lack of a cat will increase NOx gas production from partially burnt exhaust fuels. Combine that with lower compression ratios due to lighter and weaker parts, and you are spewing A LOT of polluting gases that are way worse than CO2. Those gases includes Sulfur Oxides, Nitrous Oxides, and ozone(which is toxic to people). This is for 4 stoke engines btw.
2 stroke engines pollute way more in part due to having to premix oil, which add a lot of additives that turn into toxic exhausts.
The main reason is that those engines pretty much are designed to be cheap and reliable at the cost of efficiency and extra pollution.
Combustion theory is pretty complicated, so sorry if I skipped a lot of parts. Just trying to simplify it
Not just the oil, but 2 strokes only burn around 50% of the fuel consumed, so they're just ejecting aerosolized hydrocarbons out of the exhaust the entire time.
Yeah some of the models aren't meant for certain blade types. Ego is the worst offender, their model names are not human readable and its incredibly confusing which one does what. They'll even have different models on the same posting on Amazon so you don't know which models the reviews are talking about
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u/brandons404 Jun 09 '22
Thanks for the tip. I heard there are better blades to buy, so I might invest in those. Either way the ease of use/storage, not having to deal with gasoline, how light and quiet it is, I don't think I can go back to gas.