"Connor T" wrote in message
...
Hi,

At the moment i have a qualcast hover mower - Quite a cheap model, with
the
most useless invention ever - plastic blades.

I'm about to move to a house with a 100ft+ lawn, so will need a bigger
device, whats recommended? I dont think I want to go petrol, but could be
swayed if the reason was good...

Rgds,
Dan



I was recently faced with a similar situation. For many years I've used an
electric Flymo. No major problems other than having to avoid the cable.

I once had a petrol powered rotovator and had considerable problems starting
it at times. Now, I suspect that was partly because I'm not mechanically
gifted and partly because it was 2nd hand. I also suspect things have
moved on in 15 years.

However, that made me rather wary of buying a petrol mower so I bought one
of these: http://www.enviromower.co.uk/. I've only had it a couple of
weeks but so far I'm quite impressed. I also bought one of the strimmer
attachment things and that's been quite useful (I didn't have a strimmer).
The battery life seems to be about an hour whatever I use it for. It can
be used with metal or plastic cutting equipment. So far I've only used the
metal blade which has performed effectively (I'm not a "stripes" person, I
just want to keep the grass under control and neat).

However, it's taught me something else. With the Flymo I had to adopt
certain "strategies" to avoid running over the cable. With this (and by
definition petrol) there is no cable. You can go round and round, if you
want, in ever decreasing circles. Not having to manhandle the mower down
to an edge, turn it round and then up to the next edge, turn, back etc.
And, apart from my mechanical malaise that was one of the other reasons why
I turned against petrol; I failed to understand the freedom from cable bit
and assumed my mowing pattern would be the same and that trying to turn
around a heavy petrol mower was going to be a pain. I'm quite happy with
the decision I made but at least one of my reasons for not buying petrol
turned out to be a non reason.

One last thing. When looking at petrol mowers, I was advised more than
once to buy one with a roller. Not because of stripes but the arguement
went that when cutting along a border it provides more stability. A 4
wheel mowever (which the enviromower is) will tend to drop into the flower
bed; the roller helps you to keep it on an even keel. That's probably
true, but, with the lighter (but not light) enviromower, I don't find it an
issue.