When Kathleen and I moved to Newtown, Pennsylvania we got a bonus with our house: a big lawn. The backyard of our house is at least half an acre. I bought a really good lawn mower: the Toro Recycler Personal Pace Electric Start. This is the Consumer Reports Best Buy in the Self-Propelled Lawn Mower category, and considerably cheaper than the Honda HRX-series or the Toro SR4 SuperRecycler mowers that appear to be the premium products in the category.
Kathleen and I started mowing on Sunday afternoon and finished about half of the grass area. We had a few issues to work out, such as how high to set the blades. I finished the job yesterday morning. On my second attempt, I set the blade to the right level to cut high grass without stalling, and figured out how the Personal Pace mechanism works.
Personal Pace is a continuous variable speed mechanism that’s controlled by how much force you exert on the handle. The harder you push the handle down toward the deck, the faster the self-propulsion system moves. The mower can move at up to 4.8 miles per hour, which will be very helpful now that we have the lawn in a maintenance mode.
Personal Pace is a pretty intuitive design. The reason I had trouble with it initially is because I was trying to cut tall grass with the blades set too low, so no matter how I used it, the mower would stall.
Now that I’ve purchased a mower and become familiar with it, I’m turning my attention to string trimmers. Due to the size of our property and the distance from our house to the corners of the property, it’s impractical for me to choose a corded trimmer. I’m looking at the gas-powered trimmers and the one I’m probably going to buy is the Troy-Bilt Trimmer Plus TB25CS.
I’m leaning in this direction because it’s also the Consumer Reports Best Buy in its category. The Troy-Bilt Trimmer Plus is rated “excellent” or “very good” in all five tests that the publication did on 26 different gas-powered trimmers. I saw this trimmer at Loews and it has a number of accessories that I might want in the future that are available separately, including an edger and a hedge trimmer.
I don’t normally talk about lawn and garden gadgets on Operation Gadget, but these products have been a topic of major off-line discussion around here for the past week or two. If you are in the market and have similar needs, maybe you should look into the models we chose.