Do You Throttle All The Way Down Before Turning Off The Engine?

Johnbt said:

That's what my Toro/Scag dealer says, too.

What Deere seems to be doing is buying the engines and assuming responsibility for ALL the warranty work. They get a big price break on the purchase price for providing the warranty on the engines because Kawa doesn't have to spend a penny on repairs in the future.

Like I said, this is my first Deere anything, so I'm learning the system.

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Interesting, sounds logical about Deere buying the engines & covering the warranty. That would seem to give them a much better price.

Zeroturner said:

Or, when you quit mowing, do you shut down the engine at full throttle and not concern yourself about it?

My old tractor style 46" deck, Craftsmen, powered by a 24 Hp, B & S Intek engine's manual never mentioned having to do this. So, I always left it going full blast when I killed the engine. I sold it to my next door neighbor with 350 hours on it and he is now running it with over 500 hours on it and he doesn't worry about shutting it down at idle.

My Toro manual says to idle all the way down, wait a minute and then turn off the engine.

What do you guys say?

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Let me ask then, Do you continue to keep you right foot on the gas peddle in you car or truck when you put it away or do you release it and thus allow the engine to go to an idle?

In my experience, at least on newer machines (15 yrs old and less) the manufacturer of the engine or the equipment will give guidance on this. There are "logical" reasons to do one thing vs the other, but I am of the opinion that the manufacturer's recommendation is the way to go since they are the ones who have (for the most part) designed, engineered, tested and warrantied the engine.

Now, I personally like to run my engines dry by using the fuel shut off. On the push mowers they are running at full rpm until they die out. On my v-twins I would shut the fuel off and run at idle until it died out. Now I just shut it down at half throttle (as recommended by the engine manufacturer) and turn off the fuel supply. I also run non-ethanol fuel 100% of the time so I am not as concerned about the fuel sitting in the carb/bowl in-between uses. I do ALWAYS run all of my equipment dry at the end of the season.

Not to go off on a tangent, but I have also seen where people have installed a small pep-cock at the bottom of their carb bowl to run out any fuel after they had shut their equipment down.

I guess you have to think about what happens inside of the combustion chamber when the engine suddenly loses spark but has been fed the maximum amount of fuel. I wouldn't know if this stops the engine in an enriched or lean condition that would make for later starts easier/harder or if it would cause smoking at startup.

Toro manual procedure is to allow the muffler to cool somewhat to prevent after bang. Even with a fuel solenoid, there is still fuel in the emulsion tube of the carburetor that can be drawn into a hot muffler and igniting. Bottom line, shutting the engine off at high or low idle will not harm the engine.