New Honda Cordless Electric Mowers

[Tiger Small Engine]

Thanks for your feedback. I too wish that Honda could have continued to make gas engine mowers alongside new battery-powered offerings so customers who prefer one platform over the other could have a choice.

But to put the battery cost issue into perspective, I think you can squeeze 10 years out of a pack with quality cells by simply following good protocols for heat management and state of charge. Where I live in the deep south along the gulf coast, we mow 40 times per year. If I depreciate a $400 pack down to zero over 400 mowings, the pack itself costs me about $1 per mow. The recharge cost is pennies per mow. I only use ethanol-free fuel in my Honda gas mower, which costs close to $5 per gallon and uses maybe 0.2 gallons per mow. So the fuel cost per mow of my gas Honda is similar to the pack depreciation cost per mow of my battery Honda. Even if pack depreciation were 2X the fuel cost of my gas mower, we're still talking about trivially small dollar amounts per year, in exchange for less noise (no hearing protection needed), no fumes to inhale and lower vibration for my tennis elbow to deal with. That's not a bad tradeoff for a few dollars per year.

And BTW, I bought my battery Honda for $400 ($499 sale price, minus another $100 from Northern Tool). That included the mower, charger and battery. At that package price, the battery was basically free. $400 is less than I paid for my HRN216 gas Honda six years ago. It's good to buy these things on end-of-season sales.

That is how manufacturers usually do it with batteries. The equipment plus the batteries is less costly than the battery alone. Getting 10 years out of a battery is on the long side. Not uncommon for batteries to fail at 3-5 years. Again, when motors fail, electrical issues happen, few shops will work on battery equipment. Then because of the amount of plastic once the equipment is beyond repair, it all ends up in a landfill.
I will be an internal combustion engine guy until I die. I do like my battery hand tools though.

 

[fbirch]

There’s no reason for a battery pack to fail in three years, other than users not following manufacturer guidelines. Lots of people don’t, so that’s why premature failures happen and the false perception that a pack simply can’t last any longer than five years. As I posted upthread, I ran the engineering department of a company that designs, manufactures and sells thousands of battery packs per year to industrial consumers. The oldest consumer packs I own for outdoor lawn equipment have just completed their 6th year of service and still provide 85-90% of their initial capacity. I fully expect to get 10 years from them, and it isn’t a lucky result or because I know some secret technique. Everybody can get similar longevity from any pack made with quality cells by following the same simple protocols for heat and state-of-charge management.

Any pack of reasonable quality will also protect against any possible motor fault during use or recharge. Short circuit protection, over current protection, thermal overload protection, over discharge protection, over voltage protection are all fault conditions that any reasonably good quality pack will protect itself against. The circuitry that provides such protection costs all of about $3 to add to the packs my engineering team designed for many years. So no, a motor fault will not damage a battery pack for any brand except the absolute bottom-basement manufacturers. And even if you only get six or seven years from your $400 pack that you use 40 times per year, the economics of pack replacement are still very respectable.

And as for motor failures, a brushless DC motor has a much higher MTBF than a small residential gas engine, even a good one like a Honda. The electric motor MTBF is so high that almost everything else on any mower (gas or electric) will wear out long before the electric motor does.

Lastly, these battery powered Hondas are not plastic heaps that no one can/will work on. That may be a fair assessment for some battery mowers, but not the brand or model being discussed in this thread. Did you miss my post upthread where I detailed that almost all the content of this steel deck model shares identical part numbers with the gas model Honda? Same metal transmission, same wheel/axle assembly, same drive system, same blade holder, very similar same deck assembly, same drive control system, etc. That means any failure on the mower – apart from an unlikely failure of its high-MTBF electric motor – can make use of the same replacement parts, be purchased through an extensive network of parts retailers, be serviced using the same tools and procedures that you’d use for the gas model, etc. This is basically a highly reliable Honda gas mower that has been retrofitted with an electric motor with higher MTBF than the gas engine.