Propane Powered Mowers Cut Grass, Emissions, and Prices
I have a guilty concscience. You see, even though I aspire for literary greatness one day (hey, we all need dreams) most of my jobs have involved menial, manual labor. Right now, that is landscaping in a fancy-pants Connecticut town where most of the people have more money than free time.
But landscaping is a dirty, dirty business. My boss will sometimes go through a 100 gallons of gas in a week between his trucks, mowers, blowers, and trimmers. What’s more, although the EPA is imposing new regulations for small gasoline engines, they don’t take effect until 2012 (although California has already enacted its own standards). Engines under 50 horsepower can contribute significant smog emissions in some states because most of these mowers don’t even have basic catalytic converters, and run on mixed gas-oil fuel.
But there is an even better solution, one that for some landscaping companies seems only…natural. Natural gas, to be exact.
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Propane-powered vehicles are nothing new. Many warehouses use propane forklifts because they don’t emit smelly exhaust in an enclosed space, and there are conversion kits for automobiles to run on propane. But perhaps most promising is the use of propane on lawn service equipment. Spilled gas is a part of the job when you are filling up equipment 10-12 times a day, and gas-powered trimmers are loud and smelly and can eat through a 16oz tank of gas in an hour or less. A 60-inch mower can mow maybe 15 large lawns on a 5 gallon tank, and then you need to go to the nearest gas station to fill up if you don’t want to be carrying around gallons and gallons of extra fuel. The EPA estimates that gas mowers account for 5% of ALL U.S. air pollution. One mower makes enough pollution for 43 new cars driven 12,000 miles in a year!
Propane is in every way a better choice for landscapers. Not only is it cleaner burning, but it is cheaper and easier to use as well. Propane costs during the summer cutting season (at least here in New England the grass don’t grow in the snow) are usually between 30-50 percent cheaper than petrol. Companies like Lehr have developed propane-powered trimmers that use screw-in propane tanks you might use on a small camping stove. You know, those little green cans that cost $5 for a two pack? Those two canisters are good for around 4 hours of trimming, whereas a gas-trimmer would need to be refilled at least four times. The savings on trimmers might be negligible, but on mowers it can really add up.
Companies like Exmark and Onyx offer propane mowers right from the factory, and Kawasaki offers a propane conversion kit as well. 15 gallons of propane strapped to a mower deck can offer around 13-14 hours of continuous operation, whereas a gas mower would need 10 gallons of gas for this same. The price savings can still be up to 20% or so over gas, depending on the prices of fuel. But the savings on the environment are worth so much more, and companies like Clean Scapes in Austin, Texas, have already made the conversions on all their equipment.
Hank Hill would be proud.
Dixie Chopper (not the brands you cite) built the first propane-powered mowers with a 990cc engine designed to run on propane — not a conversion kit. Dixie has been building propane-powered mowers since 2005 and even undertook a cross-country adventure, driving a propane-powered mower from Indiana to Sacramento, Calif., in April-May 2007 (Clean Cut Across America), in a attempt to generate publicity on the cost savings and environmental savings that could be had with a propane-powered mower. Suggest you check out dixiechopper.com or cleancutacrossamerica.com for information.
As publisher of a trade magazine whose readers are professional landscape contractors. Your writer needs to get his facts right. Although propane is growing in the market, there are other engines that are more efficient and better suited for lawn mowers. As a writer, or a wanna be writer, he needs to do more research before he puts out an article. Your position as a publisher is to make sure what you publish is correct. Some of his statements are misleading, more importantly he does not show the other side oo propand.
If gas stations starting allowing self serve propane, which would hook onto a standard propane tank, meaning you could fill and reuse tanks, cutting costs even further. It would then be worth it. Those little green tanks may be cheap now, but imagine reusing them just like a gas tank.
Goldstein, what are the facts and what is misleading about it? As a publisher shouldn’t you know how to back up your statements?
I’m not trying to be a dick, but I would like to know what the alternatives are. I’ve been on your site and it’s jumbled mess.
Please tell me, us, which engines are more efficient and better suited (I do not doubt there are better alternatives, but you don’t tell us what they are, are you trying to keep it a secret. Don’t want to share your green knowledge? Stop hording it.)
Which statements are misleading? I need to know this as well since I may be making a purchase soon.
And what is the other side to propane?
And before you take yourself too seriously, this is just a blog. At the end of the day everyone, including most uptight publishers of trade magazines, should not hold blogs to the same standard as traditionally published material.
[...] tweetmeme_url=”http://gas2.org/2009/08/18/cruising-the-country-in-a-propane-f150-part-1/”;A few weeks ago I met Todd Mouw with Roush Manufacturing (many of you may know the company from its work in motorsports) who was displaying a Ford F250 converted to run on propane. I talked him into letting me take it for a spin through Ft. Worth, Texas. From there, I convinced him to let me take a liquid propane injection (LPJ) F150, model year 2007, across the country (I’m technically on vacation). I know that propane is not a new technology -it’s been used as a fuel since the 1930s- but in America, it is rarely used in vehicles outside of fleets, but is gaining momentum and can now be used in applications such as lawn mowers. [...]