It could be illegal to sell gas lawn equipment in metro Denver starting in 2025
It could be illegal to sell gas lawn equipment in metro Denver starting in 2025
To reduce ozone pollution in the region, air regulators have proposed rules to accelerate the shift to electric leaf blowers and lawnmowers.
It's a nice idea but I'm curious what they expect commercial landscapers to do. I have a smaller yard and an electric mower: I can do my yard at best 1 and a half times on a charge, it's a 3 hour charge time, and now the battery infrastructure is discontinued so I can't even get a backup battery unless I go to ebay and pay twice what I did originally.
Yeah... I get the initiative and don't hate the idea. The problem is technology isn't there yet. At least not at reliable and cheap enough levels.
It’s a valid question - there is a guy near me who does all electric lawn care - he’s got a pickup with a bunch of solar panels in the back but I can’t imagine he’s getting a whole lot of charging between jobs, even parked in full sun on a pleasant day.
It just says it will be illegal to sell. They could still leave the city to get a new mower.
Further regulations would limit the use of the equipment during the summer ozone season
Eventually you won't be able to use them either.
The solution is to hot swap batteries
I doubt lawn guys average more than 1 lawn every half an hour. Assuming an 8 hour work day, that’s 16 batteries. Yes it sounds like a lot but that’s absolutely an amount you can carry around in a truck and ~$3k in batteries per year isn’t exorbitant when it comes to business expenses.
Realistically we won’t see places going out of business from this, but you can expect the cost of lawn care to go up a few bucks per service.
Maybe emissions standards for commercial lawn equipment? If there are existing standards they're probably pretty low.
Probably not practical for very small engines (especially those using premix), but a lot of commercial landscaping mowers are pretty big and expensive now, so maybe there's some room to get some economical emissions controls on them to clean up their exhaust without impacting businesses too much.
You buy them out of state or whatever? Lol
Or you know buy extra batteries, or plug them in at a customers place etc..
Can't speak for anyone else but I love my electric mower, weed eater and leaf blower.
I don't live anywhere near Denver but when I'm biking through residential and some guy is doing electric yardwork and it smells like fresh plants with no smog 😙🤌
My regular work commute I wear 3m p100/2097's because of quad wheel pickup trucks with nothing in them, every block having construction, and if nothing else is smogging me it's forest fire smoke, so realistically electric lawn care probably won't make much of a difference apart from make landscaping business owners miserable.
running a gas powered leaf blower for an hour, for example, is equivalent to driving over a thousand miles in a car. certainly air pollution has many sources but it's true that lawn equipment is a significant contributor
I hope it’s approved. I wonder if the ozone alerts do anything lol
Oof, I tried and purchased one of the highest rated and expensive electric mower on the market. It needed to be charged halfway through a 40x25 yard and the grass looked like shit compared to my gas Honda.