Happy endings!

[chezmax]

So, the previous story about the lawnmower has a happy ending.

On Monday, the charger arrived in the mail. It was the correct one! It had lights when we plugged it in! Finally!

So we plug it into the lawnmower, and a minute later, the charger says 'Fully charged'. WTF?

It seems mostly the batteries were so discharged the charger was confused (techie bit: we got the multimeter, the 24V batteries were down to 12V...). After some playing with it, eventually we just left the charger in, and overnight, the battery climbed up to 26V.

So, on Tuesday, we cut the lawn! FINALLY! Unfortunately, the battery was still in bad condition, so we managed to do about half the lawn before the motor started sounding a little tired. So we threw it on the charger again, over night, and Wednesday night, we cut the rest of the lawn, and it held up like a champ.

Which is good, cause those batteries would probably have been expensive to replace.

The moral of the story: charge the batteries occasionally over the winter. And hope your charger doesn't die. :)

Our lawn actually almost looks nice now!

Comments

[kraig.livejournal.com]

What's the environmental cost of manufacturing the batteries? Not asking to be a jerk, but I've always wondered that.

[chezmax]

That is a particularly good question, which unfortunately I don't know. In the meantime it's less smelly and noisy :)

[kraig.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess you win on that at least. I never minded the smell of our gas mower, particularly since cut grass overpowered it, but to each his own... certainly the noise was never pleasant. I daresay I'd rather smell my gas mower than somebody else's car that really ought to be e-tested (or condemned), but living on Erb Street still I don't get a choice about the latter. >:

[indigofire-net.livejournal.com]

The environmental cost of batteries can be contained by using appropriate manufacturing and disposal technologies. Though I suspect it's also much less than a gas mower, the uncaptured emissions alone are a good argument.

[kraig.livejournal.com]

*Can* be. Were they? (Well, obviously we don't yet know about disposal.)

[indigofire-net.livejournal.com]

Good question, and something we need to push for everywhere: environmental accountability for all things produced. Also agreed that the entire picture needs to be looked at and not just the the initial use case.

Until that happens, I'll settle for the option that enables containing the environmental footprint.

-iF