Well, the $25 lawnmower my wife scored at a yard sale late last year died a week ago. It just quit in the middle of the yard, leaving me with a yard with a mohawk, since I’d already cut the front and most of the sides.
I bit the bullet and bought a new Toro.Why a Toro? I bought a $300 Toro because I can’t afford another $100 no-name special. My first mower was a Mastercut that had been given to me because it mostly worked but the people who gave it to me had problems with it, and the second was a Yard Machines (MTD) mower that died after its first mowing season and only worked 3-4 times after I worked on it. Buy three of those throwaway mowers and you’ve paid for a Toro.
Consumer Reports said the Toro 20171 is the best sub-$300 mower on the market. I saw another news story where the reporter asked a lawnmower repair shop what brands break the least, and he said Toro and Honda. And I noticed that almost all of my neighbors have Toro mowers. More importantly, most of them have old Toro mowers.
So it’s what I got. I hated paying $300, which is over half the principle on my monthly house payment, but I justified it this way: The mower has a three-year warranty, so it ought to last at least that long. Probably a lot longer. If the mower starts on the first or second pull instead of the 35th, it saves me a lot of time. The mower has a 6.5 horsepower engine, a 22-inch blade, and is self-propelled, and mulching, so I was able to cut the lawn in an hour with it. Normally cutting the whole lawn used to take me closer to two hours, counting wasted time emptying the bag, trying 35 times to start the stupid mower, and making more passes due to the 21-inch blade.
I figure if I have an extra hour a week that I’m not wasting on yard work, I can spend a little bit of that time doing things that make me money, and hopefully pay for the mower.
The other thing I noticed is that the mower seems to use less gas than the cheap Yard Machines mower I’d been using–even though it has a bigger motor in it and is self-propelled. I was burning a half gallon of gas mowing the yard with the other mower. I filled the Toro once and still had gas left when I finished. I guess that’ll save me another five minutes since I won’t have to refuel in the middle of the job. And with gas at $3 a gallon, maybe, just maybe the mower will pay for itself in fuel savings over its lifespan.
Initially I felt bad about spending the money, but I think in the long run, in this case I probably needed to spend money in order to save some money.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.