Ryobi electric lawn mower won’t start? Try this.

Last Updated on August 12, 2023 by Dave Farquhar

It’s frustrating when your Ryobi electric lawn mower won’t start, or when your Ryobi mower stops suddenly. Especially because the selling point is that they are really easy to start and really reliable. Here’s what to do when it happens.

When your Ryobi electric mower won’t start or stops suddenly, it’s usually one of three things. It’s often the battery, the handle not being fully extended or locked, or the discharge, all of which are fairly easy to fix.

Ryobi mower stops suddenly

When your Ryobi mower stops suddenly and won’t start again, the problem is very much related to the mower not starting. It’s one of the same causes. Yes, it’s possible for the mower to start, then conditions to change and it to stop working. But the fixes are the same.

Don’t forget the battery!

Don’t overlook the most obvious solution. If your battery is flat, or overheated, that could be the problem. Here’s some advice on Ryobi batteries. If the battery is freshly charged and tests good in the charger, it’s not the battery.

But if the mower was working and stopped suddenly, and none of the other fixes outlined below works, it could be the battery is overheated. Let the battery cool down and then charge it.

The other possibility is that the mower deck is clogged and the battery doesn’t have quite enough juice to power through it. I ran into that this year. It had rained every day that week so the grass was tall. I had a few hours of dry time on Saturday and it was going to rain all day Sunday. And that wet grass under the deck was just too much for my batteries to power through once they dropped below three bars. When I thought to check under the deck, I found my problem. I pulled out the battery for safety’s sake, cleaned out the muck that had accumulated, then flipped the mower back over and replaced the battery. The mower roared to life.

Check the handle

Ryobi electric mower won't start
When your Ryobi electric mower won’t start or it stops suddenly, it’s usually either the handle or the discharge. Extend the handle and check that the discharge is connected properly.

The handle is supposed to be fully extended for the mower to run. You can lock the handle in a lower position. But the extensible handle is meant for storage, not to adjust the mower’s height. Most of the time when my Ryobi electric mower won’t start, it’s the handle. Either the handle isn’t quite fully extended, or one of the levers that holds the handle in place isn’t locked in the right position. Or both. It’s very easy to bump one of the levers when you walk past the mower in the garage.

When I unlock the handle, extend it fully, and lock it in place on both sides, it starts working again.

Just to be sure, I always lower the handle completely downward. Then I extend the handle completely, and lock it in place. This helps to avoid the crooked handle problem.

When I have trouble starting my mower, or one of my family members says they can’t get our Ryobi mower to start, this is the most frequent reason why.

I have also had our Ryobi mower stop suddenly on me because of the handle. The handle locks into position, but it can creep downward ever so slightly with use. When it creeps far enough downward, the mower stops. Unlocking and extending the handle gets it starting and working again.

Check the discharge

The other reason a Ryobi mower may refuse to start is because of the discharge. If you’ve changed between the discharge, mulching, or bagging anytime recently, make sure the deflector, mulching plug, or bag is installed completely, and completely snapped into place. There is a sensor that detects when you don’t have one of those three things properly installed, since running the mower without one of them is a safety issue.

I almost always mulch, so this usually isn’t the issue for me. And these parts are designed to be really easy to change. But if you have the bag or deflector installed and the mower gets bumped, I could see the bar coming unsnapped and making the sensor unhappy.

It takes about a minute to check, regardless.

In my experience, the problem is one of those two things most of the time. Check one, try starting. Then check the other and try again. You’ll probably be back in business.

Bad sensors

I have heard of the sensors going bad on Ryobi electric mowers. And there are already YouTube videos showing how to bypass them. I have a couple of problems with this. The first being that virtually any Ryobi electric lawn mower is probably still under warranty, so bypassing the sensors voids the warranty.

If you’re good with a soldering iron, then bypassing the sensor probably is less work than taking the mower back to the store to get it fixed. And you can make the modification in an afternoon. An authorized repair will certainly take longer than that. Maybe a week, maybe multiple weeks.

So you will have to decide if voiding the warranty on your $300 piece of lawn equipment is worth that for you. I would certainly recommend calling the store where you bought it to find out what the warranty procedure is and how long it usually takes. It’s at least worth the phone call.

Safety issues

The second problem is, you are introducing a safety issue when you make these modifications. I know people have mixed feelings on that, and some people like to defeat the safety measures on their tools, thinking this somehow is sticking it to the man. But if there is one thing I have noticed in the course of doing my day job, it’s that people are not very good at calculating risk. I have seen the same person say that 30% is really high or really low in two different situations, and I’ve seen this more than once.

Safety features reduce the number of bad things that happen. They don’t completely eliminate them, and unfortunately, there is an element of society who believe that if you don’t eliminate the bad thing from happening, it’s not worth doing anything. But if your choice is between stopping the bad thing from happening 50 times out of 100 instead of allowing it 100 times out of 100, it’s worth doing. At least you stopped 50 bad things. And usually the effectiveness is much higher than that.

I probably don’t know you, but I’d still really rather you didn’t get hurt.

Two possible workarounds

My workaround has been to have two mowers. I have the 20-inch mower that works how mowers are intended, and I have a small, cheap, 13 inch mower for backup. If one of the mowers ever gives me trouble, I can use the other one. And the 13-inch mower is small and light enough that it doesn’t take a lot of space. Granted, it’s a $175 piece of equipment, and for some people that’s a lot of money. And for other people that’s a trivial amount of money. I look at it as much cheaper than a trip to the emergency room, and also less money than I would get fined if a neighbor complained that I haven’t been mowing my lawn.

If that’s more money then you want to tie up in having a spare lawn mower, here’s another option. Maybe one of your neighbors would let you borrow their lawn mower long enough to finish the job. And then again the next time you need to mow if your Ryobi is still in the shop. Just a thought.

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