Lawnmowers 101: The Best and the cheapest lawnmowers

Selecting a quality lawnmower can be confusing for the average person. There are many decisions to make, such as: price-range, riding mower or push mower, gasoline-powered or electric lawnmowers, additional lawnmower features, durability, performance,and what are the best brands.

The first decision you should make is your price-range. Cheap lawnmowers can range from around $50, while the best lawnmowers (generally riding mowers with all the features) can be several thousands of dollars.

It is a good idea to check out your local hardware stores (Lowes, Home Depot, Ace, etc...) and compare them to online prices. Sometimes the brick and mortar stores will be offering a special discount and sometimes the online sites will be offering a discount. You can also compare brands against eachoter this way. Honda may be having a sale at Lowes, but is $30 more at Home Depot, and then you come to find out (by doing your homework, mind you...) that Home Depot has an online sale that is $25 less than the price offered at Lowes. Do your homework and compare online prices to the price at the store. With a little checking around you can save yourself a lot of money.

Whether or not you should buy a riding mower or a push mower will largely depend on the size of your lot as well as the time and effort you are willing to put into your lawncare. As a general rule of thumb you will probably want to buy a riding mower if you have more than an acre of grass than needs to be cut. The amount of time it takes to cut an acre of grass with a push mower is very long, and it can be tiring. Some people will purchase a lawnmower for parcels of under and acre, but it is pretty expensive considering the increased cost of purchasing a riding mower. However, if cost is not an issue and you want to save time and effort cutting grass on your half acre lot, you are free to do so.

As I mentioned earlier, riding mowers are great because they take a lot of the time and effort out of your yard care. There downfall, however, is the price. Another downfall is the cost to maintain your riding mower. It is quite a bit more to have the mechanical worked on and the blades sharpened. They can also be a little harder to maneuver in tight areas (unless you happen to purchase a zero turn riding mower, but the cost of these are especially hig... usually only used by professional lawncare companies and landscape architects). Riding lawnmowers are able to save their owners time because they have a larger mowing deck, which requires less passes over the lawn. An average riding mower will have somewhere around a 42 inch deck, whereas a push lawn mower (also known as a walk behind mower) will generlly have a 21 inch deck. So, simple math tells us that if you can keep up the same speed as a riding mower (which most people can't... they are frighteningly fast nowadays), you would still take twice as long to mow the same area. Push mowers, however, are better at detailed grass-cutting. If you have a lot with lots of landscape architecture (rocks, trees, streams, even garden gnomes), you will have much better precision with your standard push mower.