On Jul 27, 9:08*am, Cindy Hamilton
wrote:
On Jul 26, 9:53*pm, Mat wrote:



On Mon, 26 Jul 2010 07:51:14 -0400, Dimitrios Paskoudniakis wrote:
snip

Please share with us what lot size you have. *Would you recommend this for
someone with 3 to 5 acres?

7000 sqft, of course not. I should have qualified the post. Also, we have
clean hydro electric generated power here.

Possibly your original post should have been more specific, then. *Or
possibly you should not have generalized your experience without
more thought.

Back into the troll soup...

snip

Allow me to address your points individually:

1. They are noisy, the trimmers can drive one crazy trying to sleep in
on a saturday morning

Well, we don't use a trimmer, and relatively few of my neighbors
(whose
yards are typically one or two acres) do, either. * I try to wait
until
8 on a Saturday or 9 on a Sunday before mowing. *(Mind you, I wake
up at 4:30 on weekdays and no later than 5:30 on weekends.)

I generally give it at least another hour before I make noise. I
generally mow/trim in the evenings, though. It's cooler (may not
matter in MI, but it does in AL). ;-)

2. They pollute

So does electricity generation, except in those few places
where hydro is feasible. *Even that is not completely non-polluting
if you take into account the pollution generated during the building
of
power plants.

Not to mention the fish and silting of the rivers.

3. They are +20x more expensive to operate than electric

Not everywhere. *A pity I didn't open my electric bill last night;
I might have more accurate info on electricity rates here. *I
believe it might be $0.20/kWh, but my memory isn't what it
used to be.

$.10 here, but it doesn't matter. It's a *trivial* amount of money.
The OP is trolling for excuses.

4. They never start reliably

Only if you fail to keep them properly maintained.

My 4-cycle trimmer starts quite easily. I don't do anything special
to it, at all. Just hang it up when I'm done.

5. Always out of gas

Only if you are irremediably disorganized. *It's not difficult
to keep the gas can filled.

The 4-cycle trimmer helps here. ;-) ...the primary reason I bought a
4-cycle.

The extra few minutes dealing with an ext cord are no big deal

Granted, if your lot is small enough. *We had under 4000 sqft when
I was a kid, and we had an electric mower.

For those rare occasions when I use a trimmer, I use an electric
one, although it's hardly quiet. *I'm only interested in trimming
relatively near the house.

I all around the yard (a hill in the back need whacking), edge along
the driveway and street, and blow the clippings back into yard.