In article , NY wrote:
"Theo" wrote in message
...
PeterC wrote:
Chap next door bought a Mac Allister from B&Q, corded mains, about £70
3 years ago. Much to my annoyance it cut his fair-sized lawn very
well. The grass was about 6" long for the first cut and I though that
there was no chance - no problem, more like.

I've been pretty impressed by the corded MacAllister that we've
inherited from a landlord who only bought the cheapest everything.

The main issue was the cutting width - on a big lawn, petrol mowers go
up to about 55cm while the electric was 35cm. It still handled
'meadow' quality grass, you just had to overlap cuts.

If I were a contract gardener without ready access to power and the
need to get the job done rapidly I'd still want a petrol (or a
ride-on).

Petrol will still prevail for cutting larger areas of grass where battery
capacity is nowhere near enough to cut the whole lot in one day without
a long recharge, and where you can't trail a very long mains cable that
is probably 100 metres or more.

Our garden is about an acre, though some of that is pond, flower beds,
greenhouse area etc. But it would need a battery the size of a car (maybe
I exaggerate!) to cut the whole area of grass in one charge, and
trailing a long mains cable would be horrendous.

I cut it with a self-propelled walk-behind mower and can do the whole lot
in about 2 1/2 hours. The previous people had a ride-on mower and a
self-propelled walk-behind mower for the bits that the ride-on couldn't
get to, but they wanted to sell them to us for an extortionate amount,
so we went for the walk-behind as a stop-gap while we decide whether to
get a robotic mower.

We've 2/3 acre and for the best part of 40 years, I used a self propelled
petrol beast which took the best part of 3 hours. Then I bought a sit on -
main job done in under an hour with another 20 minutes for the edges.

--
from KT24 in Surrey, England
"I'd rather die of exhaustion than die of boredom" Thomas Carlyle