This Electric Mower is Great! Until it Isn't...

hi this is my all electric zero turn riding mower i bought this thing at the beginning of last year and mowed with it for the entire year and last year i loved this thing and couldn't recommend it highly enough however it's a new year i've taken this thing out of cold storage and started using it again and now my opinion of it has soured quite significantly to the point where i don't think i could recommend you buy this thing anymore shut up i'm trying to do an intro full disclosure this video is not sponsored by ryobi nor do i have any affiliation with ryobi whatsoever however this video is sponsored by all right new car oh crap now i gotta get car insurance i hate that process what what's what's this why don't you check out policy genius shopping for car insurance doesn't have to be awful oh no i've got a broker i don't need this oh a broker that you'll send an email to and then reply in three days didn't you say you hate that process well yeah but yeah why don't you try this instead policy genius is your one stop shop to find and buy insurance go to policygenius.com aging wheels okay now just go through and answer some simple straightforward questions okay and now it'll give you several estimates wow several of these prices are far lower than i expected yep policy genius has saved customers an average of one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars per year over what they were paying for home and auto insurance cool now what now they'll look for ways to save you more for instance you can bundle your home and auto insurance neat policy genius works for you not the insurance companies if they find a better rate they'll switch you over to it for free now see wasn't that easy yeah in fact now i'm gonna comparison shot my existing car insurance head to policygenius.com aging wheels to get your free home and auto insurance quotes and see how much you can save and thanks to policy genius for sponsoring this video and thanks to policy genius for saving me money and time [Music] at the beginning of last year when i picked up my ryobi mower i had three main options for electric zero turn mowers to choose from there's this model from cub cadet with a 42-inch deck an advertised ability to mow up to two acres on a single charge and at the time it costs 4 500 then there's this option from ego also with a 42-inch deck and an advertised ability to mow up to two acres although it's expandable if you buy some more batteries and at the time it costs five thousand dollars and looks like a cyborg tarantula then there were three options from ryobi the two smaller ones i didn't really care about i only cared about the big one with a 54 inch deck and an advertised ability to mow up to three and a half acres on a single charge at the time it costs five thousand dollars so given those numbers and the fact that my yard is almost exactly two acres the ryobi was the obvious choice for me now i did mention that those prices were from last year here's those prices now wow what happened now this thing's ability to mow up to three and a half acres on the charge is and i knew this before i bought it a big lie but we'll get to that later how's about a tour headlights parking brake mower deck uppy downy with stop badging go go sticks storage cup holders to fill your drinks with grass clippings more storage controls key on auxiliary mower start stop headlights these two buttons are low speed drive and low speed cut there's a two speed setting for the drive sticks and a two speed setting for the mower blades battery indicator and if you want a usb charging port all the batteries reside here underneath the seat and this is the charging port in case you're wondering the seat does adjust fourth and back now on every other mower i've ever been on i've had to have the seat adjusted all the way in its furthest back position but on this one its furthest back position is too far back this is the first mower i've had to adjust it forward slightly quite a range of motion electric mowers are substantially more convenient than gas-powered mowers i don't have to go get gas in the jerry can i don't have to change the oil ever because there isn't any i don't have to change transmission or hydrostatic fluid i don't have to do any of that sort of maintenance and there's no belts all i have to do is when i'm done mowing plug this thing into the wall to charge and the next time i need to mow it will be ready for me i don't have to mess around with fuel stabilizer for winter storage i don't have to mess with the choke when i'm ready to use this thing i just turn it on and it's ready to go and obviously it's a lot quieter than a gas powered mower even with the blades activated it's a heck of a lot quieter obviously there's still some wind noise but it's a heck of a lot quieter than a gas powered mower by a large margin i don't have to wear any hearing protection whatsoever but aside from the big obvious difference this thing is basically a standard zero turn mower and it mows just like you would expect a zero turn mower to mow [Music] they have modified the drive mechanism ever so slightly if i pull all the way forward on both sticks both wheels spin up to full speed but if i pull back on this wheel stick this wheel also slows down i know what to call it maybe some sort of anti-slip control all it's doing is preventing you from spinning one wheel up at full speed while the other one stopped and digging a big rut in your ground it's a small difference but it's there and probably impossible to see on camera the deck i was impressed to find out this is of the fabricated variety with the welded on strengthening rib around the edge and everything it's worth noting the smaller two ryobi models have a stamped steel deck rather than this but this one has the full-on fabricated deck the deck consists of three independent blades each powered with their own independent electric motor if there's any complaint i have about this mower aside from the really big one that we'll get to in a minute it's that the motors powering these blades are a little bit on the weak side if the grass is too thick or too tall you're gonna have to take it a little bit more slowly than you would with most other mowers which is a little bit annoying now the answer to this is to mow more often but sometimes that's not an option one advantage of having blades linked together with a belt is if you have one blade struggling you have the momentum from the other two blades to help it along with this setup each mowering blade is on its own [Music] okay now the big problem with this mower there's clues pointing to this problem all over the mower if you just know what to look for 48 volt that is a multiple of 12. i could do math brushless brushless it's not weird that it says brushless it's weird what it doesn't say and finally there's this warning on the charging port cover always charge when not in use you know what kind of battery likes constant float charging lead acid this is powered by lead acid batteries lead acid batteries suck here's the cons they're heavy and therefore not very power dense they can't charge all that fast they have a crap life span as anyone who has ever owned a car can attest if you discharge them below 50 state of charge on the regular then you significantly reduce their already crap lifespan if you're not using them they need to be maintenance charged and as the state of charge drops they experience significant power fade pros they're cheap oh that's it and then there's ryobi's claim that this thing can mow three and a half acres on a single charge that's not true maybe in super ideal conditions you could get three and a half acres of mowing done but in the real world and this is just a guesstimate this is not based on any science whatsoever i think two and a half acres is your upper limit number and remember that would be from a hundred percent to zero percent state of charge which would be super unhealthy for the lead acid batteries in this thing if you discharge lead acid batteries down below 50 state of charge you significantly reduce their lifespan so take that two and a half acre number cut it in half and you're left with one and a quarter acres of realistic mowing time that you can get done with this thing without prematurely destroying your batteries now remember my yard is two acres which is more than one and a quarter so last year after i finished mowing my yard this thing would regularly be at 30 to 35 percent state of charge with a little bit of variance and those numbers are less than 50. and after an entire year of mowing down below 50 state of charge now this thing no longer has enough battery capacity to mow my entire yard on a single charge in fact it only has enough battery capacity to mow half my yard and then i have to charge it and this thing charges incredibly slowly so now it takes two days to mow my whole yard after just a year and i'm not too pleased with that so if i knew all this before i bought the mower why did i buy it well it's sort of an experiment batteries like this are supposed to last three to five years which isn't great and i only expected to get two to three years of usable life out of these batteries before i either replaced them or swapped them out for lithium batteries i didn't expect them to only last a year so that's why i can't recommend you buy this mower unless you can comfortably mow your entire yard within the top 50 state of charge again there's nothing wrong with the mower itself except for the blade motors being a little bit weak it's just that the batteries suck and just in case you're wondering i kept the mower plugged up to the charger 100 of the time i wasn't using it and over winter i stored the mower right here plugged into the charger 100 of the time in this building that is heated so it never dropped below 60 degrees fahrenheit so what am i going to do well the ideal solution is to sell my mower and buy a proper electric zero turn mower with a lithium battery pack i'm never going back to gas again so that is totally out of the question the problem is i only have two options and one of them's not even available for sale yet since last year ego has released a new electric zero turn mower this one with a 52 inch deck and a claimed mowing range of four acres which sounds great but it's seven thousand dollars now i don't think that's an unreasonable price but that's that's getting up there and ryobi has announced but not released yet three new zero turn mowers this time with proper lithium battery packs they're going to be available in 30 inch 42 inch and 54 inch and they're going to cost four five and six thousand dollars i don't really care about the two smaller ones the only one i'm interested is the big one the 54 inch one for six thousand dollars now ryobi claims that it can mow five acres on a single charge which is fantastic because it has lithium batteries this time i'm more inclined to believe that number even if it is a lofty goal that's two and a half times the size of my yard so i'll be good and they're claiming that it has the equivalent power of 42 horsepower which is a lot but it's also kind of a meaningless number all they're doing there is just tallying up the peak power figures from every motor on the mower of which there are five so it doesn't really tell me anything hopefully that means they've uprated the the motors on the deck that on mine are a little bit underpowered i'm just assuming but hopefully that's what that means ryobi decided to get all innovative with these new zero turn mowers and they ditched the standard double go go stick arrangement for a joystick since right about here it's just a joystick that controls all the movements of the mower they're calling it idrive because apparently no one at ryobi drives a bmw now i don't know how i feel about this joystick arrangement the only way to find out is to actually drive a mower with the joystick but i don't know how i'm going to do that for one thing they're not available for sale yet and they're not going to be until early summer but even when they are available for sale the only way that i can try one out is to buy one so i'll have to spend six thousand dollars on a mower i may or may not like so i don't really know what i'm going to do maybe i'll buy one of these new ryobi mowers to try it out maybe i'll buy the ego or maybe i'll lithium swap this one that i already have i mean i've got two whole coats worth of lithium iron phosphate cells ready to be dumped into something until i decide though i'm just gonna keep mowing my yard over two days and be increasingly annoyed every time i do it and that's the ryobi zt540e great mower crap batteries i waited a year to make this video and i'm so glad i did because if i'd made this same video last year i would have recommended this mower and i would have recommended you go out and buy one and then come this year i would have regretted that i did not expect these batteries to lose so much usable capacity so quickly but they did thanks for watching

Channel: Aging Wheels

Views: 1,437,721

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Id: LcJH7QqEn_Y

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2022