As stated in my previous article To Go Green You Must Start With The Grass I had decided to purchase a new Craftsman 48 Volt Battery Powered Mower to put my own “Green Credentials” to the test. This was a bid to unchain myself from the Energy Mafia. Now lets “Cut” to the chase (Yes, lame). 

When I first started this experiment I did not really think too much of the the lawn mower. I just figured it would be my first large step toward green. I started looking for the mower in retail stores because I needed one as soon as possible. Looking around Sears I saw a sign that said you should only get a battery powered mower if your yard is under 900 square feet and lucky for me my yard is around 700 square feet. The Craftsman mower looked like the best choice I had, it was fully loaded, a 19″ cutting deck, bag attachment, mulching capability,side shooting, single lever height adjuster… and the only battery powered mower there. Yep, it cuts grass and has a battery, that is why I chose it. 

The first thing I noticed was how much this battery powered mower weighs. On the Sears site it says the mower weighs 80 lbs. Now grant it when pushing it around your yard it is well balanced enough that it is hard to notice but, it feels as though it has power assist… without the actual help of power assist. I was pretty excited about my first large green purchase and the weight of the mower was probably due to the lead acid batteries. No biggie. 

Next, I un-boxed the beast. Pulling the mower out of the box I noticed that the handle already had been screwed together, all I needed to do was fold out the handle and tighten the large wing nuts. Finally, my brand new mower was un-boxed and ready to tear through the grass. 

To start the mower you need to place a “Key” into the mower. When this key is not present the mower will not start which is helpful if you need to do some cleaning or anything around the blade. Once the key is in the mower you must push an orange button with your thumb while you pull the standard safety handle and the mower starts right up. It was one of the coolest feelings to have this mower in your hands. The mower is so quiet that it sounded like a large fan. Still not whisper quiet but you could hold a casual conversation with someone across the yard while mowing. Another cool thing is that you can actually hear the blades of grass being cut which gives you a bigger sense of power over the grass. 

But all good stories must come to an end some day. The sad part is that the beginning of my good experience and the end of my good experience occurred on the same day. The first problem was required 18 hour charge before use!!! Still, I was not swayed, I told myself, “It doesn’t matter, I will just plug it in and leave it there, I only need to mow once a week, that should give it plenty of time…” So I charged the mower as instructed. 

The next day, I pulled out my new mower freshly charged and ready to go! Man was I ready for this! I put the mower on the grass and started mowing. Man the sound of the grass being cut just felt cool. Then I noticed of the four power LED’s I only had two more left! “Eh,” I said, “The battery light probably doesn’t indicate the real power left. The last two LEDs should work longer than the first two,” I was wrong. The charge is lost quicker on the last two LEDs. I got to the last square foot patch of grass in my back yard and the mower kicked and screamed and tried its darnedest to die before the grass was cut and I still needed to cut the front yard. 

Nothing to fear. I figured the batteries probably needed to be conditioned to handle the full charge and complete my yard. I plugged the mower in again and went to bed to finish the front the next day. 

When I woke up, I felt great, I was ready to mow my front yard! Pulled out the mower and got the front yard done without a hiccup. I ended the front yard with barely three green LED’s out of four. When that was done I plugged the mower back in for next weeks mow. 

Well, my third and final mow the next week was a mirror image of my first, barely making it through the entire back yard before the mowers battery died. As far as recommendations go… purchase the Craftsman 19″ battery powered mower at your own risk. I have to say that this idea has much promise, possibly if the mower used Lithium Ion batteries instead of the led acid ones it currently comes with. I recommend holding off unless you are just going to mow around your porch or would like to trim your banzi grass. 

Craftsman 19in 48 Volt Battery Powered Mower 4 out of 10 

P.S.
On a more positive note, I looked around for a different and better mower and found the Neuton, These mowers seem to be much more suited for this situation, plus they have removable batteries, so even if you ran out you could just pop in a newly charged one and finish the job. 

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Craftsman 48 Volt Battery Powered Mower
Neuton Battery Powered Mowers

While on my way to work, pausing at every red light, I came to a point of frustration rarely seen. Yes, some of that frustration had to do with people who get in a car and try to drive somewhere automatically lose 78% of their brain. OK, its not really true… it just seems that way. The real frustration came at every stop as the gas station prices kept increasing. My problem, how do I become independent of the energy Mafia. 

I came up with a solution, the only problem is that many critics will not agree with my solution. My new plan is to become energy independent. “Wow…” you say, “This is what I come here for!? I figured that is what you were trying to do all along!!!” Well the truth is, you are correct but, until now I have not really thought about it in a realistic way. I must switch everything that I possibly can to electric driven. Electricity is a universal energy and can be created in many ways including solar, wind and even good old dirty coal power plants. My plan is to convert exclusively to electricity and gradually ween myself off of the power grid. The beauty of this plan is the ability to take individual steps to achieve this goal. I do not have to go out and spend millions right away and with each step of the process I will be making myself less dependent on gasoline and other fuels. My new “Fuel” will be electricity, not Coal, not gasoline, not bio-diesel, just plain electricity. 

My first purchase into this new plan is a battery powered lawn mower. My current mower has had its fair share of issues starting with the unfortunate “Stump Incident.” The “Stump Incident” left the poor lawn mower trembling in fear each time I would try to cut the grass. In layman terms it bent the shaft and made the blade off center so that it beat the crap out of my hands. This spring when I decided to mow and found that the old beat up mower won’t even start. So I figured, I talk about Greener Thinking all the time, why not try to put my money where my mouth is. 

With my grass being rather tall I decided to make the purchase quickly. I began looking at Sears and found a Craftsman 19″ battery powered mower. These battery powered mowers are not really the most cost effective mowers, this one started at $479 but, because they were having a sale I was able to walk away with it for $399. I have a rather small yard so I think this lawn mower should work rather well. I was only able to use the mower once so far and due to the length of the grass, I do not think that it lasted as long as it should. I will be using this lawn mower over the next couple of months and submitting my full review on Greener Thinking so stay tuned. 

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Sears Battery Powered Mowers

Hope you had a fantastic and relaxing Thanksgiving Day. While enjoying my turkey day something crazy happened! I saw a commercial! Yeah, that’s not the crazy part. The content of the commercial was what made me look at the T.V. with my head cocked to the side with a confused look the same way your dog does when it hears something odd. 

This commercial went completely against my logic. It claimed that the 50% of power plants in the USA are powered by coal. But still this did not surprise me. I knew this is a problem that we were trying to solve by moving away from coal. After all coal is one of the dirtiest forms of power and the destruction that mining coal causes nature can be extreme. extreme. But here is the kicker, this commercial said that coal is the clean alternative. 

It is true that there has been much advancement in coal power, decreasing emissions. There is still a tremendous amount of power plants that do not use these efficiencies. Another thing they are saying is that they “contain” carbon dioxide emissions and store them. We can only sweep our problems under the rug for so long, but one day we will need to shake the rug some day and will find a mountain of problems that we cannot control. 

What should be done cannot easily be defined as picking one fossil fuel over the other. We need to find clean renewable energy such as solar or wind or the combination of both if we want to save the planet. The new efficiencies should be applied to current coal power plants, but we should not keep investing more and more money into non-renewable resources. The individual has to become self-reliant. We need to find a source of power that does not require us to burn something! 

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Clean Coal Commercial 
Coal Strip Mining 
America’s Power 
Business Week

Have you ever seen those videos of tornadoes destroying everything in their path on The Weather Channel? You know, the ones where you’re wondering how it is that the person is actually able to stand there and continue videotaping it when all logic says they should be ducking for cover in their basement… Well, have you ever thought of how much energy could be generated by these massive forces of nature if we only had a way of harnessing it? One man did, and he has set his sights on doing just that. Louis Michaud of Canada has come up with an idea to generate a man-made tornado in a controlled environment. This tornado would be then used to generate massive amounts of energy that could power nearby homes. This idea is still in early conceptual stages, but Michaud is a long way from where he began with experiments in his garage. He has received interest from many scientists all over the country with his idea and plans to demo a much larger version soon. Who knows, maybe someday in the future, we’ll all be getting our power from these feared towers of destruction. 

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The Weather Channel

If you didn’t see this past week’s episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, you missed an episode dedicated to making a new “green” home for a Navajo family. This episode was full of innovative ways to conserve energy and help ensure that the family would never have to pay an electricity bill for this big, beautiful new home of theirs. They had solar panels outside that moved throughout the day to follow the sun across the sky. This way, they are always collecting the maximum amount of sunlight all day long. Also, they had a wind turbine on their property to produce even more electricity for them. After all was said and done, they were able to produce more energy than was needed to power the home and were even able to put the excess back into the power grid to help the rest of the community. They also gave the family all Energy Star appliances in their home and really pushed for viewers to follow their example and do the same in their own homes. They even had plants growing on the roof of the home, which I had never heard of before, but apparently it helps cool the home and keeps the roof last much longer. In addition to all of the environmentally friendly parts to the home, they also handed over the keys to a brand new Ford Escape Hybrid to the family (not to mention there were several Escape Hybrid commercials throughout the TV broadcast). They showed off the car to the family as well as the viewers and educated people about what the environmental advantages are of having a hybrid. The show itself was quite entertaining and educational, but most importantly, it was of great importance that a popular TV show made a point to put the word out there about ways that we can all help the environment and keep our energy costs down at the same time. This may prove to be of huge significance if other shows follow their lead and especially if people start to learn more about the techniques used in the show and want to do more of it to their own homes. 

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Extreme Makeover: Home Edition 
Ford Escape Hybrid

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste”, says a famous quote from an ad campaign. But perhaps in Australia they say the wind is. Epuron, a renewable energy company, has announced their plans for one of the largest wind farms in the world in Broken Hill. The $2 billion project would supply up to 400,000 homes with power and generate 1000 megawatts of renewable energy. Australia’s government has recently set a target to make massive reductions in energy emissions by 2020, so this project comes at a perfect time to be a part of a solution to this major problem. They are beginning work on building the over 500 wind turbines and say that the station could be in partial production by late 2009. 

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Ad Council 
Epuron

While listening to the radio, I heard an interesting commercial DTE Energy stated that there is a renewable energy option available NOW! This new project is called Green Currents. I am always interested in saving the environment so continued to listen until they gave me a website to check out on my own. 

Thinking I was going to find the mother load of cool I hit a new stage of euphoria, I went to their new site. It starts out by forwarding you from the green currents page to a DTE product page. I read on. “GreenCurrents is a voluntary green options program that makes being green easy and affordable,” they say.

Excited about the prospect I read the explanation of what renewable energy is and how it will help lessen the impact on the environment. The site even comes with its ownCarbon Emissions Calculator. Still not exactly sure what this new “Renewable Energy Option” was I stumbled across the press release explaining their Green Currents project.

They explained that they are working on creating a wind farm and you can “play a significant role in shaping the future of sustainable energy in Michigan,” and all you need to do is pay DTE more money. 

It is undoubtedly going to cost millions of dollars to switch from the fossil fuel to renewable energy, but it also seems like a great business opportunity for DTE. When you move to a renewable resource DTE will not have to spend money on fuel to keep the generators going and because of this there should be a cost advantage that the early adopters will probably not see any kickback on. If you are interested and live in Michigan you can check it out here. 

I have contacted DTE and when I get a response I will bring you more information on the project and see how DTE plans to make the world a better place without making your wallet too light. 

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Green Currents
Carbon Emissions Calculator
Green Currents Press Release
DTE Residential Green Currents