Drive electric… riding mowers?

This is not a love letter. I’m sure I have cursed this thing more times than I’ve praised it. But I think we’ve finally come to terms.

I’m talking of course about my Ryobi 480e riding mower, from Home Depot, purchased five years ago.

A lot has happened in that time. The good news is that it has never needed: gas, an oil change, filter, belts, or engine adjustments of any kind. In fact it has never been “serviced” by anyone but me, because being run by batteries, it doesn’t need any of those things.

The promise

For $2,499 (interest free for two years) you get a 38-inch wide mower that never needs gas or oil or belts. Charges overnight for pennies and mows an acre at well below the noise level of gas engines, with no local air pollution, and speeds almost double of an equivalently sized gas ride-on mower. And it did all the things. I put the charger on a device called a “ Kill a Watt ” which meters electricity for an individual outlet, and calculated that mowing my two-acre property from April to October took about $20 a season in electricity, or $100 over the five years I’ve owned it. Not bad.

The Ryobi 480e mower in its natural habitat. 14850 Photo By Ari Kissiloff.

The reality

Unfortunately, the harsh reality was that the batteries for this mower were woefully underpowered and unbalanced by design. The concept was to take four 12-volt deep-cycle batteries and put them in a series circuit together so they equaled 48 volts to run the traction mower and two separate motors for the two cutting blades. All of this would be charged by a single charger. Well, if you know anything about electricity, you know that in this kind of setup, if the batteries get out of balance (different voltages) then the charger can’t really help balance them since it’s wired to them as “one big battery” instead of individual batteries. It simply can’t shunt electricity just to one if it is underpowered. So eventually one battery would go low voltage and take the rest of them down with it.

The first time this happened, I just replaced all of them with higher capacity ones which effectively made the unit a 480ex and gave me a bit more running time, but alas not enough to do the whole property, so I would mow it halfway and then recharge and then mow the other half. Not a deal-breaker, but hardly convenient for most people. The remaining good batteries I made into an array that could charge from solar and use an inverter to power my home’s essential systems for a day or so if power went out. But I was out another $400.

The next time it happened, I could have just replaced the one battery that went bad for $100, a process of diagnoses which involves removing all the batteries from the unit, disconnecting them, and then using a “repair charger” to charge each back to 12v and determine which one could not do so. But with being a bit underpowered in the first place, the mower would sometimes have to slow down one or both of the deck blades so they didn’t overheat, which resulted in somewhat of an uneven cut. I wanted to remedy that, too.

The upgrade

So I embarked on a lithium battery replacement which promised a bit more power (52 volts) that didn’t have to slow the blades, plus dramatically increased run times, as a 100 amp-hour lithium was said to be enough for several acres. Now as you may know, lithium batteries are expensive and heavy. But the good news is that with the upgrade, you get one big battery instead of four, and it ends up being maybe ¾ the total weight. And now the battery management computer can charge all of its individual 24 or so cells independently, so even if one or multiple ones go bad, the entire battery keeps working. This is why there are Teslas that have run 300,000 miles on one battery, but lost a bit of range every year, because the battery is dying piece by piece.

So why didn’t they use lithium in the first place? Well, a battery of that size and power if it existed (and it didn’t in mass scale) would have been at least $2,500 so would have made the price of the mower $5,000. That isn’t unheard of for a good riding mower, but not one of this size and comfort level. (It does not have power steering, for instance, and the ride is a bit bumpy because it is lighter than the big ride-ons.)

But times have changed, and a 50 amp-hour battery can be had now for around $400 and a 100ah for $700. I opted for the 100 amp-hour one because (A) I wanted to do my whole property and then some if the neighbors had to borrow, which we often have to do because of how unreliable their gas mowers are, and (B) the 100 amp-hour usually does not require a “soft start circuit upgrade” (a third party wiring harness and circuit board that prevents too much current from rushing out of the battery and forcing the mower to shut down since it thinks it has a power surge).

I was also told that the 100ah battery would likely charge with the original Ryobi charger and not need an additional $150 charger, and it has Bluetooth and an included power gauge, so you can see the health of the battery either from a newly mounted display or an app on your phone. We have to remember that the built in power meter will be useless with a new battery because it basically thinks it’s full all the way until it isn’t because of the different characteristics of the battery.

So $700 later, I get this really heavy package from eBay (the DC House store) and I embark on a journey of Facebook group chats and YouTube videos so I have some sense of what I’m doing. It turns out it’s actually pretty easy. Less than an hour later (after having my hulking son transport the battery box to the mower location in the back yard for me) and the old batteries are out and the new one is in and wired properly. I charge it overnight, and the next day, voila! It turns on, and proceeds to mow the whole acres of my property and then reads a stunning 82% of battery charge left! And the blades didn’t slow down once even with high wet grass, so the lawn looks terrific.

Oh and did I forget to mention? For another $60 or so in hardware, I added a 48v 1000W inverter to the mower so in case of emergency, it can power my home’s essential system for several days?

The Summary

So the takeaway is, if you want to buy a $2,500 mower and use the batteries until they croak and then spend another $400-700, you will have a beast of a mower that really never needs any service and can mow even huge lawns (I’d estimate around 10 acres based on my performance).

If I knew then what I know now, would I have sunk all this money into this? Maybe not. But at this point it seems I will have maintenance free mowing for the price of 2 movie tickets a year for many years to come. You will do better if you buy a used model that someone has lost faith in and upgrade the battery, or a new one understanding a lithium conversion is in your future.

Editor’s Note: Ryobi has smartened up and now all the mowers use lithium batteries, and come with a hefty $3,000-$5,300 price range. But there are still plenty of retailers and eBay listings for the old lead-acid battery mowers. One we saw was $800. That would give you a 100ah lithium mower (if you upgraded the battery) for $1,500 all-in.

People interested in the Ryobi line should join the Facebook group Ryobi 48v Riding Mowers to learn more.

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