Rudimentary ICE

While mowing your grass, it is not uncommon to ponder just how efficient that motor actually is. Believe it or not, small gas engines have remained largely unregulated by any governmental agency. This despite the fact that small lawn and garden engines produce 5% of the nations air pollution. The reason is simple, unlike a car where you can measure efficiency by ‘MPG’, lawn and garden engines have no such measure of efficiency. Another reason that is largely unknown by many consumers, is the fact that the majority of lawn mower engines are produced by the same manufacturer. So even if you shop from brand to brand, chances are that they use the same engine manufacturer. So how do you find out exactly how efficient your mower engine is? The simple answer is there isn’t.

What Makes Mower Engines so Inefficient?

The fact is that the ICE (internal combustion engine) is an inefficient method of transforming fuel to usable energy. Most of the inefficiencies come from heat or frictional losses. Many of the advancements in automotive engine efficiencies have come by way of electronic means and not from the mechanical process itself. When you think about your car, there are entire subsystems in your car dedicated to making the engine more efficient and scrubbing the emissions that are expelled from the engine. When you think about your run of the mill lawn mower, there simply is not enough room for such systems. In fact, small mower engines are the most rudimentary forms of the  internal combustion engine comprised of nothing more than a basic mechanical fuel delivery system, a spark plug and air with a little bit of oil for lubrication. Fact is that today’s mower engines are not much different than those from 20 years ago. Unlike a car, there are no onboard electronics that control the ignition and fuel delivery processes, there are no catalytic converters or  charcoal filters to scrub emissions, there is not engine cooling system, in essence they lack all of the major advancements in modern engine design. The reason for this boils down to cost. You see, in order to make lawn and garden engines more efficient, you need to make them more complex. To make them more complex, you have to make them more expensive. This in turn, also makes them more difficult and costlier to maintain.  So despite the upcoming new efficiency standards set to take place in 2011, mower engines are destined to remain highly inefficient compared to car engines unless consumers are willing to sacrifice high costs for much higher efficiency.  Would you be willing to pay twice as much for a much more efficient lawn mower when there are electric mowers that have zero emissions and will do the job just the same at a fraction of the cost?

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