Which lawnmower?

Well, after a bit of Googling and reading, if it were my money I would go for the Honda 536QX. Good as lithium ion technology is nowadays, I am still not convinced that it is the be-all and end-all that we are being told that it is; and battery failures are now all to often resulting in massive repair bills when they go wrong.

My reason for going for the more expensive of the two Hondas is fairly simple - it has a much stronger construction for a start (cast aluminium deck as opposed to plastic on the cheaper model) and a more powerful overhead valve engine which should significantly increase reliability and longevity (especially if looked after); OHV engines tend to be more fuel efficient as well. It seems to get good reviews, albeit there aren't that many, and Honda stuff is generally remarkably well built.

Now, there is a caveat to this, as I reckon the Hayter would give the Honda a close run for its money, and if it was that wee bit cheaper it would be really hard to split the two - - indeed, I would say that between the Honda 536QX and the Hayter 56 BBC, you are definitely in hair splitting territory to the point that it would then come down to how the machine looks and feels to you. To be fair, I doubt you would be disappointed by either of them.

 

A quick calculation on your lawn size suggests that the difference is that you will essentially walk a 100 metres more (two more trips up and down the length of the lawn) - and that price being so much cheaper...... I think you have just answered your own question

 

OK Hayter against Hayter - the larger one is not just giving you an extra 8cm cutting width, it also has quite a few differences:





The larger mower has more torque (grunt, to you and me), is 1kg heavier, and has electric start (as opposed to a pull cord on the smaller one).

Now, a bit more searching finds this which on the face of it does not make good reading.

It has to be borne in mind that the proportion of people that will go to a manufacturers website when there is nothing wrong with their machine and they are quite happy with it is considerably less than would do so if they have problems, but to see so many highlighting starting issues is a bit concerning. Don't get me wrong, Briggs and Stratton have always been pretty good, but any manufacturer can produce a model that is a donkey, be it electronics, cars, motorbikes or lawnmower engines. In fairness, the Hayter machines do come with a 5 year warranty which goes a long way to ease that concern.

However, when you take into account that the Honda 536QX has a 7 year warranty, and are using their own engine as opposed to buying one in from another company....... I, personally, would be taking a long hard look at that Honda.

 

I wonder if Briggs and Stratton are suffering from the same sort of nonsense that a lot of car manufacturers suffered from; there has been an ever increasing push for engines to be more efficient, lighter, more powerful and all the time putting out less emissions (in many cases, emissions have been mandated).

A lot of car manufacturers were caught on the hop with this problem, as they were at a point where they had just about managed to get engine reliability up to where it should be, and had started to see sensible power figures from them, when along came the EU and imposed all sorts of emissions restrictions. This resulted in them rushing through engine designs in order to meet the new emissions regulations, and the net result of that was engines that were powerful enough, but were either pushed to their limits to be able to make that power within the given parameters, or were strangled by emission abatement - - in short, reliability went out of the window in many cases (look up Volkswagen BKP diesel engines, as they were shockingly unreliable, or even more recently Nissan's 1.2 DIG-T petrol engines which had something like an 18% reliability rate!).

Briggs and Stratton are an American manufacturer, and as such they do not have the emissions restrictions that we do here in Europe, particularly when it comes to lawnmowers etc - in short, the American authorities have more to be doing with their time than worrying about the CO emissions of a wee lawnmower. That meant that companies like Briggs and Stratton likely carried on as they were until all of a sudden they had to do 'something' to be allowed to continue selling their engines in EU products. So, a rushed design, and appears to have problems.

Honda on the other hand, well they have been making small engines for eons and they already had to learn the lessons to enable them to keep selling cars and motorcycles in the EU. So, in every reality, Honda were simply more equipped to be further ahead of the game than Briggs and Stratton.

Now, all of this is really easy for me, sat here with a glass of wine tapping some keys; it is YOUR hard earned money that we are discussing here, and you might not be able to afford the Honda without putting yourself in difficulty - in which case, the Hayter with a 5 year warranty and the possibility of it having the odd bug looks to be quite sensible.

On the other hand, you might not even bat an eyelid at the extra cost involved and are more interested in the longer term picture - - and if that is the case, the Honda wins every time on the basis of the information that we have found so far.