My old 21-inch gas mower was a Toro that a friend of mine found for free at the side of the road. He gave it to me, I replaced the carburetor, and it fired right up. Score! It ran fine for over a year. And mowing 5 acres with a small gas mower at an hourly rate made my son a relatively wealthy 11-year-old. But then it died again. And again. And at some point, small engine repair isn’t fun anymore.
While I was spending weekends cleaning carbs, tracking down air filters, and not mowing, the grass was growing. In northern Wisconsin, grass grows so fast I’m pretty sure you can see it happening if you take the time. A wet June ensured that by the time the Ego arrived for testing, the grass was well out of control, up to 10 inches in the lower, wetter areas of the property.
I figured it would make a good torture test for the Ego, but I’d still need to go in afterward to hack it back with my string trimmer. To my surprise, the Ego 1300 plowed right through almost all of it in a single pass.
For the first pass, I set the height to 4.5 inches, which is easy to do using the height adjustment lever. Unlike an alarming number of mower makers, Ego’s height adjustment system is a thing of beauty. The height markings aren’t arbitrary letters or symbols that require you to consult a manual to translate to inches. On the Ego, the height adjustment is plainly printed in inches. Imagine that. This lets you know that if you set it to 4.5 inches, your grass will be 4.5 inches high when you’re done.
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
Starting at 4.5 inches and running in Turbo mode allowed the Ego, in a single pass, to cut just about anything I pointed it toward. There is one patch of grass, below an active seeping spring, that was long enough and wet enough that I had to make two passes to get a nice even cut. After that initial mow, I then went back over it a few days later at 3 inches to finally get the height back to what I could call normal. The second mow was, dare I say, incredibly easy. Even the lowest self-propelled speed was generally fast enough for me, though I did crank it up to about the middle to get up the steeper slopes (and then turned it off entirely going downhill).
