I have completed five years of lawn care, using lithium-ion battery-powered lawn equipment from EGO Power Plus. I am as excited about these great tools as I was, back when my good friend Charles and I reviewed them.
I have been completely satisfied with these tools…well, almost. The one thing that’s broken, was the metal bar, mounted on the motor housing of the string trimmer. This u-shaped bar can be flipped out from the motor housing to support the head’s weight, while you’re edging. Spring tension, in this bar, allowed it to lock in the stored position or the edging position. Over time, the spring tension got weaker and weaker. I was able to remove it and bend it back into its original shape, but about the third or fourth time I tried to bend it back, it broke into two pieces. Since then, I’ve just been supporting the weight myself and have not contacted EGO about buying a replacement. I am writing this immediately after mowing and edging the front yard, to kick off the sixth season of lawn care.
I have been driving the Chevy Volt, albeit from varying model years, for about 6-3/4 years. In those years of Volt driving, my wife and I have leased four Volts (two 2012s, a 2017 and a 2018) and bought three (a 2014 for my youngest daughter, a 2015 for my wife and we bought our previously leased 2017). When we bought out the leased 2017, we traded the 2014, giving the 2015 to our daughter and my wife taking the 2017.
Until I started driving from Fort Worth to Austin and Houston more regularly, I was going MONTHS without buying gasoline. In fact, my longest time, between gasoline purchases, was 11-1/2 months, back in 2017. I think of my Volt as an EV with a rarely-used range extender.
We have completed two years and three months of using solar panels to augment our electricity supply. The solar panels have been great and have been completely trouble-free. There appears to be no maintenance required and they just keep on working! Mine are on top of a steeply pitched second story roof, so I haven’t been going up there to clean them, as I am a lazy, low-maintenance kind of guy. That being said, production from the panels last year only dropped 2.65% from the previous year. That could be explained by different cloud cover over different years, or pollen and dust accumulating on the panels. It is a result I’ll be watching, year after year, to watch for degradation over time. For now, the source of the drop could be anything. The difference amounted to about $41 in electricity. Total generation, last year, amounted to about $1,542 in electricity. At this point, I am blissfully unconcerned.
