Galen Scott

gscott@weatherforddemocrat.com

Cleaner engines may be the wave of the future, but the power plant inside your shiny, new lawn mower is a far cry from what it once was.

Amid growing air quality concerns in the late ‘90s, the Environmental Protection Agency started forcing more stringent regulations on small engine equipment manufacturers. The new rules applied to just about any “spark-ignition, non-road” engine with 25 horsepower or less, including lawn mowers, weed trimmers, leaf blowers, small generators and a variety of other farm, construction and industrial devices.

According to estimates provided by the EPA, a riding lawn mower operating for one hour without emission controls puts out about the same amount of pollution as 34 cars. The Journal of Environmental Science and Technology reported the 20,000,000 small engines sold in the U.S. each year contribute about one-tenth of the total U.S. (greenhouse gas) emissions, and are the largest single contributor to these non-road emissions.”

Companies like Stihl, Husqvarna and John Deere were allowed to phase in the EPA mandates, and it took a period of several years for the carburetors and ignition systems powering America’s small engines to transform into cleaner versions. But, as Reece Reeves remembers, the transition was not seamless.

“It started happening about three years ago,” he recalled. “The first year they did it was horrible. I would say we were getting probably five to 10 calls a day [from people with new machines that would die when you hit the trigger].”

According to Reeves, who owns Reeves Mow Better mower shop in Weatherford, most of the equipment having problems simply needed to warm up for an extended period of time. However, he guessed about 10 percent of the brand new, clean-air equipment actually needed to be adjusted.

Though he stressed things have improved over the last three years, Reeves admits customers do still call about the problem — even hard-core do-it-yourself types.

Part of the reason is because carburetors today are difficult if not impossible to adjust, according to Reeves. He said special screwdrivers are usually required and that no brand in particular is better or worse because almost every carburetor serving small engines today is manufactured by the same handful of companies.

“Every one of them is going through this; even the new riding lawn mowers don’t have an adjustment on them,” he said. “There’s not even a place to go in and mix your idle anymore. A lot of them have plastic float bowls where you can’t even change the needle and seats out in them.”

Depending on the application, ignition system curves, rev limiters and other mechanisms designed to reduce emissions and make products safer can end up translating into less available power.

“It used to be where if you gave it gas, it would be full-throttle automatically, and it would dang-near twist your arm off,” Reeves said. “Now, when you give it gas, everything is all tame and mild.”

In addition, after-market small engine components are getting harder to find. Some manufacturers struggling to keep cost and emissions down without sacrificing performance are moving toward “throw-away” carburetors, which are not designed to accept rebuild kits or adjustments. However, Reeves noted the throw-aways are starting to have fewer problems.

“Three years ago it was difficult because they didn’t know what they were doing. Now, the manufacturer of the carb is working with the manufacturer of the equipment and it’s better. They’re really improving.”

Another problem facing small engine consumers has to do with what goes in the carburetor. Reeves believes supplements added to area gas supplies in recent years are destroying plastic parts like fuel lines and primer bulbs prematurely.

“There is gas eating the fuel line on 90 percent of the mowers and weedeaters that come in here,” he said. “Almost every single riding lawn mower that comes in here now, we have to change the fuel lines out because they’re cracked. They used to crack before, but it would take eight or nine years. Not every year, or every other year like they are now.”

Increased use of ethanol-blended gasoline could be a factor.

About 10 years ago, the EPA started requiring the sale of reformulated gasoline (RFG) in nine Metropolitan areas around the country. The Dallas-Fort Worth air-quality non-attainment area voluntarily followed suit and ethanol-blended gasoline is now commonly available.

RFG burns cleaner because it has lower levels of certain compounds. But most also contains oxygenates like ethanol, which is a form of alcohol and may have an adverse effect on fuel systems.

An EPA report published in 1995 states, “Although newer engines should be largely unaffected by proper oxygenated fuel formulations, some manufacturers are concerned that seals and gaskets on older equipment that have not been previously exposed to alcohol-oxygenated fuels could experience leakage.”

Guy Hoffman, with the TCEQ Air Quality Division, said ethanol didn’t really become part of RFG until after the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

The legislation, signed by President Bush, instituted a renewable fuels standard calling for the use of more than 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel by 2012.

According to Hoffman, the act also removed an oxygenate requirement and gasoline manufacturers started using ethanol instead of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), the old standby.

In April, the EPA proposed another new emission control program that is supposed to reduce hydrocarbon emissions from small spark-ignition engines by about 35 percent. Depending on the size of the engine, the new emissions standards are supposed to take effect in 2011. The proposal also includes new standards to reduce evaporative emissions from certain fuel systems.

“I’m getting ready for catalytic converters and inspection stickers on mowers,” Reeves said. “I would say at the minimum, it’s going to happen within the next 10 years. At service school for the last two or three years, they’ve already been talking about it.”

At least one home improvement store is currently selling reel mowers — the one with the whirly blades — for less than $100.