Choosing the right mower: commercial vs. residential lawnmowers

by | Dec 22, 2021

Visit your local independent dealer and you’ll find lawnmowers in various sizes and price ranges, categorized as commercial or residential machines. What is the difference? And when would a residential homeowner want a commercial-grade lawnmower for their lawn? What are the considerations that go into making such a purchase?

“The commercial lawnmower is designed by engineers for more hours of use versus a residential mower,” said Barry Allen, owner and operator of the independent dealership 96 Lawn & Garden Center in Burns, Tennessee. “The components of a commercial mower: the transmission, engine, spindle assemblies, pretty much the whole package is just a lot heavier than residential ones.”

We asked Allen to walk us through the considerations that go into deciding on the machine that is right for you.

“My goal is to find a product at a price the customer is comfortable with and that they’re happy with.”

Comparing the categories

“The industry classifies a commercial mower vs. a residential machine: we’re talking blade tip speed, the quality of parts, how much metal, how heavy is the metal, things like that.”

Commercial lawnmowers are designed to mow several hours a day, several times per week. To be more productive, commercial mowers can cut at higher speeds without compromising quality of the cut. Homeowners typically need a mower for fewer hours, 1-2 times per week and, thus, may not want or need a heavy-duty machine.

But there are other considerations than just quality of the parts.

“As you go up into a commercial mower, the blade tip speed increases,” Allen said. “Therefore, you can go with a faster turning blade, you can have faster ground speed, which gets the job done faster.”

The blade tip speed is the speed at which the blade under the deck is turning, a standard set by the American National Standards Institute. A consideration is how much time homeowners want to spend cutting the lawn.

“If a blade is turning only so fast, you can only go so many miles an hour to get a good clean cut.”

“Then under the deck, it (a commercial mower) has a better vacuum as far as picking your grass up. It’s kind of like when you get your haircut. Pick your hair up and cut it off. Same kind of scenario. The more vacuum you have, it takes the grass and pulls it, the blade is going to cut it off cleaner; and then you have a better discharge because you have more air actually going out the side.”

It’s not about size

Size of a lawnmower deck, Allen says, should be determined by the individual yard and the goals of the homeowner.

“There are options of deck size from 36-inches up to a 60-inch in the residential series. It’s just according to your lawn size that you’re needing it for or what’s in the yard,” Allen said. “Some people may have 3-4 acres and a 60-inch lawnmower would be a nice mower, but they’ve got trees and flower beds and stuff that they just cannot get a 60-width deck into.”

Handling workload / Time commitment

When deciding on whether you need a heavy-duty commercial or a residential machine, ask yourself what you’ll be using it for and the time you want to spend on the work.

“The analogy I use is this,” Allen recounts, “say you want a pickup truck. You can buy a Ranger or a 150, 250, and 350. All four of them are going to haul stuff in the bed of the truck down the road. But as we get up into the 250s and 350s, now we’re getting into something that’s a bigger transmission, bigger engine, bigger frame to haul heavier loads.”

“If you’re gonna work it really hard and haul a lot of heavy stuff, you’re going to purchase a truck that’s going to stand up for years and years. With a little Ranger, it’ll do it for a while, but it’s not going to hold up for long life. Same with a lawnmower.”

A dozen years ago, Allen remembers, the commercial lawncare market took off “because people didn’t want to spend 4-5 hours every weekend mowing grass, so they hired somebody to come out and it gave them their weekends back.”

But then homeowners “got to watching these guys on a piece of equipment and he’s taking an hour to an hour-and-a-half to mow the grass with this new zero-turn out there; and they said, ‘If I had a machine like that one, I can get cut it when I want to and don’t have to wait on them.’”

Homeowners started snapping up commercial-grade lawnmowers.

“Now they’re buying the machines the commercial guys have, they’re going faster, and they don’t mind spending a couple hours out there.”

Major consideration: price point

Allen says that for 80 percent of his residential customers, price is the biggest driving factor when buying a particular machine.

“Price points probably dictate the residential side of it more than anything because if it wasn’t a price point issue, then you could just build a commercial heavy-duty mower and everybody would just buy that one.”

The other 20 percent of the market, Allen says, are looking for a machine with more durability and quality.

“The first thing I ask a customer is how many acres of grass are you cutting? to try to determine a size – deck size, cutting width. Next, how fast do you want to get it done? Then I would go to budget. How much do you want to spend? And I recommend the biggest and best machine that fits their needs.”

‘We try to help them’

Allen helps when a customer walks through his door, he wants to help them for today’s projects and for future needs.

He knows that there are times they’ll buy a smaller, residential mower for a larger yard “with the understanding that they know it’s gonna take forever, but that’s all they can afford at this point.”

“So you’re trying to help them and then hopefully in the years to come, financially they’re able to buy a bigger mower.”

“There have been many times they come back and they’re like, ‘We’ve had this mower for about 4-5 years and you were right, it wasn’t big enough, but it was all we could do at the time and we would like to get something larger now.’”

So when it’s time for an upgrade, “we try to help them,” Allen said.

“I just want the customer to be satisfied.”