The Best Mowers for Big Lawns

Wide-cut mowers were once the machine of choice only for landscape contractors who valued them for speed and compactness. But more homeowners are discovering the benefit of these fast, wide-cutting mowers. For many people, these are the perfect way to mow a lawn that’s either too small for riding equipment or where the lawn has features like slopes, corners and pockets that make the agility and stability of a wide cut mower safer and faster.

More Grass Per Pass

A typical residential walk mower uses one blade to cut a swath from 20 to 22 inches wide. A wide-cut mower on the other hand, cuts a swath from 26 to at least 30 inches wide; commercial versions of these machines have a cut width from 32 to 54 inches. Cutting more grass per pass helps you get done faster.

A residential 22-inch mower will be equipped with an engine somewhere in the range of 163-cc to 190-cc. Wide-cut mowers start at 223 cc and go up to about 337 cc. That high power-to-weight ratio helps speed you through normal cutting conditions but can be a significant advantage when the going gets tough, such as when the grass is tall and lush in early spring or when there are leaves on the grass in the fall. And it can be particularly useful when mowing the border area to keep tall weeds and non-turf grasses from encroaching on the lawn.

Also, as you move closer to the heavy-duty end of the spectrum with these machines, you find not only larger engines, but other durability-extending features, such as spin-on oil filters, commercial-duty air cleaners, and grease fittings.

Wide cut mowers are powered by gear drive or hydrostatic drive transmissions that give them a top speed in the range of 4 to 6 miles an hour. At top speed, many of them move so quickly that you’ll have to trot to keep up.

Wide-area Testing

The most important thing that we look for in testing a wide-area mower is whether it really is a better fit than a small piece of riding equipment under the same conditions. We put a premium on the mower’s ability to handle terrain that would prove challenging or unsafe to a small rider. We mow uphill and down, especially on slopes 30 degrees or steeper, and we also like to see how the mower does on long sidehills. Our pivot test is designed to examine whether the wide area or a small rider provides a closer and cleaner cut in a tight spot. In that test we drive the mower in and then pivot out. Because these mowers are designed to reduce your mowing time, we push them as hard as possible to see if they live up to their potential.