// WIRED US/UK — MONDO
Ego 1300 Electric Mower Review: Tame Your Lawn Without Gas
I dislike lawns. Vast unproductive expanses of grass are great for playing baseball, but I don't want one at my house. I want gardens, orchards, and silvopasture capable of producing food. And yet here I am, having recently purchased 5 acres of property, much of which is lawn, which therefore has to be mowed.
When my older, 21-inch gas mower died yet again at the start of summer, I decided it was time to jump ship for an electric mower. They are quieter, don't smell like exhaust, and are largely maintenance-free. The largest, most powerful residential electric mower I could find was Ego's 1300 series (30-inch) mower, which has made relatively quick work of my roughly 2.5 acres of mowing, but perhaps most enticing is how easy it makes the job.
The 30-inch model is the newest member of Ego's line of cordless, self-propelled electric lawn mowers. The wider cutting path makes it an excellent choice for larger properties like mine, but the fact that the handle folds down to make it easier to store, combined with its surprising maneuverability, means it'll handle smaller properties in no time as well.
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.
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).
The Ego has options to mulch, bag, or side-discharge your clippings. I ran the mower in all three for testing purposes, but left to my own devices I'd mainly leave it in mulching mode. So far as I could tell in testing the three modes, what happens to the cuttings doesn't seem to have any impact on battery life or how well it cuts through tall grass. I will say, though, that the included rear bag holds way more than I would have thought.
The Ego 1300 is a big mower, by far the biggest walk-behind mower I've ever used. Despite that, pushing it on level ground when it's dead isn't difficult at all if you're in moderate shape. Uphill is another story. I definitely suggest saving some battery to get back