I have a Toro walk behind self propelled battery electric mower. I also have a 0.9 acre yard. (About 35,000 square feet, of which about 1k is taken up between the house and garage. It’s a small house.) the mower was about $700 and an extra battery was another $250 (open box on eBay.)
Same battery I use for my snowblower, string trimmer, leaf blower, and chainsaw. The Toro 60v lineup is mostly solid tools and I have had no trouble finding “open box tool only” examples on eBay at a steep discount.
I bought it in ‘21 when I moved in but this year broke me and I bought a gas mower.
It works fine in general. It’s peak output is about 2hp, but it’s nominal operating power (based on the battery capacity and drain) is like 3/4hp.
In general, I can get about a quarter acre done on a single battery charge. Which jives with the manufacturer claims, and means I can mow half my yard one day, the other half the next, ince it takes about eight hours to charge the batteries. (They have to cool down from operating temps after draining, and then trickle charge for about 4 hours.) Normally this is fine - I wouldn’t want to walk that much anyway.
However, if the grass is too long or the blade is a bit dull, the engine works harder and drains the battery faster, and that ~10,000 feet of yard per charge quickly becomes like 3-5,000. Because the electric engine is kinda wimpy, it’s extra super important to have that blade be sharp as hell. And still, the longer the grass is or the faster it grows, the less of the yard I can, practically speaking, mow in a day.
This year was very wet, especially June, and the grass grew fast. It got to the point where even mowing every day it didn’t rain I was losing ground.
So I got a used off brand gas mower from a guy on Craigslist for $120 and have been using that. Not only does it “charge” immediately, although I have to drive an extra couple blocks to get to the gas station with non-ethanol gas, but it uses a common name brand (Briggs & Stratton) engine with cheap parts and its about 2x as powerful. (3.8hp or so, based on the published specs, torque, rpm, etc.)
So I have both mowers and I’m a little sore about “overspending” $880 on the Toro.
But it does work, is quiet, doesn’t smell, doesn’t need oil or engine maintenance, and will likely continue to work fine for a long time. So I’m ambivalent about hating on it because as long as we don’t have another swampy summer (mosquitos have been really bad this year too) its a perfectly adequate mower even for my huge years, and would be totally adequate for somebody with a quarter or a third of an acre.