Posted: 5/2/2013 9:30:05 AM EDT
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So I just bought a new mower. It has a flush port on the deck.
Does anyone here use it? V OUT |
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Depends. I mow commercially. We coat our decks with wax or "mowez" sometimes, our decks our much thicker metal. we just do it on the mulchers to reduce clumping...
The acid in grass eat the deck metal over time. The paint gets chipped and then rust starts. The acid speed the oxidation process and eats metal also... We once bought a rechargeable trim mower for our "green" customers. It had a composite deck. We never washed or cleaned that thing. just wiped the outside so it looked good for the yuppies.. Either use every-time or leave it alone. The grass will form a layer and that layer dries, the acid content rises and the damage is done,over time but if you rinse sporadically you keep a fresh layer of acid every-time you mow / rinse. So the acid content will rise everytime the remaining grass dries.... Most likely you will NEVER see enough damage to be of any concern. The machines design life is shorter than the rate at which a deck normally degrades... But If you get into some wet heavy clumpy stuff. it beats having to raise the machine or remove the deck to get those clumps outside, before you park the machine and they fall off in your garage/shed. Ours usually fall off in the trailer on the ride home. Get pretty dusty and loud blowing out the trailer 
Hope that helps... |
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Quoted:
Depends. I mow commercially. We coat our decks with wax or "mowez" sometimes, our decks our much thicker metal. we just do it on the mulchers to reduce clumping... The acid in grass eat the deck metal over time. The paint gets chipped and then rust starts. The acid speed the oxidation process and eats metal also... We once bought a rechargeable trim mower for our "green" customers. It had a composite deck. We never washed or cleaned that thing. just wiped the outside so it looked good for the yuppies.. Either use every-time or leave it alone. The grass will form a layer and that layer dries, the acid content rises and the damage is done,over time but if you rinse sporadically you keep a fresh layer of acid every-time you mow / rinse. So the acid content will rise everytime the remaining grass dries.... Most likely you will NEVER see enough damage to be of any concern. The machines design life is shorter than the rate at which a deck normally degrades... But If you get into some wet heavy clumpy stuff. it beats having to raise the machine or remove the deck to get those clumps outside, before you park the machine and they fall off in your garage/shed. Ours usually fall off in the trailer on the ride home. Get pretty dusty and loud blowing out the trailer
Hope that helps... Hmmm...lem'me guess what brand of mowers you use... I have an Exmark Lazer Z for my yard. That bitch cost 10K. I hose it down, including the underside of the deck, every time. Then I blow it dry with the Stihl. |
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My Deere has one, I haven't used it yet. I take the deck off about the beginning of July, maybe sooner; power wash the inside, and touch up any bare spots and put the "good" blades on, and recheck the deck level and re-grease the spindles. Then when I pull the deck in fall to put the snow blower on, I do the same and put the junky blades back on for next spring. |
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I have used mine. It seems to work, but you have to keep up on it. If you don't the grass cakes and the hose generally doesn't do it.
You could take the deck off and bring it to a do it yourself car wash and pressure wash it to get it clean and then keep up on it after that. |
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We have 1 exmark lazer hp, 1 exmark turf tracer hydro, 1 toro(exmark copy) z200, 2 proline walk behinds hydro and belt... push vary from ariens (before they sold out and are kmart specials now) to snapper, sometimes we get a donated pos. we use til she dies or sh** jobs...
Would have all exmark, but got two of the toro's used. estate sales... They need nothing except grease, gas and oil. maybe we blow em off with leaf blower on site and compressed air to do pm's Our HP is over 2500 hours. One lung started to get blow by around 1900 so we replaced with new Kohler. Was cheaper in our mind to have new engine than pay for almost as much labor to rebuild... 10 k ? must have included a round of golf with Todd. But then again been a few years since we bought any. They seem to last longer with owner operators... but we still have 20k probably... Shindaiwa and tanaka. trimmer. Echo backpack blower. Tanaka edger (can't beat that direct drive...) Maybe someday I'll get the exmark diesel, but one has to have dreams... |
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The concept certainly has merit. I grew up on a dairy farm, and we used forage harvesters to chop several thousand tons of alfalfa annually, into haylage for storage in silos to feed the cattle.
The alfalfa juices would eventually badly gum up the harvester's cutterhead after only a couple of hours of running, or less. This gummy plant residue caused a tremendous drain on the tractor's horsepower and fuel economy if you didn't constantly scrape it out. (Very tedious job.) In the mid Eighties, Gehl offered an option to their harvesters that employed a thirty-gallon water tank mounted on the machine. A simple valve triggered open only when the crop was being fed into the cutterhead. It was only a pencil-sized stream of water under only a foot or two of gravity head pressure, but it worked very well to keep the knives in the cutterhead, the shearbar and all the sheet-metal guide chutes remarkably clean. The gum simply never built up on the wet steel-it couldn't stick long enough.to gain a foothold. A thirty gallon tank of water lasted the better part of a day's chopping; perhaps forty or fifty tons of haylage.(?) I often thought about jury-rigging up my push mower for the same type of system with perhaps a two-gallon water can, but haven't got around to it yet. I think the mowers that have the fitting were designed with it in mind for cleaning out at the end of the day, though. Not for continuous water application into the deck. |
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Yes, unless you are mulching wet heavy grass. It's a non issue. Sometime we have to cut wet heavy grass. so the wax or any lubricant only hinders the wet grass from hanging on to the deck. Much like oiling concrete forms...
Commercial decks have large domes or air channels to avoid this. The seals are decent also. I like the other post. for home-owner. just paint the deck once or twice a year and your are doing more than you need to... It is considered by some a sales gimmick, but if you actually use it. it will prolong the deck life and keep your garage floor cleaner... Decks are usually the last thing to fail on push mowers.... Avoid power washing near the bearings. My friend thought he was foing a great job cleaning his deck. 3 bearings and 500 dollars later. He doesn't even think about washing his decks.... |
| My pops used to make me wash the deck every time we mowed the lawn, and we usually had 2 pushers or 2 pushers and a rider, and there were no fancy wash ports then. Now that I'm all growed up I don't wash it out of spite. He was anal about things like that, and in my experience, depending on the quality of mower you have, it will run itself into the ground some other way before the deck will rust through. |