Preparing Your Lawn Mower For Spring

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Pulling the cord to start the lawn mower is as much a sound of Spring as birds singing in the yard.

But, what should you do if your mower won't start?

"You have got to be using treated fuel in any kind of small engine whether it is the lawn mower, your trimmer, your chainsaw, any of those type of engines," explained Andy Amrhein with Every True Value Hardware.

If you didn't treat your fuel to protect it from ethanol, you could be staring at a minimum of $50 to $80 for a tune-up.

However, a $10 bottle of Start Your Engines made by Briggs & Stratton could save the day.

"It will settle through the gas tank, through the fuel line, into the carburetor, and it rejuvenates the gas. You can't do this all the time, but your first time out, what it will do is rejuvenate the gas and give you a fresh start of gas to get that lawn mower started," Amrhein said.

Before you run the mower, Amrhein insists people change the air filter. He showed KDKA's Rick Dayton an example of a dirty filter.

"Imagine yourself, a human trying to breath through a filter like this. You are going to cough and choke and not work properly. It's the same thing for an engine," he said.

No mower will work well with a damaged blade. If you try to use it, you are likely ruin your lawn mower in a matter of minutes.

Lastly, the quality of the cut is only as good as the sharpness of your blade. Dull blades yield lousy results.

"It is going to be a very uneven cut. It's going to look bad, but on top of that, you are going to damage the grass. Grass needs to have a very clean, straight, perfect, quick cut. Cutting with a dull blade, you are damaging the grass itself," said Amrhein.

While everybody is thinking about getting their mower in shape for cutting grass this weekend, it's probably not a bad idea to start thinking about next winter.

Take a little bit of a product like this enzyme fuel treatment, pour it in your snowblower, then when the flakes fly, you'll be ready for winter.

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