Electric lawn care spreads across CT landscape. Quieter, less polluting, making ‘people more happy.’

Connecticut towns are pushing lawn-care companies and individuals to switch from gasoline-powered equipment to electric, but Dan Delventhal’s been running on batteries since 2006.Owner of MowGreen in Bridgeport, the man who styles himself as Dan QuiMowte de la MowGreen figures that “since we started, we have avoided the equivalent emissions of 650 trips around the world by car.”Electric-run lawn care is a growing trend, as concern for carbon emissions increases and towns, including Westport and Greenwich, pass bans on gas-powered leaf blowers. Westport’s ban took effect May 15. Greenwich added gas-powered leaf blowers to its noise ordinance, which goes into effect during certain times of the year.Delventhal got into the lawn-care business when he bought a couple of push lawn mowers back in 1996 for $5 at a junkyard near his computer shop. It wasn’t long before he switched careers.Nelson Muñoz, owner of Cultural Lawns in Stamford (Courtesy Nelson Muñoz)“We have five crews and we’re in a few towns, too many towns,” he said. “We’re trying to fix that and get closer to home. And we’re just under a million in revenue. We have probably 150 regular customers.”Delventhal also advocates for electric equipment by testifying at town boards that are considering ordinances, including Larchmont, N.Y., Montclair, N.J., Greenwich, Norwalk, New Haven and Westport.Larchmont has had a gas-powered leaf blower ban since 2023. They are also banned in Montclair. Norwalk has a partial ban.As for costs, “It’s more capital intensive to be in the business, but it costs less to operate an electric mower compared to a gasoline mower,” Delventhal said.“So the smart money is on the electric,” he said. “The return on investment is 25% for a commercial operator who invests in an electric lawn mower … if he’s got decent utilization for 500 hours. Blowers, similar numbers: It’s 25 cents an hour to run an electric blower, $1 an hour to run a gas blower.”He said more people don’t switch to electric because “it’s really the fabric of the rugged individualist. No one wants to be told what to do.”The upfront cost of converting to electric equipment is a barrier too.A crew member with Cultural Lawns of Stamford (Courtesy Nelson Muñoz)“It’s a really hard business. I’m sympathetic. It’s hard to make a living at it,” Delventhal said. “If you scale the business to any particular level, then you know you as a business owner can make maybe $100,000 a year if you do it right, but a lot of these guys are really scraping, and so they don’t want to change anything.”Nelson Muñoz, owner of Cultural Lawns in Stamford, took over the family business in 2004, working mostly in condo complexes. But the noise in the dense residences “was kind of annoying for the residents,” he said.“They always complained about it,” he said. So he decided, “Let’s get some trimmers, some blowers, weed whackers, electric battery. So I saw the difference in the work. More quiet through the week, people more happy.“So this is where we started looking into electric and then decided to start converting one group at a time until now, and it’s been a success,” Muñoz said. He no longer uses any gasoline-powered equipment other than his trucks, he said.Muñoz also uses small backpack-mounted leaf blowers exclusively, not the large blowers, keeping the mulch in the grass instead of blowing it out.“We put a mulching blade on them and we cover the outlet of the machine so it stays down there and mulch all the leaves into dust, which will stay on the lawn, which is better for the lawn because now it’s compost, organic matter,” he said.Burt DeMarche, president of LaurelRock landscaping of Wilton. (Courtesy of LaurelRock)Another change has been that Muñoz’s crews are using rakes and picking up sticks, something they didn’t do with powerful gas blowers.“We don’t rely too much on the blowers like we used to with gasoline because they’re so powerful that my guys (didn’t) like to bend and pick up a branch from the floor. They just want to blow it,” he said. “That was a problem. … Picking up is faster than blowing. That’s my concept. That’s my technique. So we use the rakes.”The crews also don’t blow every inch of lawn, which keeps less chemicals and particulates out of the air, Muñoz said. LaurelRock landscaping of Wilton, which has a crew of 65 covering Fairfield and lower Litchfield counties, plans to be fully electric in 2027, according to Burt DeMarche, president.“We started using electric equipment back in 2020,” he said. “Our fine-gardening crews had all-electric equipment at that time and those were the hedge trimmers, the handheld blowers and some trimming saws that were all battery operated.”As far as large mowers, “we’ve been waiting for the technology to catch up so that they finally have gotten to a point where there are some really good high-quality large commercial mowers, the 48-inch and 60-inch mowers that can be battery-operated now and can last for the entire day,” DeMarche said. And so we just purchased those starting last year.”Now he has five gas-powered and five electric mowers, he said.A crew member of LaurelRock landscaping operates an electric leafblower. (Courtesy of LaurelRock)The cost difference is significant. “The initial investment’s large,” he said. “We just bought a 60-inch ride-on mower, which is like a large commercial mower. And it cost us $40,000 for that mower, which is what you can buy a car for. Now if you buy a gas-powered one, you’re going to be a little less than half of that for the same exact unit, same performance.”He said he’s not charging a premium to his customers for using electric equipment, “although maybe it would make sense if we did.” The challenge with electric leaf blowers is battery life, DeMarche said.“The reason we can’t do them for fall cleanups and spring cleanups is you’re using the backpack blower basically eight hours a day,” he said. “You’re using it fully. These are blowing leaves the whole time. So they haven’t created batteries that will last for that period of time on the backpack blowers yet.”During those seasons, he still needs to switch back to gas-powered equipment, he said. Otherwise, electric equipment measures up to gas-powered equipment, and is superior when it comes to pollution.“It’s equally as powerful, which is great, which is what we’re waiting for and it’s why it took us a while to buy them,” DeMarche said. “Also, because they just didn’t have the power supply, the air flow that the gas-operated ones do, but now they do. So that’s all working well. … It’s quieter. Our crews don’t have to breathe all the fumes from the two-cycle engines, which is terrific.”DeMarche said he tries to give his clients the best experience possible.“I think ideally a client would love it if they never saw us but the property always looked perfect; that’d be ideal for most clients,” he said. “And some of the things that we didn’t like about it, both for our crews but also for the clients, is whenever using the gas-powered blowers, especially, you’re going up near the house to blow off decks and blow off patios and front stoops and things and the fumes from that just seem to permeate into the house, even if the windows are closed.”The sound also is a problem, especially with so many more people working from home since the COVID-19 pandemic, DeMarche said. Electric equipment is much quieter than gas-powered, he said.“What drives me personally is just being more sustainable as a company and the less the amount of pollution that comes out of all of the equipment, all lawn equipment in general, actually, whether it’s commercial or even just used by homeowners themselves,” DeMarche said. “We want to try to prevent all this change that’s happening on the Earth,” he said. “We have to do things about it. So as a company, we can take a step towards that. And so that’s our goal. This is our reason for going with the electric.”Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com. 

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