Electric (mostly corded) lawn mowers

I recently started fixing and selling electric lawn mowers. I used to scrap them: pulled out the motor and a bit of wiring, recycled plastic parts (our city collects plastic) and tossed the rest. Then I realized that broken ones that people throw away are often easy to fix: their electric motors are fine about 9 out of 10 times and what's broken is either the on/off switch on the handle, in which case the mower does not start, or the plastic square-shaped washer that sits above the blade, in which case the blade spins freely not cutting anything.

There is a somewhat limited market in our area for used electric mowers. Those people who are either too busy or too rich hire others to cut their grass but there are at least some homeowners living in houses with yards that want to do it on their own but prefer electric over gas. I am one of them: I know just about zero about gas mower engines so I had to get it serviced every Spring plus I didn't like having to deal with oil and gas and storing them in my wooden shed that's filled with lumber and other wood.



I prefer to fix and sell corded units even though they are less convenient than cordless ones. That's because batteries in cordless ones die and new ones cost about as much as a new mower. So I cannibalize cordless ones for parts (switch, wheels etc), scrap the old batteries but never try to fix them.

The hardest part is to actually sell them: have to deal with no-shows, people who apparently can't read ads and so are very surprised when they realized it's a corded unit when they thought it was a cordless one etc. The good part is that the cost to fix a unit is slightly above the cost of gas to pick up the broken one.