Battery Power for Efficiency and Savings

Adam Martin, Vice President of Operations for North by Northwest Commercial Landscaping & Grounds Management in Austin, Texas, got into the family business of landscaping young. “I got out of high school,” he says, “and I went straight into landscaping for my dad. And now my dad's not here anymore, and it's me, my sister, and my brother, we run the whole company. We do about 15 mil a year now with a goal set of 17 mil this year.”

Growing their company into such a success has taken purposeful expansion, bold decision making, and a focus on efficiency. Since they run 10 to 12 irrigation and landscaping crews simultaneously, they have a large amount of outdoor power equipment in use at any one time. That many crews mean many expensive stops at the gas station each day—and many machines that will break down and require maintenance. Or at least, it would, if they weren’t using Greenworks Commercial Optimus equipment.

“Greenworks is honestly part of the plan,” Adam says. “First, we started off with the small equipment like a small weed eater, blowers, and the trimmers… once those items worked for us, we looked into getting the electric standards and 48 inch mowers.”

Starting with the smaller equipment let Adam buy into the Greenworks Commercial lineup slowly, investing in more batteries, equipment, and charging systems over time to equip his fleets. But as his crews reported their success with Greenworks Commercial equipment, Adam realized that the time to swap over was sooner rather than later.

“If you buy a BB361,” he says, referring one of our most popular backpack blowers, “and two batteries and a charger… if you were to run that blower for three years, that blower overall, in the end of it, would probably cost me $500 of electricity.”

$500 over three years was a low enough cost to draw his attention. He ran the numbers and realized just how much money switching to battery-powered Greenworks Commercial Optimus tools would save his company.

“If you were to run that comparable gasoline one,” he continued, “you would buy it for $500, but all the maintenance… and all the gasoline that you would spend inside of that blower for three years… it would cost you in the end $6,500.”

The math simply makes sense. Battery-powered tools can be more expensive to purchase new, but quickly pay for themselves in reduced fuel and maintenance costs, even without considering the other benefits. For Adam, maintaining tool uptime was critical. A gas-powered riding mower going down for maintenance during peak season can be a huge problem cascading across your schedule, forcing many companies to keep old backup equipment on-hand or cancel on clients. We asked Adam how much of an advantage he had seen with reduced maintenance.

“It seems that, in my years of working with mowers, gas mowers, over the last 20 years that bearings, spindles, belts, hydraulics with the hydraulic pumps… All of that is mitigated. You know, we're not dealing with belt issues anymore… not having to worry about a pull rope to start… [no] spark plug issues, air filters.”

So, battery-powered tools are more reliable and cheaper to operate, justifying them as an efficient choice. But how do they measure up otherwise? Like many longtime landscapers, Adam was skeptical at first.

“I have doubted all electric vehicles, equipment, tractors, everything that I've seen coming out,” he says. “I'm just like, there's no way. The Texas heat is going to zap those batteries. Is it going to have the power? How are we going to recharge them? Are the batteries going to light on fire? These are some of the concerns that we had, but… we demoed a couple of them and they last the whole day. They come back and we charge them and get them ready for the next day.”

Modern battery-powered tools, like the expanded Greenworks Commercial Optimus lineup, have the runtime duration to work all day, handling everything from Texas heat to the thickest brush and grass. Power and runtime aren’t the issues that they once were, and now electric outdoor lawn equipment can more than compete with gas power—it can surpass the competition, throwing gas into the trash.

“Some of our other dealers sell the competitor products,” Adam says. “They tried pushing us towards that stuff but, honestly, because of the good impression that we got from Greenworks initially, we decided to stay with Greenworks.”

What sets Greenworks apart? For Adam, two of the biggest advantages are the smart motor technology and the quiet operation. He’s seen real, tangible benefits from these factors, which he was happy to explain.

“I'll tell you that the mower does a great feature… If the right blade hits a rock, it shuts off that blade and alerts it onto the screen. It says some sort of blockage detected on blade three, and the guys just need to go in there and reset it and reactivate the blade. A gasoline powered one with belts and stuff would have just chewed it up until he turned off the PTO or turned off the engine or cleared the debris—or the debris cleared itself by shooting out the side!”

In addition to running smarter due to their electronically-controlled motors, Greenworks machines are designed smarter. We’ve always been a battery-first company since our founding in 2002, so you can trust that our battery-powered suite of commercial-grade tools aren’t a recent addition to our lineup. This is our specialty.

“We run those gasoline power big blowers, but that's all that machine does. It's just a giant blower,” Adam says. “But if we can run two Greenworks Z-rider mowers and then stow the ETO attachments for them… then the guys can just drive back to the truck, put on the ETO attachment, then go start blowing the whole property with the same piece of equipment. We find it as a space saver. We can actually buy one less $13 ,000 machine.”

Smarter tools save time, but nothing saves time like starting earlier in the day. Many properties have noise restrictions preventing the use of gas-powered lawn equipment too early in the morning, delaying when landscapers can start their work. Battery-powered tools, by contrast, are so quiet that you can use them without violating any noise ordinance.

“These guys, we start them early because of traffic around Austin area,” Adam says. “So we start them early… Get them there at 6:30, 7 o'clock in the morning, and all of a sudden now they can't work because they can't turn on their equipment. We got them out of the shop early, we got them to the job site, but now we can't work.

“But the electric equipment now enables us to be able to start,” he continues. “[And] if we don't want to run mowers because there is noise of the blades, we can run the blowers, we can do weeding and stuff for the first 30 minutes or an hour, but at least they're doing something. At least they're getting ahead, and our efficiency is improving by doing that.”

For Adam and the rest of North by Northwest Commercial Landscaping & Grounds Management, battery-powered tools have been a gamechanger. Not only are his new tools quieter, smarter, more reliable to maintain, and much cheaper in fuel costs, but they’re also letting North by Northwest set a new standard for quality landscaping services

When it comes to using electric power, Adam says, “some of these clients want that. They want to be part of, like, the next generation of technology. Like some people want robotic mowers. Some people want their mowing crews to have electric equipment. It’s the future.”

Battery-powered tools aren’t a fad; they’re the new normal.

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