This video isn't much, but I'm posting it anyway just incase anyone else ever wondered If You Can Run a Modern Lawn Mower on Kerosene. The answer is Yes You Can, but you probably wouldn't want to make a habit of it, especially if you have long thick grass to mow. For light mowing, it works just fine.
Since I only had a 1/2 gallon of gas on hand and I would have burned up a gallon in the car just going to get more, I decided to use up the remains of a jug of Kerosene I had on hand that had been setting out in the shed for 12 years or more.
I didn't know if the mower would start cold on kerosene or not, and didn't want to mess around fighting it, so I did like they used to with the old hit & miss farm engines and old tractors around the turn of the last century and started out on a half tank of E10 gas and mowed a while to get the engine warmed up good and then refilled it with the Kero. Didn't affect how it ran at all other than when I got to the one corner of the yard where the grass grows extra thick & tall and the motor bogs down even on straight gas. Sure enough it still bogged down there, along with rattling pretty good on the kero due to detination. It hammered loud enough the first few times that it sounded like the rod came loose, but backing off on the mower and letting it catch up with a lighter load it quieted right down again. Each lap around the yard, I had to slow down when I reached that spot, but again, I always have to when running gas too, and yes, I have had it rattle a few times on gas as well when it's running hot and lean and bogs down. It just rattled louder on the kero, and I backed off on it quicker to avoid damage.
I didn't think about filming any of it until it was time to refuel again, which you will notice I did with it running, which I do Not recomend others do as it could pose a fire risk if you spill any fuel on a running engine. This mower has always been hard to restart when hot, so I have been refueling it while running since the day I got it a few years ago.
By the time I got around to filming it, I was far enough up into the yard that the grass wasn't quite as thick as it is in the lower corner and the engine loads where lighter, but it did still let out a couple good rattles, which I point out in the video and replay each of them a couple times so you don't miss it.
Other than the rattle under a moderate to heavy load, it ran perfectly fine using up the reaminder of the kero I had on hand, and then I switched back to E10 to finish the back yard.
A few weeks earlier, when I was short on gas one other time, I used up the remainder of a can of 2 cycle mix I had for my chainsaw just to get the can empty so I could refill it again later with E10 as I had finished my chainsaw cutting for the year and still had 3/4 of a gallon of the 2 cycle mix on hand and nothing else to use it in.
Not exactly what you would call a 'Flex Fuel' engine, but so far it's run on everything I've dumped in it.
Ran equally good on the 2 cycle mix, with no noticeable smoke or anything from it. I did notice the faint aroma of 'lamp oil' when using the kerosene though, similar to setting in Grandma's house with the old kerosene lamps lit up during a storm. …...more
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