12/26/2023 2:12 PM
in reply to
Mike Petersen
Mike,
I believe the USGA has some information on life spans of equipment.
But my opinion on the best way to get new equipment is to document the cost of repairs and downtime, especially if you have no backup, we run one fairway mower on our 18-hole course, luckily, we can get a backup if needed from our two other city courses if needed. The other factor that might help is the cost of new machine maintenance, which hopefully requires less parts for it's early life. For example, you have your reels on your current machine needing replaced, that's (I'm ballpark figuring here), $2,500 to replace them all? Throw in bearings, seals, bedknives, etc, that could add up, although, I would spend $2,500 myself, if everything else is good on the machine.
Something else you can factor; can the new machine cover more acreage in less time? How fuel efficient is the new mower compared to your current mower, do a man hour savings. I have done this with equipment before, we had a small crew, it would take us 1 hour for 3 of us to clean plugs off of greens, for a total of 57 manhours, with a TC125 we could knock that down to 18 manhours, of course the labor savings would have taken 8 years to justify, but this was at a University golf course, and I was able to justify it's purchase by using it on athletic fields as well.
You could also use possible fuel savings if there is a difference between equipment. We have a couple of JD 1600's they burn about 2.1 to 2.3 gallons an hour, when we received our HR600, it was burning about 1.8 gallons an hour. We put about 500+ hours on our rough units per season, we would save about 250 gallons of fuel at the average price of diesel at $4.00 per gallon, we would save $1,000 per season on fuel. (of course, maintenance cost on our HR600 might eat that savings up)
Mel
Melvin H. Waldron III, CGCS, Horton Smith Golf Course, City of Springfield/Greene County MO