Still Worth Starting works out what a repair costs on outdoor power equipment — and whether it is worth paying. Walk-behind and riding mowers, snowblowers, chainsaws, string trimmers, pressure washers. Every price and spec here was read off a manufacturer service manual, a parts catalog, a shop’s own published rates or a named cost survey, and carries the month it was checked.
(Kitchen and laundry appliances are a different subject and a different site.)
It won’t start. Is it still worth starting?
On most walk-behind mowers, the answer is decided by what broke — not by what it costs, and not by how old the machine is. A carburetor is $45–$100 on a $230–$450 gas push mower. An engine is $260–$800 on the same machine. Those two land at opposite ends of the machine’s price, and neither needs break-even arithmetic to decide. One row looks like the exception, and it is worth knowing why it is not: an electric starter runs $95–$250, up to 109% of a $230 gas push mower — but none of the 13 push mowers in Toro’s, Troy-Bilt’s and PowerSmart’s own stores has an electric start, and against the cheapest walk-behind that does, a $599 self-propelled Toro, it is 16–42%. Priced against the machine it is actually in, it is a repair.
Every price and specification on this site is dated on the page it appears on.
Start from what the machine is doing
| What you’ve got | Go here |
|---|---|
| It won’t start, or it starts and dies | Symptoms, priced |
| I have a quote and don’t know if it’s fair | What repairs cost |
| I know the price and don’t know whether to pay it | Repair or replace |
| I don’t know what engine is even in it | Engines and brands |
| I’m buying, storing, or getting rid of it | Buying and seasonal |
Or use the repair-or-replace calculator
It asks what failed before it asks for a quote, and tells you plainly when there is nothing to calculate. Its defaults are listed on its own page with the source each came from — including the two cut-off thresholds that rest on this project’s judgment rather than on any published rule, and the fields left empty because nothing is published to fill them.
Five sections, and the strongest finding in each
Repair or replace — and often no decision to make
The decision, machine by machine, and the honest news that on a cheap mower there usually isn’t one. A riding mower is rated in hours, not years, and the published figures span 250 to 1,000 depending on the duty class the maker picked. A rebuild costs more than a replacement engine, which is the reverse of what the word implies. And a tune-up runs 88% of the average repair on a push mower and 163% on a zero-turn, so that answer changes with the machine.
What repairs cost — built from the parts counter up
Costs built from the parts counter up — OEM part price, plus the shop’s hourly rate, plus the fees — rather than quoted as a band with no provenance. Eight shops’ published fee schedules in one table, because the diagnostic, the trip charge and the minimum can be most of the bill on a cheap machine — and on two of those three, the shops’ own published figures run outside the national range on both sides.
Symptoms, priced — because small engines have no codes
Small engines mostly have no fault codes, so the unit here is the symptom. Each page says what its own list is ordered by — what the machine is doing, what the fix costs, or the manufacturer’s own order of operations — because the useful order is not the same on every symptom. “Won’t start” reads like a catastrophe and prices at $105–$256, and what Briggs & Stratton names as the most common cause is stale fuel, dirt and debris.
Engines and brands — starting with whose engine it is
The brand on a mower’s hood often did not build the engine, and parts, manuals and specs follow the engine. That one fact resolves more frustration than anything else on this site. Two of six major brands still will not tell you what a part costs — Honda and John Deere both send you to a dealer instead.
Buying and seasonal — ordered by the calendar
Annual snowfall is the wrong number to size a snowblower by — Boston, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Fargo and Spokane sit within 0.7 inch of each other and are five different machine climates. A shop’s March 1 storage date is two months early in Denver, which peaks in March and still averages snow in May.
Why this exists when page one is a robot vacuum company
The page-one results for “lawn mower won’t start” in August 2026 included a robot-mower vendor’s blog, a robot vacuum company, a self-storage company, and a dealer. Not one dedicated small-engine resource. This content gets written by people selling equipment, as an afterthought.
This site is built on a narrower and more boring claim: someone read the primary sources and wrote down where each number came from.
- Technical figures come from manufacturers, never from other blogs. Plug gaps, oil capacities, torque specs, part numbers, shear-pin specs, rated capacities. Repair blogs copy each other, the errors propagate, and here a wrong figure can damage a machine or hurt someone.
- A spec is good only for the machine whose manual it came from. Carrying one brand’s plug gap or torque figure onto another brand’s engine because the two machines look alike is the error this rule exists to stop, and this site treats it as a sourcing failure.
- Part prices come from manufacturer parts catalogs, with part numbers, so you can check them.
- Arithmetic is labeled as arithmetic. Where a figure is derived rather than published, the page says so and shows the working.
- Gaps stay visible. Where no figure exists, the cell is empty and the page says why. The lifespan fields for chainsaws and trimmers are blank because the only published figure describes full-time professional use.
- Prices carry a three-month clock, not the usual annual one. Two engine prices cited here vanished from the supplier’s page within three days. The editorial policy sets out all three schedules and the sourcing tiers.
The line this site does not cross
It is not written by a small-engine mechanic, and it does not pretend to be. The About page is explicit about that, because inventing credentials would make every other claim here worth less.
Practically: this site is good at telling you what something costs, what a quote is made of, and whether a repair is worth paying for. It will not teach you to perform the repair. It publishes no step-by-step procedure for chainsaw chain work, blade removal, sharpening or balancing, carburetor and fuel-system disassembly, or clearing a snowblower auger or chute by hand — those go to your manual and a servicing dealer, every time. A chainsaw with a mis-set idle can drive the chain while it looks like it is at rest, an auger and impeller can turn after the engine is off, and a safety notice under bad instructions does not fix the instructions.
Independent, and intended to be reader-funded through advertising once it is running. No manufacturer, dealer, retailer, warranty company or repair shop pays for coverage here, and nothing on this site is a paid placement. See the editorial policy and terms.