This one asks what failed before it asks for a quote, because on this equipment the failure type alone settles most cases. When there is nothing worth calculating, it says so instead of making you fill in six fields.
| Repairing | Amount |
|---|
| Replacing | Amount |
|---|
Both sides are annualized — total spend divided by the years of service it buys. That is what the old rule of thumb — replace it if the repair comes to more than half the price of a new one — is trying to approximate without measuring the years, and it is why that rule misfires at both ends. On cheap machines a repair worth a third of a new mower can still be the better buy; on expensive ones it waves through repairs that buy almost nothing. Nothing on this site treats that half-price test as authority, and no published source behind this tool states it: it is named here because readers arrive having heard it, not because it is being applied.
The repair side is priced as one visit. No shop or trade body publishes a first-time-fix rate for small engines, so no repeat-visit allowance is applied — but the cost of a second trip is not spread evenly, and it falls the wrong way. Carry the machine in yourself and a return trip costs you fuel. Have the shop come to you and it is billed again, because all three mobile shops in this site’s fee table price transport by the trip rather than by the repair: Patrick’s charges its $75 service call for each trip to your address whatever the issue, Mobile Mow & Snow charges $95, and CSE charges a $60 trip inside a $95 minimum that buys the drive plus fifteen minutes of labor and nothing more. Those are the shops used by the reader who cannot lift a 200-pound two-stage snowblower into a truck — so the second trip charge lands on whoever had the least choice about avoiding it.
The verdict at a range of assumed remaining lifespans, everything else held where you set it.
| If the repair buys you… | Repair, per year | Verdict |
|---|
Figures verified September 2026.
Repair brackets, labor rates and shop fees: LawnStarter (updated December 27, 2025) and Thumbtack. New-machine prices — mowers and snowblowers: Lawn Love mower prices and Lawn Love snow blower prices (both updated December 27, 2025). Chainsaw and trimmer prices are list prices from the makers, read August 16, 2026 — Lawn Love prices no handheld equipment: Echo CS-310, Echo CS-501P, Stihl MS 172 C-E, Echo GT-225, Echo SRM-225, Echo SRM-2620. Part prices: Briggs & Stratton online store, Outdoor Power Direct, P&P Small Engines. Lifespan discussion — two different Consumer Reports documents, and the notes in this tool cite both: mowers, Consumer Reports on mower maintenance (2015); snowblowers, Consumer Reports on buying a snow blower against hiring a plow (2014). Neither is seeded into a field — see below.
No service life is seeded for any of the twelve classes, and that is a deliberate refusal rather than a gap in the reading. For most of them nothing is published at all — snowblower and handheld lifespans, and a machine price from the three gas pressure-washer brands this site reads. For mowers and snowblowers a figure does exist, in the two Consumer Reports articles above, and it is still not seeded: both are advice resting on no stated test, one of them an assumption inside a 2014 cost model, and a number that weak should not silently become the denominator your verdict is divided by. Every one of those fields is left at 0 with a note giving whatever figure does exist rather than filled with a plausible guess. That is why this tool asks you for the number instead of asserting one.
Updated August 16, 2026: chainsaw and string-trimmer replacement prices are no longer empty. Echo and Stihl both print a machine price on their own product pages, so those two fields now carry Echo and Stihl list prices. Echo labels its figure MSRP; Stihl prints a bare price, and its own terms say its dealers' prices may differ. The lifespan fields for both stay at 0 — that gap did not close.