Last week word came out that the Utah Department of Environmental Quality was offering a special “exchange” for gas powered lawn mowers and weed eaters.  In their writeup it said that a gas lawnmower polluted the air about the same as driving over 100 miles or so (I don’t recall exactly the distance you would drive a car to equate to mowing your lawn, but the distance was substantial).  With that, Windy, Weasel and I began our dialogue.

Do we want to play in this program or not…yes.  Do we want a couple of lawn mowers and a couple of weed eaters….yes.  Ok, let’s work out the logistics.

I read and re-read the rules and came to the conclusion that in order to “play”, we would have to put up the full purchase price on our credit card to the tune of $550 for a lawn mower and a weed eater.  Then after the exchange of a gas mower and weed eater (gas and oil removed), they would credit us with a substantial amount of credit for both and the end result would be a lawn mower for $100 and the weed eater for $25.  The credit would be applied back to the card in one weeks time after the exchange.  Windy read and surmised the same as I.  They had roughly 1,000 mowers and 500 weed eaters for this program.

So, this morning was the day for pre-registration and the paying of the money.  Beginning at 8 a.m. and only on line at the DEQ website.

Windy showed up at 7:58 and we logged into the site….at 8:01 (our time), the site opened for business and Windy was rocking his purchase of one lawn mower and one weed eater.  In the end he reserved his two units and only had to pay for the two finished price units plus sales tax, $133 and some change.  A very welcome surprise for both of us.  When he logged in, we found we had to pick a time for the exchange on April 23 (Saturday).  He chose 9:15, as the 9 O’clock time was full.  Now it was my turn to log in and make my purchase of one weed eater.  The rules would only allow one household to purchase one mower and one weed eater or one only of your choice.  Well, we really wanted to end up with two weed eaters and one lawn mower anyway, so I was to go on and buy one weed eater.

He logged out, I logged in….but the wait for the website to upload was not going well.  We waited and the little wheel on the tab turned slowly on my Chrome browser.  Then it crashed.  I tried again with the same results.  So I switched over to Firefox and tried.  It came up!  YEAHHH!  But then when I went to register the earliest time was 1 p.m.!  NO WAY am I going to go back down to Salt Lake city at 1 p.m. to pick up my weed eater!  I opted out.

By my computers time it was 8:19…19 minutes from the start of registering and they had only 23 lawn mowers and 4 weed eaters left!  19 minutes!!!!!

So, what did we end up reserving?  Well, of course one lawn mower and one weed eater.

A Kobalt 40 volt electric lawn mower!  And a Kobalt 40 volt electric weed whacker!

We will see how well they hold up, but the lawn mower comes with a 5 year warrantee.

Not a bad morning if you ask me.

Bears Butt

April 13, 2016