APP FOR MOWING

When I posted last week about mowing and included a track of my mowing stats, several of you asked about the app both in comments and via email to us.  I realized I had never shared this on the blog.  It's an awesome app and I love having it.

It's called MowerPlus in the App Store.  It's free which is even better, ha.  Now bear in mind, it's designed for and is branded "John Deere" but it's not tied to your mower, it really just works with your phone which you have to carry on you while you mow the yard.  I keep mine in my shirt pocket because I'm usually listening to music on my earphones.

As you can see here on the app home page, it shows the weather for your location which is nice.  It also shows how long since your last mow and how much rain has fallen since the last mow (at the rain station the weather app uses of course).

It also tells you at the top "today looks like a good day to mow", ha!  What you do is when you get on your mower, you start up the app and touch the "mow now" button and it counts down ten seconds...

 ...then it uses the GPS on your phone to track you while you mow (since you have the phone with you while you are on the mower).  This is why really, even if you don't have a John Deere, it will work using whatever mower you have.  It will track all sorts of stats and then compile all of them into the app and create a really nice history of your mowing.  

Above are a couple of screen grabs of mine.  You can toggle by year, see all the months and then within the month see how many mows that month had and the length.  Then when you click on a specific mow...

...you get the details for that particular mow.  For example, on the left above is a mow from last June.  I mowed on June 30, it took me 1 hr and 49 minutes, I covered the equivalent of 7.2 miles, 3.9 acres and had an average speed of 3.5 mph.  There is a pause button for breaks of course if you have to stop.  Oh and the picture portion at the top?  It's a google satellite view of where you mowed with an ANIMATED path showing everywhere you mowed in your yard.  I blurred it out for our privacy of course but it's really neat to see all the paths you mowed around.

The other screen shot is a stat to keep track of how many hours are on your mower engine and if you have a Deere, it reminds you when it's time for various maintenance items on your particular model.  You can tap on the maintenance section and keep track of oil changes, etc.



There may be other apps for mowing, but this one is pretty neat and useful.  Of course since we have a Deere, it works all the way around for us.  I've been using this for about 3 seasons now and it's nice to compare previous years and see how weather changes mowing habits, if things take longer in certain months, etc. 

Hope this helps someone!