I was at one of my mechanics places today and he and the Echo rep. showed me the "emmision complient rating" on the new 2 strokes. They have 3 rattings 50 hour, 150 hour and 300 hour. Now these numbers are only a compliency rating. But I would belive that the sooner they are out of complience the sooner they will wear out.
Some of the commercial stihl stuff only had a 50 hour rating all of the echo stuff had 300.
These ratings refer to how long one can expect an engine to stay in EPA compliance when new.....not the life of the engine. I'm not a big fan of Stihl 2 cycles, but common sense tells you that they will last longer than 50 hours.
The rub is that when they are out of compliance, it the end user who must make sure that they are brought back into compliance under penalty of law. So, essentially the Stihls and other engines that have a 50 hour rating will require much more maintenance.
Will these laws be enforced? Unlikely, but the penalties are pretty severe.
This is why Stihl has had to resort to 4 cycle engines.
Redmax owners manuals claim service life 300 hours
Really I think they last longer, I have some Redmax that are old as dirt.
Yes, they do get smoky, etc when older so the number really means how long you can expect the machine to run cleanly.
I use the number to figure out costs.
ED 7001 = approx $550 / 300 hours = $1.83/ hour + fuel + repairs and maintenance.
Fuel = about $1.70 gallon with premix, fuel burn = 0.5 GPH, so add $.85/hr fuel, add about $.25/hour maint & repairs,
total= +/- $3.00 per hour. Employee = +/- $13.00 incl benefits, so my cost on-site is about $16/ hr wet time on blower. Mark that up at least double for billing purpose to cover windshield time, overhead, etc. Like to go triple when possible.
the law says the end user has to service the emission components by the time the expected life hours is up. but they have to prove how many hours on machine, and that you didn't service it. these two things probably won't hold much water in an argument. and besides, people get away with murder these days, why can't we get by with breaking a simple emission law? by the way, most manufactures give an expected engine life of 1200 hrs. which is bogus too. cause they say after this amount of use, the engine will not be efficient enough to meet these new rules even with emission components working properly. look up epa's phase 2 emission on the i-net, and be prepared to do some reading.
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