How to Winterize Landscaping Equipment Before It Costs You April

It's the first Monday of April. Forty lawns on the board, the crew's in the truck at 6:45, and the stand-on turns over four times and dies. Last October's gas.

You parked it running fine. Nobody touched it for five months. That's the whole story behind most spring breakdowns in this trade, and it's why how to winterize landscaping equipment is a money question before it's a maintenance one. The hour you give each machine in November is the cheapest hour of your year. The same hour in April, with a dealer backed up and a route waiting on the trailer, is the most expensive.

Here's what the manufacturers actually say to do, machine by machine, and the math on why a slow week in the shop beats a dead week in the field.

Why does winterizing equipment matter more for a crew than for a homeowner?

Because a homeowner's dead mower is a Saturday chore pushed to next Saturday. Yours is a route that doesn't get cut, in the one week every client is watching to see if you show up.

Here's the math. Say your crew bills $65 an hour, the conservative rate we use for pricing across this blog. A mower that's down for one day in April is $520 of work that didn't happen, or got done late and a machine short. A week waiting on a part or a dealer slot is $2,600, and that's before the client who got skipped twice starts calling around.

Now price the prevention. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for grounds maintenance workers at $19.27 an hour as of May 2025, and notes the work is seasonal, "available mainly in the spring, summer, and fall." So two hours of a crew member's time per machine, in a week you weren't billing anyway, is under $40 of labor. Add oil, a filter and a bottle of stabilizer. You're protecting a $520-a-day machine for less than one hour of what it bills.

There's a slower cost too. In lease vs buy a mower we ran a stand-on at about $6.00 an hour to own and operate over five seasons. That number only holds if the machine lasts five seasons. A carburetor full of varnish, a battery that froze in the shop, a deck that rusted under a season of clippings: that's how a five-season machine becomes a three-season machine, and the cost per hour quietly goes up on every job it ever ran.

What happens to gas that sits in a mower all winter?

It goes stale, and in a carbureted engine it leaves varnish exactly where fuel is supposed to flow. Briggs & Stratton's storage guide puts it plainly: gas begins to degrade in as little as 30 days. Stihl's fuel FAQ says not to store or use fuel older than 60 days, and preferably no longer than 30, even with a stabilizer in it.

That means the clock started the last time you filled up, not the day you parked the machine. Two ways to handle it, depending on the engine:

• Big machines, full tank. For zero-turns and standers, Exmark's fall maintenance guide says to top off the tank and add a stabilizer made for winter storage, then run the mower a few minutes so the treated fuel reaches the whole system. A full tank leaves less room for condensation. Briggs & Stratton gives the same instruction, and adds that if you skip the stabilizer, or the engine's been running fuel with alcohol in it, drain the tank and run it until it stops.
• Handhelds, empty tank. For trimmers, blowers and saws, Stihl's instruction is to empty the tank, restart, and run the engine at idle until the fuel system is dry. Idle only, no throttle. Exmark says the same for small walk-behinds: empty them. The other route is a premixed, ethanol-free fuel. Stihl's version has a stated storage life of up to two years and can be left in the machine over the winter, which is a real option for the backpack blowers nobody wants to drain.

A word on ethanol, since that's the part that changed under everyone. E10 is sold in every state and most gasoline in the U.S. carries up to 10% ethanol, according to the Department of Energy's Alternative Fuels Data Center. That's fine for the equipment. Stihl rates its engines for up to E10 and says anything above that can damage the equipment and void the warranty. E15, which the same DOE page notes is approved for 2001-and-newer light-duty vehicles, is a truck fuel, not a trimmer fuel. If a pump near you sells it, the crew needs to read the label before the nozzle goes in the can.

What should you do to each machine before it goes in the shop?

Work down the trailer. The list is shorter than it looks, and most of it is in your operator manual already.

Zero-turns and standers

• Change the oil and filter while the engine is still warm, which is Briggs & Stratton's instruction and Exmark's too. Exmark adds spark plugs and air filters to the same session.
• Grease the friction points. One pass with the grease gun now beats a seized spindle in May.
• Clean the deck, pull the blades and clean them. Have them sharpened or replaced over the winter so the first cut of April isn't the ragged one.
• Tires to the pressure on the sidewall. Exmark's guide says to inflate them properly before storage, since they lose pressure over the winter, and to park on cardboard or something else that insulates pneumatic tires from cold concrete.
• Battery out, stored somewhere cool and dry. Both manufacturers say the same. Charge it before it goes back in.
• Write down the hour-meter reading. You'll want it in the spring, and in the spring you won't remember it.

Trimmers, blowers, saws and hedge trimmers

• Fuel out and run dry at idle, or premixed ethanol-free fuel in, per the section above.
• Clean the air filter and the cooling fins. A season of dust is sitting in both.
• Bar oil off the saw, chain cleaned and oiled, bar flipped if you don't already rotate it.
• Wipe everything down and hang it or rack it indoors. A trimmer that spends the winter on the trailer floor comes back with a cracked housing and a flat primer bulb.

The truck and the trailer

• Trailer tires, lights and bearings get looked at now, because the trailer that sits all winter is the one with a flat and a dead taillight on the first morning in March.
• If the truck plows, this is its busy season. If not, the same stale-fuel rules apply to anything parked with a quarter tank.

Should you do the big repairs now or wait for spring?

Now, if the cash is there. The hydro leak you've been topping off since July, the deck that's vibrated since August, the spindle that whines: none of those get better in a cold shop, and the dealer's calendar in late March is everyone's calendar. Ask your dealer what the turnaround looks like the first week of April versus the first week of December. You already know the answer.

The honest problem is that November is when cash is tightest. The off-season income post covers how to carry fixed costs through the quiet months, and a repair bill is a fixed cost whether you pay it in December or in April. The difference is that in December it doesn't also cost you a route.

There's a tax angle too, smaller than people think. Repairs and maintenance on your equipment are ordinary business expenses, so a bill you pay before December 31 generally lands on this year's return. Whether a bigger job counts as a repair or an improvement is a line your accountant draws, not you. The landscaping tax deductions post covers the categories small crews most often miss.

How do you keep track of what you did to each machine?

Write it down the day you do it: the machine, the hour-meter reading, the oil type, the filter numbers, what it cost. Then put it somewhere you'll actually look in April. In most crews this lives on the lid of a parts box, in a text thread with the dealer, or in nobody's head.

In Terrascape it goes on the books. Snap the parts receipt or type the line ("log $64 oil and filters, overhead") and Zentra, the AI in the app, logs it as an expense without tying it to a job, so the winter shop bill lands next to everything else you spent instead of in the glovebox. When you ask what oil a Scag Cheetah II takes or what engine's in an Exmark Lazer Z, Zentra looks it up in a spec database of over a hundred machines across 13 brands, including fuel and oil types where the manufacturer publishes them, and hands you the manufacturer's own page so you can check it. If a number isn't in there it says so instead of guessing, and for anything past fluids and filters it points you to the operator manual. It's a co-pilot. You still turn the wrench.

Come spring, job costing puts what each machine cost you against what the jobs it ran earned, which is the number the lease-or-buy decision and next year's prices both rest on.

What does a day in the shop actually buy you?

The first week of the season. That's the week every client decides whether you're the same crew they had last year, and it runs entirely on machines that start.

Run your own numbers, but the shape is this: a day of prep per machine in November, in a week you weren't billing, against $520 of lost work for every day a machine is down in April, plus whatever the skipped client decides to do about it. Over a fleet of three mowers and a trailer of handhelds, the November day pays for itself the first morning something would have failed and didn't.

Before the first hard frost: stabilize or drain every tank by the manufacturer's rule, change the oil while it's warm, pull the batteries, grease, clean, sharpen, write down the hours, and book the big repairs now. You didn't start a landscaping business to spend April on the phone with a parts counter. If you'd rather have the receipts logged and the specs answered without digging for the manual, Terrascape: 7 days free, then $34.99 a month. Cancel anytime. Employees are unlimited, with no per-user fee.