Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuffworks dot com where smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, is it more efficient to mow your yard in a spiral pattern or in an up and back pattern. One thing that complicates the answer to this question is the variables you have. The speed of the mower, the width of the mower, the dimensions of the yard, the amount of
time it takes to turn, and so on. There's also the issue of things like trees and shrubs in the middle of the yard, which might make one or the other pattern better. Let's ignore trees and shrubs. Assume the mower is two feet wide and assume a square shapeyard that's a hundred feet on a side, making it a
quarter acre or so. Here are the details of the paths. First, you could walk a hundred feet up one edge of the yard, make a hundred eighty degree turn, walk back another nerd feet, make a hundred eighty degree turn, and so on, and do that fifty times. Or the second option is you could walk a hundred feet up one edge, turn ninety degrees, walk feet along the edge, turn ninety degrees, and so on, spiraling in towards the center, you'd have
to make spirals, with each spiral getting progressively smaller. If you go ahead and calculate the distance you have to travel for each of these two paths, it's the same. You have to walk about five thousand feet or nearly a mile. The big difference comes in the turns. In the first option you have to make forty nine hundred and eighty degree turns. In the second option you have
to make nine nine degree turns. If you assume that it takes twice as long to turn a hundred eighty degrees as it does to turn ninety degrees, then the two paths are again approximately equal. If one type of turn is significantly more involved than another, or then that could shift the equation. For example, on a riding linemower, a nine degree turn is probably much easier than a hundred eighty degree turn with a walk behind. More, a hundred eighty degree turn and a ninety degree turn may
differ only slightly. So the key if you want to figure this out for your own yard is to get out there with a stop watch and see which type of turn is more efficient for you. Or you could get a goat, or you could buy one of those robot line mowers to do the work for you. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com