Is It Safe To Use A Hose On Your Riding Mower?

As you would probably expect, given its job, a riding mower can get pretty gross after a few runs across your lawn. If you look around your yard for tools to clean it with, you’ll probably notice your garden hose. Technically speaking, you can use your hose to clean your riding mower, but it’s important that you only use it to clean the mower deck on the bottom. If you spray the top of the mower, where all of its sensitive components are stored, it could end up doing more harm than good.

Indeed, the hose has always been a quick and easy option for spraying down dirty stuff, and both the mower deck on the bottom and the housing on top can get covered with dirt, grass stains, and little bits of debris. But besides being unseemly, dried crud can gradually start to clog up the mower’s moving parts. This is why properly maintaining your mower is important, but you need to use the right tools for the job, and be careful when using them.

As tempting as it may be to start spraying down your entire riding mower with reckless abandon, that’s a temptation that’s best tempered. While a blast from a hose may dislodge some stains and debris from the top housing of your mower, that housing almost definitely isn’t water-tight. That means you’re going to get water inside your mower’s more delicate components, including the oil and air filters and the spark plug housing. If any of these components get wet, they could suffer permanent damage. It’s the same reason you shouldn’t use a hose on an engine bay. Instead, you should clean off the top of your mower by hand, using useful mower cleaning tools like a wire brush or blower to physically dislodge debris and cleaning off stains with a rag.

On the literal flip side, the mower deck on the bottom of your riding mower is prime territory for a good hose-down. The mower deck is mostly self-contained, so as long as you’re careful to only spray the deck, it’s a great way to loosen any accumulated gunk. In fact, some mowers even have built-in washing ports that you can plug a hose right into, running the water alongside the blades to get a good, thorough wash going on the deck. If your mower doesn’t have a built-in port, however, just run the blades and spray the ground next to a corner of the deck. This will splash water up into the deck while it’s running. Just make sure to aim low to the ground so you don’t accidentally splash any parts of the upper housing.