Is this the future of mowing. It Looks like something out of "The Jetsons" or something, doesn't it? The little space capsule for mowing your lawn. This is a Kubota ZD mower, but we're going to be talking more specifically about this cab today, an air-conditioned cab that can go onto your mower, that's going to do a couple of things for you. Keep the pollen in off of you, keep the bugs out of your face, keep the grass blowing back on you, and keep you cool all at the same time. I'm going to show you around this. We'll talk about the benefits, but also some of the downsides and complications of installing this on a machine like this. Come along with me today, we're going to take a quick walk around this cool-looking mower.
The cab that's fit onto this mower is an after-market cab from a company called Curtis, out of Massachusetts. Curtis makes a lot of cabs for Kubota's machines, the two companies work fairly close with one another. A little bit of engineering effort is shared, but they are two independent companies. While this looks like a drop-on factory cab today, it is not. This is a piece that I'm sourcing through Curtis. If you look here, there are a couple of unique things that are done on this machine to make it work on a zero-turn mower.
You can add cabs onto a lot of different things, but you have some different considerations when you get onto a machine like this. One of those considerations is weight. On this machine, you're going to find there are more Plexiglas doors, less metal structure, to keep the weight of the cab itself down. The more weight that you add onto a machine like this, the more mass that you're moving around with those wheel motors, and it's going to bog the machine down a little bit more. Speaking of bogging down, horsepower is generally an issue when you're looking at a machine like this. This is a 26 horsepower diesel engine, and running a 72-inch mower deck and an air conditioner, uphill all at the same time, is asking a lot of this little engine.
When I say it's asking a lot of the engine, you can see, it takes a lot of added equipment in order to operate an air conditioner. There's going to be an added electrical load that's going to run the fans and the lights and everything that are on the front of the cab. In order to accomplish that, they're adding a double-stacked alternator back here on the back. That's having both the regular alternator that's typically on this machine and a secondary one that's going to run the electrical systems on the cab. Stacked off of that is another belt that comes down to an air conditioning compressor that's down underneath this cover here, on the side. Generally, when we're looking at air conditioners like this, we're putting them onto tractors and that kind of thing, and we're figuring you're going to draw about two or three horsepower or so off of that engine, in order to run that air conditioning system. There's going to be a definite draw on this machine when you're doing heavy work with it, you might notice the impact of the air conditioning system. We're going to do a little bit of performance testing here coming up, so stay along with me, and we'll show you how it drives.
When I'm looking at a machine, one of the things that I often will focus on is serviceability. It's one thing in order to look at features and function and that kind of stuff when you're choosing a machine, but serviceability is something you really want to keep an eye on, because that's what you're going to be dealing with over the lifetime of owning that piece of equipment. Kubota does a good job on this unit of creating flip up seats and swing out hoods in order to be able to get down to the guts of the machine. Putting this cab on compromises this in some ways, but they have maintained all of that ability. In order to get to the latch for the hood, I've got to wiggle my fingers up here around the back, and you'll find that I can still open the hood. The same goes for this seat. I've got to wiggle my hands back in behind this cab structure back here, but I could still get into the points to be able to flip the hood of the seat open, to be able to get down to the guts machine, to perform regular maintenance.
There's two things here on the front of the cab that are optional extras that I have on this machine. One is going to be this windshield wiper. There's even a washer fluid bottle here in the back that you can run some washer fluid to, to keep your sight lines clean out the front. These work lights up here on the top, I actually will mow at night periodically, or are at times approaching dusk, and having these LED lights up here in the front illuminates the area in front of you so that you can continue mowing.
For a long time I've discouraged adding cabs onto tractors and a lot of other equipment, because adding aftermarket cabs is going to come with a certain amount of drawbacks, particularly in terms of noise. I'd say most of the time, when you running a zero turn mower, you're generally going to have to wear some kind of headphones, and that's going to maintain with the cab as well. When you close those doors up, it's going to be pretty loud on the inside. What I'm going to show you here is, it's not as loud as what I actually expected. If I come over here and start the machine up, run this up to full throttle, walk around here to the back with my DB meter, you'll see there that I'm sitting at right about 95 decibels right over top of the engine, kind of where your head would be when you're mowing. Now, if we come over here and we get in the cab, close the doors, I'm at 89 decimals.
Surprisingly enough, they've accomplished something here that I find is really difficult to imagine. By adding an enclosure on top of the machine like this, they have not raised the noise level significantly. Kicking the mower deck on is going to add, add to that number, it pushes it up to about 95 or so. That is a point that the OSHA numbers would say you're good for about 45 minutes in here before you can start doing hearing damage. I'm still going to encourage most people, when they're in a cab like this, to wear some kind of hearing protection. I wear a set of 3M work tunes when I go out and mow the grass anyway. Putting a cab on like this is not going to be whisper quiet, not like driving around your yard in your SUV, or even like a lot of the bigger factory cab tractors.
A lot of those machines are in the low eighties as far as DB levels go, they're definitely a lot more comfortable to be in. Even at working levels on the RPMs, you don't usually have to wear hearing protection in there. That's not the case here, you're still going to want to be in here with a set of headphones.
There's a couple things we're going to play with here today. First is the air conditioning itself. Up here behind me is where the air conditioner unit is itself. There's an outlet here at the top that the air blows out of, and it's going to help keep the cab cool. Now, in a way, I'm sitting in a little greenhouse here too. You can take a flap on the vent to direct the air here on the back, and actually point it down at yourself. I just got in here and closed the doors, it was a little hot in here from the get go, and just having that pointed down on me is really effective, and it helps keep you cool. It's blowing cold air down the back of your shirt.
This has got a couple of controls on it. One for how cold the air is, and then another one for fan speed. It does not have a thermostat on it, it won't turn on and off as the temperature in here comes down, but I definitely feel it. One little trick that they put on this thing in order to make sure that it's not pulling down the engine too hard, is adding a little micro switch onto the throttle. This thing doesn't start running the compressor until you have the engine up at full revs. If you back it off even a little bit, your throttle's going to come off that micro switch, and then it's not going to start running the compressor, and you don't get cold air.
Once I rev that up, it takes 15, 20 seconds or so, and I can even feel the temperature difference in the air that quickly. It does really work. The one concern we have here is horsepower. I'm doing this in basically October. We don't have thick, heavy grass at this point. If I take the machine here, and I'm going to set my mower deck down really low so I'm basically scalping the grass, to try to get myself a good load on the machine. You can hear my engine working a little bit.
I'm going and what would be about two thirds to a half of the speed that we normally would, with the air conditioner on and going uphill. You can see, there's a point here that, I've got to slow down to pull the hill. More horsepower would help, or, at the very least, a 60 inch mower deck is going to have 20% less cutting surface than what this 72 does, and is going to help having enough power if you're somebody that mows fast. I don't love to fly around, because I get jostled around so much, my yard's pretty rough.
Coming downhill makes a big difference. I'm nearly at full stick there, coming downhill. We're going to do this same thing here, and reach back and turn off the air conditioner. I could tell when that's on, it's not night and day. I'm asking about as much as I can of this thing right here, and even with the air off, it's lighting up this hill. Getting a beautiful cut. With the air conditioner off, and on a flatter ground, I can get the full stick. You know the air conditioner is there. Again, power would help, but if you're buying this thing, being able to go full speed is probably not necessarily what you're all about. This is more of a decision for comfort and convenience and that kind of thing, than it is being a commercial landscaper probably, who's really concerned about knocking out the acres per hour. I'm going to stop scalping the ground here, and go to more of what my normal cutting light is.
I mow at home right now with a 30 horsepower, gas zero turn, 72 inch. The torque from this is good. I don't feel like I have quite the power that that one does, but again, we're asking a lot of this thing. If Kubota came out with a good 35 horse diesel, this would be perfect. That's neat though, when I throttle down there, I can hear it come off of that micro switch and shut the air conditioning compressor off.
Another thing that I notice in here too, is how this impacts my sight lines. Out the front, it's really good. I can see very nicely. The corner posts up here aren't so big that they give you blind spots in the front. I do lose a little over the corners though, because of this thing here behind me. I can lean out to the left and the right and be able to see behind me well, but if you're concerned of something behind you, can't turn your head and see completely behind you in one shot. You've got to check both sides if you're worried about something behind you. I'm actually starting to get a little cold.
All told, running this thing around, I don't feel like this cab structure compromises this machine too much. Obviously there are times that you can hear the engine here on the video. I'm sure that we're asking a lot of a 26 horse engine, in order to do ll this at one time, but it is still very functional. As long as you're not trying to set land speed records with this thing, you're really good to go. Most of the time, this isn't a machine that you want to go super fast in any way. The ride on these things is not fantastic, they could do more as far as suspension and that kind of stuff. This one has a spring suspension seed on it, the air rides that they had on the 1511 were better. I don't like to mow a zero turn like this super fast anyway, where some of those other machines, Ferris is another brand that I also sell, that has spring suspension on it. That brand does a fantastic job of suspension, so you want to slow down on this one anyway. That's really the only criticism that I could give, would be that power thing. My visibility is good, I'm definitely more comfortable, and now that I'm parked here with the key turned off, I want that air conditioner right back one again.
That's a little bit on the Curtis Cab to go into the Kubota ZD series mower. I think a lot of you might look at this in different ways. You could look at this and laugh and think that it's a utterly ridiculous, and who would spend this amount of money to put an air conditioned cab on their mower? There are some silly things about it. At the same time, if you live in a really hot climate, or if you're like me and you suffer horribly from seasonal allergies, or you're mowing for a long amount of time and you've got eight hours in the seat every day, and a little bit of comfort is worth some dollars to you, there's a definite at customer for this machine and this cab, as unique as this is.
This is today, one of the only machines, to my knowledge the only machine on the market today, where you could take a zero turn mower and have this kind of capability. I think it's really cool to see Kubota and Curtis coming together in this way, to be able to offer a really unique product that doesn't exist elsewhere on the market. Even if it's a little expensive, the fact that it exists, to me, is really cool. There's obviously a lot of engineering that went into making this thing work, and it's got a couple of compromises, you're going to when you pull this off like this, but at the end of the day, I think it could bring a lot of value to a lot of people.
We get a surprising amount of snow here in the Northeast. We saw a lot of cabs on small tractors, but you would not believe how radically different the different enclosure solutions can be for the tractors that are out there. So today we're going to walk you around this machine and show you some of the things that make it a little unique. This is the Workmaster 25S, the tractor that this cab machine is based upon. You notice how small this thing looks without the big glass enclosure sitting on top of it. Today, we're going to focus on the cab itself. There's a lot to talk about here, but if you're interested in this specific tractor and the loader and the function of the tractor unit itself, we'll have a link down to the description or one of the little cards up here that links you to that video, that dives into the details on this machine. But today we're focusing on the cab. There are many different cab solutions for small tractors. For even a small machine like this you could have just simple, soft side enclosures that might be only a couple hundred dollars. Different degrees of add-on cabs in varying qualities and fits and finishes. But we always prefer to see factory cabs like this one that's behind me here.
