I know little about mowers, but more about cars. They have the fan belt, or auxiliary drive belt, and they have a mechanism for tightening the belt. You may just need to do this. You could just try tightening it a bit. It is certainly possible to do damage by over tightening these things.
Most offices and stores have air conditioning here.
It rains all the time, so we have less need of AC.
You've never been to the United States in the Summer, have you?
I think this used to be totally true, in that torque converters are inherently inefficient. I THINK there exist automatic gearboxes that are just manual gearboxes with a computer to do the gears, which could be as efficient. There is also CVT which is less efficient but can allow the engine to always run at the most efficient speed so could be more efficient in total.
The US is quite big, there are some cold bits aren't there?You've never been to the United States in the Summer, have you?
My understanding is that Northern cities have never really been tolerable in the Summer, either. Before air conditioning, wealthy (and middle-class?) people would simply head for the hills, or for the shore. That's why we used to have so many resort communities around the North, before air travel, and why communities like The Hamptons, the Catskills, and the Berkshires became popular with urbanites. We all know Atlantic City as a popular seaside resort on the East Coast for most of the 20th Century, but there were smaller resort towns practically every few feet, up and down the East Coast from Georgia to Maine, maybe from the mid-19th Century onwards. I think Saratoga NY was the Las Vegas of its day. Some of them are still there, but there used to be more than there are now.
In the Winters. Northern US cities will make you hate your life in the Summer. I'm happy to live in a leafy neighborhood, but I've visited parts of New York City and Philadelphia in July-August, and I wanted to kill myself. I've heard that Washington DC in the Summer is like being boiled alive.
