Looking to make your yard care cleaner, quieter, and more energy efficient?
MrPowertools supply professional and honest service.
Electric lawn tools like lawnmowers, leaf blowers, and hedge trimmers are becoming more popular and you have tons of options to choose from.
No matter what tools you're in the market for, you'll want to weigh several key factors before making your decision. These include cost, battery life, ease of use, and performance. Your priorities will depend on your yard-care needs ' and your budget.
We're here to simplify the decision-making process to help you pick the right tools for the job.
Mowers
Before you go shopping for an electric lawnmower, consider what you'll need it to do. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
How big is my yard?
Is it simple to mow or are there challenging areas to navigate?
Do I have access to outdoor power outlets or the budget for a spare battery?
Will the mower have to be powerful enough to hack through tall grass?
Quality corded mowers start around $200 and most cordless mowers range from $300 to $900, with the most expensive models offering more power and battery life. Riding mowers come with higher price tags, generally in the thousands, but have features that may better suit larger yards or people with mobility impairments.
Leaf blowers
Electric leaf blowers can keep your yard, driveway, and sidewalk clear and produce significantly less noise. Corded and cordless models range from $40 to upwards of $400. What kind you should buy depends on many of the same considerations we listed above. If you have a small yard a cheaper leaf blower might work just fine. If you will be covering large areas or using the blower frequently, a bigger investment probably makes more sense.
Hedge trimmers
Most folks can get a great corded or cordless hedge trimmer that meets their needs for $40 to $200. The most expensive hedge trimmers are $700+.
Once again, your needs will dictate how much you should spend. If you're trying to maintain the shape of a few shrubs and you have an outlet nearby, you may not need a huge trimmer or a cordless model. But if you're regularly dealing with large, thick hedges and you need a long run time, you'll likely want to purchase a more powerful model.
What
'
s next?
Once you've upgraded your lawn tools and see how much they can save you on energy costs, you may just want to start electrifying everything.
Learn how you can upgrade everything ' from your cooktop to your car ' in our electrification guides for homeowners and renters!
Contact us to discuss your requirements of Cordless Garden Tools. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.
3
/
11
Cheng Wei/Shutterstock
You'll find battery-powered yard tools with 18-, 24-, 36-, 40-, 56- and even 80-volt batteries. You may think that a higher voltage battery automatically translates to more power. That's true in some cases, but not always. In fact, a well-designed tool with a 40-volt battery can match the power of an 80-volt tool, so you can't rely on battery voltage alone to judge a tool's suitability.
The true measure of a battery-powered yard tool's efficiency is its wattage. To calculate wattage simply multiply volts times amps. Here's how that applies to battery-powered yard tools. If you think of volts as pressure (psi) and amps as volume (gallons), then multiplying volts (pressure) times amps (volume) gives you the number of 'gallons' at a set pressure (volts). So a tool with a higher wattage rating uses more power than a comparable tool with a lower wattage rating.
4
/
11
The electrical storage capacity of a battery is rated in amp-hours. An amp-hour rating gives you an idea how long a battery can continuously output a set number of amps. A 5-amp-hour battery, for example, will discharge 5 amps continuously for one hour. If you run the yard tool at a higher speed or higher load that draws more than 5 amps, the battery will discharge faster.
But a battery's amp-hour rating alone doesn't give you an indication of how much total power the tool can deliver. That's why you also need to compare the battery's watt-hour rating (volts x amp-hours). Some manufacturers list the watt-hour rating, but many don't. Here's an example of two similarly sized batteries based on amp-hours.
The 40-volt Toro PowerPlex T90 battery has a 2.5 amp-hour 90 watt-hour rating. Another manufacturer provides an 18-volt 2.0 amp-hour battery with a 36 watt-hour rating. Even though the batteries have similar amp-hour ratings (2.0 and 2.5), their watt-hour ratings are very different (90 versus 36). If you're comparing batteries, make sure you compare watt-hour ratings instead of just amp-hours. Life hack: How to double the life of your lithium ion batteries.
Photo: The Toro Company, Rick Muscoplat
5
/
11
Many lithium batteries come equipped with a series of lights that indicate remaining battery power. They're an invaluable aid to let you know whether you've got enough power to finish the job or start a new one. The indicators are fairly accurate, but they're not foolproof. That's because lithium batteries don't discharge like older nickel'cadmium (NiCad ) or nickel metal hybrid (Ni'MH) batteries. Those batteries discharged slower and slower until they finally conked out. So you could 'milk' that last little bit of power out of them to finish the job. Lithium batteries, on the other hand, output power at a fairly steady rate until battery voltage reaches a pre-set cutoff point, and then the battery shuts off completely. So be warned; if you start a job with less than 1/4-power left on the battery, your yard tool will probably shut down sooner than you think. Once it's shut down, you're out of business.
Photo: The Toro Company, Rick Muscoplat
For more information, please visit Cordless Power Tools Manufacturer.