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Comment by plandis | Hacker News Reader

I have an electric weed trimmer, lawn mower and leaf blower. They are quite a bit less noise than gas equivalents I used growing up. The one huge downside is that these devices are pretty big energy consumers and battery life is horrible.

My yard is tiny and I’ll routinely go through 2 240WHr batteries each time I cleanup my yard. I couldn’t imagine how annoying that would be with an actual big yard. Also good luck if you go on vacation and come back to tall grass, my electric mower (I have one from Ryobi) that struggles to increase the torque well enough to handle it.

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I bought a reel mower for my smaller yard. No charging, minor effort to keep it clean, stays sharp for a long time (at some point I'll have to deal with that, but it's been good so far), no gas, essentially no noise. It takes me just as long to mow my yard as with an electric or gas mower, though I do have to mow it twice a week during the peak growing season (it does not handle tall grass very well). But 20-30 minutes of walking & pushing exercise is not terrible twice a week, I run, row, and cycle a lot more than that. Last year I treated it as a warmup and followed it up with a 30+ minute run.

Yeah I actually initially started out with a reel mower when my wife and I first bought our house, they are definitely pretty good, assuming you can work around the caveats you mentioned.

I should try doing it before a run that’s a good idea

> these devices are pretty big energy consumers > go through 2 240WHr batteries

Is that a big energy consumption? It's about 0.5 kWH, or about $0.10, depending on where you are. How much would you spend on gas & oil for a 2-stroke ICE system?

(I can understand that it's a bit of a hassle from a charging process point of view.)

I think he means more like you need a few batteries or you have to break up your work across a couple days

It’s not the cost that’s the issue but rather that you either need higher energy density batteries which will typically be heavier or you need many batteries or you need to take breaks to charge the batteries you have.

Now, this isn’t so bad for my yard but if I was mowing my grandparents yard like I did as a kid that would be a really annoying limitation since they had like an 0.75 acre lot.

I hope that battery technology continues to improve but today it is for sure a limitation.

It would be nice if there was a standard battery like the standard propane take. Take it to the store and swap out a charged one. Drive your electric vehicle to the station and swap out your empty for a full one, and drive away in the time it takes to fill up a gasoline car instead of 20 minutes-multiple hours it takes to charge an EV today. All your tools use the same battery, the EV just uses more in a larger holder.

If the world were like that, it wouldn't be an issue to grab some of the standard multiuse batteries you have lying around your house and use them for the acre lot mow job (sometimes while doing landscaping you need to take a gas can out with you too, after all).

Instead what we are left with is every brand has their own standard, which changes every few years, leaving the consumer with a mountain of useless crap to perennially replace and increases the costs of electric appliance adoption (whereas gas is standardized and cheap and works for your car as well as all your equipment, 2 stroke aside).

A good result of this is that the technology is going to get a lot better now that there's a larger market for the electric alternatives.

Why can't leaf blowers have just long cables and no battery? Would be completely fine for small gardens. Professional ones could have quickly interchangeable batteries.

On lawn movers, you could put giant batteries as you don't carry them, it's just a matter of cost.

A cord cannot deliver enough power. They exist, but only smaller models and you quickly need more power.

Because your standard 1.5HP 110V circuit has as much torque an as sloth, which is only slightly better than battery operated tools' having as much torque as an anemic sloth.

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