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Comment by jakogut | Hacker News Reader

I cut down and removed some forty trees of heaven, ranging forty to sixty feet tall and up to ten inches in diameter, using an M12 8" pruning saw. I went through a lot of batteries, a couple chains, and almost a full bottle of bar oil, but I didn't need to hassle with a small engine.

They make an M18 version now that would've been nice to have at the time.

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I think you hit on one of the great benefits of cordless electric tools, especially those that have recently taken over the lawn&garden market.

For so long if you had even a small yard you had to have a mower, an edger, a hedge trimmer, a weed wacker, maybe a small chainsaw for standard homeowner tasks throughout the year. Each of these had small gas motors in them that required priming, starting, gas, oil, lubricant (for chains and other things), and potential tuneups of the throttle and small components like that. It was honestly a huge pain.

The worst is that you had to have all these small gas cans around the garage that were premixed with different ratios of oil for many of these engines.

For a homeowner you needed these tools to keep your yard looking good. But they don't get an abundant amount of work. You might fill a weedwacker up with fuel 2-3 times all summer. A hedge trimmer once. Then in the winter you need to try to drain the fuel so bad fuel didn't rot in there. Then undo it all in the spring. It was a lot of work and small engines just deteriorate while sitting still.

We have seen electric tools in the form of drills and drivers for a while. But they had never been powerful enough before to operate a huge lawn mower or weed wacker reliably. Now they are and it makes home lawn and garden so much nicer. When you start one of these tools you only have to make sure the battery is charged. It starts with one click. No priming, no mixing oil, no winterizing. Not to mention it is quieter.

I get that professional lawn care might still need the power of gas tools for a while longer, but homeowners can finally kiss that world goodbye. I replaced my mower about 5 years ago. Then the next time I had trouble with the weedwacker I replaced it with an electric one of the same company and batter system. Since then I have bought a leaf blower, a hedge trimmer, and a small garden tiller, and a pole saw, all that use the same battery system. It has been amazing and truly simplified my life.

Absolutely, small engines are a pain, and the more you have, the more pain they are. Especially when they don't get used often.

The pruning saw was as much as cheap gasoline chainsaw, but it fires right up with minimal maintenance (charging, bar oil), without having to mix and pour fuel. I can put it in storage for a few years and it'll run just as well as the day I left it.

I also have some Greenworks 60V tools, including a mower and trimmer, and they work great for my yard.

The chainsaws (both the small ones and the bigger ones) are a real example of where you can look at something that has substantially improved and is actually usable now. The M18 chainsaw is perfectly usable and much easier than firing up the big gas one.

I guess those are Stihl models? I think you're overestimating the inconvenience of a small engine. It's possible that I'm underestimating the convenience of a battery... I do have an old-school bias probably. But if I were cutting that much I'd rather stop and refuel once, maybe twice than have to keep swapping batteries. I guess it's heavier too... I think of it as a workout.

Edit: I guess I should disclose my comparison, which is a Stihl MS260 that's probably 20-30 years old. Never a problem starting and I'm guessing easier to repair than an electric one.

Milwaukee. As another commenter pointed out, it's not so much that small engines are inconvenient to use as that they're also inconvenient to store and maintain. Especially when it's a seldom used tool.

Especially the newer gas ones. Old gas tools were loose, carbureted, and flexible; they'd run on damn near anything burnable.

New ones often have a bunch of stuff on them to reduce emissions, which makes them more complicated (some are fuel injected!) and you have to do things like drain out the ethanol-injected gas so it doesn't go bad over the winter, etc, etc.

I'm just sad my snowblower died before electric ones really took off.

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