Thoughts on battery powered lawn mowers...

secretariata said:

So, after lawn mower failure while cutting today (hopefully the last time until next spring...), I'm looking to replace my nearly dead gas mower and planning to go battery powered.  I have read all of the posts in the several threads on GRM and looked at reviews etc. from other places.  Think I have narrowed my choice down to either the Kobalt 80v or the Ryobi 40v.  Would also get a string trimmer of the same system.  The Kobalt 40v mower had a significant number of reviews hammering the battery life both related to operating time and degradation over time so I have decided to skip it.  My only other battery tools are Rigid and so I'm stuck having one system for hand tools and one for yard tools and I'm OK with that.

I currently cut a bit under 1/3 of an acre (say 0.3 acres) and 2/3 of that is basically flat with 1/3 being a hill that I cut going across instead of up & down.  My lawn is well established with centipede grass that is thick and I normally cut it to a height of somewhere around 2.5".  I have to cut it every week with a gas push mower and it takes me about 80 minutes with no breaks.  So I am guessing neither of the systems I'm considering will do the job on a single charge and my hope would be to use the battery from the other tools to supplement the mower battery so that I can finish with one brief break to do a battery swap.  It's always hot & humid and I don't want to have to spend 2 evenings a week cutting the grass...I could weedeat first and plug that battery into the charger while I start mowing.

So, the Kobalt 80v is expensive...I could buy the Ryobi 40v push mower + battery & charger, string trimmer with interchangeable tool capability + battery & charger, and more than half of the edger tool for the cost of the Kobalt 80v push mower + battery & charger.  My normal inclination would be to buy the Ryobi 40v based on price and the reviews from users here on GRM, but I'm not sure that is the correct decision.  Anybody got direct experience with both systems that they care to share?

 

I actually do it backwards from you. I cut my lawn first and when the battery is about dead in the mower, it will still power the trimmer for a long while. At the moment I have three Kobalt 40v devices. Mower, Trimmer, and hedge trimmer. Three batteries is more than enough to do a 1/4 of an acre

In reply to Grizz :

Yea we have the 18v Ryobi trimmer and it's an absolute beast. 

In reply to secretariata :

I'm a Kobalt 80V guy, but I don't have the mower. I have 3 acres to tend to. I use the string trimmer, leaf blower, hedge trimmer and pole saw. The power from the 80v stuff is similar to gas units that I've used, and the charge time of 30 minutes means that I can almost always have one battery fully charged by the time the one I'm using is dead. The string trimmer does all of my trimming (and there's a bunch with 3 acres) on less than a full charge. I use the leaf blower on it's strongest setting and can clear off my mower, large driveway and patio with a full charge. I have no complaints at all with the Kobalt stuff, but I've not used any of the Ryobi system that you're looking at for comparison.

Canoe