Cordless Electric leaf Blowers?

This stuff is the real deal. Not cheap, but works awesome.

http://coreoutdoorpower.com/products-page/

Every couple years when I'm at the metal recycling corral at the dump I snag a new leaf blower that's in need of a $10 carb gasket kit. I've got 3 Homelites at the moment and they all light off in a couple pulls and get the job done fine. I mix a gallon of no-ethanol gas and whatever 2T oil I have around the beginning of the season. 5 minutes, tops.

I'm slowly converting all my yard equipment over to plug in electric. I inherited a 5kw generator from my dad that worked perfectly except for the carb being plugged up from not being used enough.

I mounted it in a lawn mower trailer I had sitting around with a 50' retractable cord reel bolted to the side and I can just tow it wherever with the rider. Enough room in the trailer for the electric chainsaw and string trimmer to just live there too.

All the electric stuff, and in particular the pruner and string trimmer weigh half of what an equally powerful gas one would weigh, making them so much easier to use, and on those two pieces of equipment alone the electric cost enough less that I could have bought a new hf generator and still saved money vs the gas.

Side benefit of using the generator more, which means if I really need it then it will start easily and that my wife now has experience running it and is confident she both could and would if necessary.

pres589 wrote: Yeah it's called a "rake".

Or a broom.

I’ve got a plug in Black and Decker blower / vacuum that I’m super happy with. After many years of use, the vacuum bag finally wore out. Given that the impeller was pretty beat up and the high speed switch only worked intermittently, I decided to get something new. After shopping around, I came to the conclusion that the stuff on the market today is a move backwards. Everything downstream of the impeller on my B&D is a separate, optimized system for the blower and the vacuum. The stuff on the market today appear to be blowers with vacuums added as afterthoughts. Anyway, I got a replacement vacuum bag from Amazon for ~25 bucks which should buy me a few years.

BTW, I have a pool and the cord routinely falls in. A while back, I asked a friend that has a degree in electrical engineering how dangerous it was and he just shrugged his shoulders and said “I don’t know but I do the same thing”.

My dad has a 40V of some brand, and it's more powerful than one of his little gas ones. It doesn't match a backpack blower, but it'll match up with anything in the sub $100 price range.

Honestly guys, just invest the money for a turbo.

Earlier this year, I bought a Kobalt 80V cordless string trimmer from Lowes.

This one It's awesome.

On the box, it says "accepts accessories", and I noticed right next to it in the store was a blower, hedge trimmer and pole-saw attachments (among others). I was close to buying the 80V blower version, but all three of those attachments cost about half as much combined.

All that said, the blower attachment will be used mainly for clearing grass clippings. For moving leaves, I already have a RedMax commercial-grade back-pack blower. I just used it last weekend for the first time in about 2 years. Given my general hatred for 2-stroke engines, I was amazed it started up without much drama (and old gas that had been sitting in it for 2+ years).

I bought an eGo a few weeks ago. Sold through Home Depot. It's been life changing!

56V lithium, 7.4 lbs (with the battery), excellent battery life, a little slow on recharge. But the best thing by far is the blower design. 530 CFM. Variable speed. It's a monster.

My wife couldn't care less about power tools, but even she started to giggle when she pushed the "Turbo" button!

I've started using it for everything. It blows the dust out of my shop in a quarter of the time my big air compressor does. Clean the driveway, clean the roof, dry the dog, blow the hat off my kid's head from the next room- the thing has alll kinds of uses! Lol!!

I have a few of the Kobalt 80V items that IanF mentioned. The leaf blower is awesome. The 30 minute charge times are legit. It has three speeds and a variable trigger. At it's highest setting, it's just as powerful as the gas powered backpack blowers I've used in the past, while being much quieter. I can run it full blast for about half an hour before it needs to be recharged, but decreasing the speed will make the battery last longer, and takes care of grass clippings and dry stuff easy enough.

On a full charge, I can trim everything that I need to on my 3 acre lot and have some power left. I throw the battery on the charger while I mow, and use the blower to clean up when I'm done.

The GreenWorks brand on Amazon sells the same stuff, and offers a hedge trimmer that Lowes doesn't offer. But, as I found out, the batteries are not interchangeable between GreenWorks and Kobalt without some modification. Keep that in mind if you're considering getting more than one tool.

My suggestion- if you are getting a cordless blower, might as well get the cordless trimmer that goes with it. And perhaps the cordless mower that's part of that same system.

I know people are bringing up the environment mostly in jest- but IMHO, this shows the benefit AND the drawback of electric powered stuff. Currently, most rechargeable home equipment is more than enough to deal with 90% of my yard work. My mower would use gas REALLY slowly, and I had to fill my trimmer once every 3 years. It's so much easier to deal with the battery than gas, it's not even funny.

For light blowing, I'd totally get the blower attachment to my trimmer set up (I have no idea if one brand is better than another, so I'm not posting my brand).

BUT, for heavy blowing, or more correctly, heavy vacuum cleaning- I have a cord. For the massive leaf clean up I do, the corded works just fine- I can deal with the cord.

The single thing that I HAVE to use gas is blowing snow. Have too much to blow and have to blow it too far for even a plug in shovel to work.

I haz seen the light!!

The Troy Bilt stuff is awesome! I bought the string trimmer first. No actually I bought the 40V and then the 80V Lowes models first. For the Lowes string trimmer you were limited because the head wouldn't accept aftermarket heavier lines or plastic/metal cutting heads. It said the whole thing would blow up if I did and the motor wouldn't be covered under warranty and all kinds of other bad stuff. Plus the extra batteries were stupid expensive and 30 minute charges were only possible under certain conditions in the real world. Plus it still needed more power and run time.

So I tried the Troy Bilt and it was awesome from the get go. How about 15-20 minute real world charges and a lot more torque!

I have 3 acres to trim and a lot of grass around 2 ponds so I'll use it more than most of you. I ABSOLUTELY HATE the gas powered stuff just simply due to maintenance and starting issues, not to mention having to have gas available and possibly oil.

The Troy Bilt was easy to use and well balanced.

Batteries still aren't cheap, but I found I didn't need to buy an extra one because the batteries lasted much longer than me. I simply couldn't run them out in a normal work cycle. I could hand it off to my wife to finish and she could run it down, but I couldn't before I ran down.

I had a corded leaf blower and I love it, but with 3 acres I exceeded the reach of my cord so we saw the Troy Bilt blower on sale and snagged it so that we got our 2nd battery (and charger) for cheap.

It's not quite as good as the corded one, but it's really only for blowing leaves off the driveway so it's quite adequate. One benefit with the slightly less blow was that now it's easier to blow out the garage. I'm not accidentally blowing things off the wall or lifting up the diamond plate rolled vinyl (from HD) that's on the floor.

We have 2 of the Echo weed eaters, the Echo blower, and the Echo chainsaw. All of them are really good. Even used for commercial work, they hold up. The weed eaters last us about half the day before having to change out batteries. The blower goes all day if we use one of the 4ah batteries that come with the weed eaters instead of the 2ah battery it came with. You can buy the whole weed eater with battery and charger for less than just the battery. Direct Tools Outlet carries them, as does Home Depot.

We like the battery tools because they just work. We never have to fight with getting them running. They also let us talk to our customers more easily because we don't have to shut them down and restart them.

The weed eaters use the same heads as the normal Echo gas powered weed eaters, so you can use whatever line you choose.

Canoe

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We have this RYOBI 18V ONE+ Hybrid Blower - works either with the battery pack or on 110V. Link

Tagged by canoes again!!!

I want one of those battery powered lawnmowers but then I'd have to clean up the grass when I'm done. Eh, I miss the cheap lawn care in southern California. 

I switched to battery powered trimmer, blower and mower a couple years ago.

I have an old 2 stroke weed wacker that needs the carb cleaned or something and a like new cheap push mower that I should either sell or just put out on the curb and let the metal pickers come take away.

It is nice that the stuff just works. If you have a smaller yard electric seems to be the way to go.

Canoe removed

In reply to BillJackson :

Their canoes appear to be top notch!

Third canoe strike for the thread.  Locking for now, send unlock requests to the canoe report thread.