I hit a rock with the hover mower and it broke the plastic fan part underneath. I sourced the part but they wanted £50 for it. With the bricks hidden just beneath the lawn in my English garden, I’m going to break it again. I decided to buy a new lawn mower, a cordless lawn mower. Unfortunately, It was a bit more complicated than I imagined!
Why Go Cordless?
Why indeed! Cordless are expensive and like all cordless tools, you would never manage to finish the job without having to recharge. Well, that’s what I thought, and trying to find information that contradicted this was difficult.
Petrol lawn mowers, you can just top up with petrol. Electric Lawn mowers will run as long as they are plugged in. Why would you want to limit yourself? The answer is in the title. CORDLESS! No cord! Nothing to determine the distance from the plug socket. Nothing pumping out noxious fumes. Just nothing!
I can just keep mowing! HANG ON, that’s not exactly true, which brings me to the next question.
How Long Will A Cordless Lawn Mower Run For
That information is like seeking a rabbit down a rabbit hole. Each make and model has a different battery capacity and voltage. Brushless motor or brushed? It all makes a difference. To be frank, it’s a dumb question anyway. The question you should be asking is how much lawn does it cut? The answer to that is even more elusive. Is it long grass, is it short grass, is it an English garden? This brings us to:
What Volt and What Amps?
Here’s what I learned in my research.
Volts Are the Power.
The higher the volts the longer, tougher grass you can cut. Maybe you have an uneven English garden like me, this tends to require the higher voltage machines.
The Amps Are Time or Distance
How long the battery will last or how much lawn you can cut. It makes sense to go for the highest voltage and the biggest amps. Prices tend to rise as the voltage and the amps do, but I managed to find a sub £150 model with 40 volts and 5 amps. Here’s the model I bought, though this article is more to help you understand rather than what you should buy. Powerbase 40V Cordless Lawn mower from Homebase, a UK Garden centre/ DIY shack. Here’s something similar on Amazon.
Will It Mow My Whole Lawn Then?
Here’s the thing that would have been most helpful when I was looking for a cordless Lawn mower. If the manufacturers had shown me a picture of what size garden it could mow! It’s ok saying it will mow for 20 minutes or it will mow 300 square feet. That doesn’t help me.
Here are two pictures of my lawns mowed with a 40 volt 5 amp battery. The battery display suggested that there was about half left. That would mean 40 volts, 2.5 amps would mow my two small lawns. Here’s the photos.
How Did the Cordless Lawn Mower Compare to an Electric Mower?
Welcome to a whole new world! What surprised me the most was the time I saved by not having to constantly avoid the trailing cable. The lightness of the unit was also very noticeable. It seemed to do zero turns meaning it needed no extra space to turn. The cut was exceptional over my bumpy English garden. The 40 volt cordless mower didn’t even flinch! As you can see in the photos, it sailed around trees and cut close to the fences.
Would I Buy Another Cordless Mower?
I’ve only used it once! This isn’t a review of a particular model but the one I purchased has a 3-year guarantee. If this lawn mower continues to perform as well as it did today, then I would say hands down, YES!