Whipper snippers (aka line trimmers or weed wackers)...

..., brushcutters, and other hand-held small engined machinery

In my previous post about chainsaws, the TL;DR was that the clean electric solution was about 95% of the way there; better for most people, but not quite ready for the relatively few people who need the biggest, most powerful petrol saws on the market. But chainsaws are an outlier; no other small-engined appliance requires so much power in such a light, hand-carried package. And so we turn to these lower-powered garden gadgets. Is what’s currently on the market sufficient to replace petrol tools in time for California’s 2024 deadline?

But first - what, precisely am I talking about here? An ever-expanding range of powered garden cutting tools. There’s line trimmers - otherwise known as “whipper snippers”, used for trimming the edges of lawns and cutting unruly grass too big for a conventional mower (which we will get to in this series!). If you want a neater edge on your lawn, there are special-purpose lawn edgers specifically for that purpose. There’s their bigger, scarier cousin, brushcutters, fitted with a bladed disc and used to clear tougher plants like blackberry bushes. There’s hedge trimmers, with flat oscillating blades. Need to prune a tree, but don’t want to climb a ladder? You want a pole pruner - a miniature chainsaw at the end of a long pole. Too lazy to sweep up leaves or grass cuttings? There’s the infamous leaf blower for that. Need to dig a lot of holes to put a fence in? Don’t bother with a shovel, use a post hole auger.

You might be dubious of the need for all of these gadgets, particularly for a home gardener. But for people with larger backyards, and especially professional gardeners, these kinds of tools are massive productivity enhancers.

Like the chainsaw, historically, the vast majority of these tools have been powered with small two-stroke engines - simple, cheap, light, and horribly polluting.

Unlike chainsaws, however, four-stroke brushcutters and the like are reasonably common as well, likely partly spurred on by earlier Californian pollution regulations and the lower power demands. Even professional versions of these tools have engines that produce less than 2 kilowatts of power, a small fraction of the requirements of chainsaws.

Electric garden tools are the here and now

Given California’s regulations and the fact that the energy requirements are more modest, you’d expect a full range of electrified garden tools for amateurs and professionals. And you’d be right; there’s electric garden tools in all sizes and to meet all budgets.

As an example of what modern electric garden tools are capable of, here’s a delightfully non-professional video from a professional gardener using a high-end electric brush cutter to slash through some very luxuriant vegetation.

Having used a whipper-snipper occasionally, that’s right at the limit of the types of vegetation you can tackle with a nylon line, and it’s just eating it up.

With a metal blade, the same brushcutter makes short work of a weed that many Australians will be familiar with - blackberry:

If you’re interested in diving down a YouTube rabbit hole, there' are many more videos of vegetation being sliced, but suffice to say that most of the people wielding these electric tools are more than happy with how they perform.

Charging can be a challenge

So is this category now a solved problem?

Unfortunately for California, not entirely in the minds of the professional gardeners who use these day-in, day-out.

The issues are rather neatly laid out in this review of the exact same brushcutter (there are plenty of others on the market, but Stihl and Husqvarna are the long-time market leaders in the petrol tool space, and consequently the first options that most professionals are likely to consider):

While the reviewer is perfectly happy with the performance of the trimmer, the battery life and charging are perceived as a problem. Trimming the lawns of a single house (which is done with truly impressive speed and efficiency) uses roughly half the battery; furthermore, they were unable to use the AC outlet in their truck to charge. As the reviewer points out, at that rate, a day’s worth of batteries would be a very considerable outlay (if substantially compensated for by the virtual elimination of maintenance and not inconsiderable fuel cost savings).

Like EVs, reliable fast charging is going to be a prerequisite if electric is going to replace the small petrol engine.

As commenters on that review pointed out, things aren’t quite as dire as all that. Commenters mentioned the possibility of fitting larger inverters to their trucks to run the charger - one even mentioned using solar panels. There are also bigger batteries available; from the availability of a substantially bigger battery in the same physical size, to 1.5 kWh “backpack batteries” that have more enough power to run for most of the day.

A bad case of vendor lock-in

But the other noticeable thing about these batteries is that they are, indeed, very expensive. Eyebrow-raisingly expensive, in fact. The “backpack battery”, at $2,500 RRP, is in fact substantially more expensive per watt-hour of capacity than the regular-sized battery. Put another way, a top-of-the-range Kia EV6 dual motor - the hottest, hardest-to-get EV in Australia right now - costs about $87,000 and comes with a 77kWh battery. To get an equivalent amount of battery capacity from these backpack batteries would cost over $130,000!

Undoubtedly, Hyundai has more clout with battery factories than relatively small machinery makers, but there’s another factor at work. You can use batteries from a Stihl line trimmer in your Stihl hedge trimmer, or electric chainsaw, or outdoor vacuum. Some brands, such as Ryobi, even use the same battery architecture in everything from electric drills to stick vacuums, to lawnmowers. But there is no way in the world that you can use a rechargeable battery from another brand of tool. And I think it’s fairly safe to say there are some monopoly rents being charged in the cost of these proprietary battery packs.

If you want to avoid paying the premium for proprietary battery packs, your only option is to explore the wonderful world of no-brand Chinese knockoffs, which often work as well as the originals, but sometimes fail miserably. Not exactly a thrilling prospect given the risk of lithium-ion batteries going into thermal runaway.

Hopefully, at some point, once the EU is done with stopping Apple’s Lightning cable lurk, they can turn their attention to equally unnecessary lithium-ion battery lock-in. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to buy replacement lithium-ion battery packs, appropriately safety tested and approved, from a variety of name-brand vendors in a competitive market.

Next up, we’ll look at lawnmowers.