Battery Strimmers

[Gwen]

I have read the comments about strimmers in general, but does anyone have any recent experience with rechargeable battery strimmers. Thanks.

[snooky]

Morning Gwen,
I bought a cheap one from B&Q to keep the grass down on the paths of the allotment.It has a Ni-cd battery in it and lasts about an hour on a full charge and takes four to six hours to charge up again.You can get strimmers with a Lithium? battery which lasts longer but are more expensive.

[Primrose]

We've had one for years and used it with mixed results although we've never replaced the battery (as far as my memory serves me). They're probably ok if you have relatively small areas to cover but our experience is that they can poop out fairly quickly. As well as lawn edging, I initially wanted to use it for for giving my winter heathers a quick haircut and reducing their height after flowering but found that the strimmer didn't really cope well with the thicker strands of heather and have had to revert back to using shears, which is much harder work. Ours wasn't a very expensive one so a better quality model may produce better results. Another irritating issue is that the strimmer plastic in the reel jams regularly and I have to keep stopping strimming/edging to unlock it. A mixed blessing but on the whole, easier physically and less hard work than doing lawn edging and other jobs manually.

[Gwen]

Thanks both.
I have a line of gooseberry bushes along the side of my allotment (seventeen different varieties!), and just want to keep down the vegetation, mainly grass, which grows up between them, so a strimmer which goes for an hour would be fine, even if it were to take two charges to do it.
Snooky - what is the make of the strimmer you mention? I was hoping for a model with three plastic 'flails' like the big petrol strimmer I once had.
Thanks again.

[snooky]

Morning Gwen,
My cordless strimmer is B&Q's own 18 volt version with the plastic strimmer cord.

[Gwen]

Thanks for that. I will go and have a look at what B&Q has to offer, and then think on it till next Wednesday when I will get it cheaper, if they have something suitable.
Gwen (real name Sheila!)

[richard p]

i use one for little jobs where it would take longer to run the extension lead for the leccy one.than it does to do the job. theyre also lighter and easier to wave arround. .....ive just sold on a 14 volt bosch one that used a small plastic clip on blade...certainly less hassle than sorting tangled string.
all my other cordless kit is 18v ryobi so ive aquired a ryobi one that uses string. purely cos it uses the same lithium batteries that my other drills and saw uses.
the lithiums definatly give more oomph for longer than nicads..
the cordless strimmer is ok for grass, lawn edges, round bushes etc... not really man enough for tougher stuff like stinging nettles.
the downside with batteries is they really need regular use and recharging... i use the same batteries on a range of tools so they often get used several times a week . batteries left in the shed for weeks on end will lose capacity and probably have gone flat when you want to use them..not really a problem if you know youre planning to use them tomorrow and can charge them up this evening.
tis worth having more than one battery.. if your e working near a power point you can recharge the first one while your flattening the 2nd.
ive also got a cordless hedge trimmer... the bosch one had a longer blade than the ryobi has, ideal for trimming shrubs but not ideal for serious hedge cutting.
if youve got trees or big hedges to prune ryobi do a reciprocating saw on a telescopic pole that i use a lot..

[richard p]

just reread the previous posts ... the cordless hedgetrimmer would be ideal for trimming heathers.... i and i used mine yesterday to cut off a small patch of stinging nettles that the cordless strimmer was struggling with.