So, about seven years ago my ancient (15 - 20ish year old?) gas mower died. I have never really loved having to buy gas, deal with the noise, and change the oil regularly. I've used yard equipment with extension cords and it always sucks. . . . so the clear winning option was to buy a battery operated one. For my uses, this is the best of everything - long lasting engine that doesn't require draining gas in the fall and is quieter, no futzing around with extension cords. Our yard isn't gigantic.
So anyway, the mower that we settled on (I think largely because it was on sale in the fall) was a Kobalt 40v push mower from Lowes. It has worked well since we got it. Only complaint is that it doesn't have the same torque as a gas mower, so you've got to make sure that you cut the lawn every week in the spring - if the grass is too high it will keep stalling out and take forever. It came with a 2.5 aH battery and a 4.0 amp hour battery. Between the two batteries there is more than enough charge to do our yard, even if you let the grass grow a little too long. We had a working extension cord trimmer which sucked, but worked well enough that I didn't buy a new trimmer at the time, but it was cool to see that they offered trimmers that use the same battery packs.
So fast forward to now. The mower still works great. Two years ago the 2.5 aH battery died, and I replaced it with a 4.0 aH battery. Now the old 4.0 aH battery isn't holding a charge very well, so it'll probably also need replacement soonish. Replacing the battery was a PITA because of:
FRUSTRATION #1 - Every vendor of yard tools uses a different configuration of battery packs (although there doesn't actually appear to be much if any real electrical difference between them). This is done to force you to be locked into one or another brand of tools. This sucks. I get why it's probably better for company shares, but it seems to be designed waste/obsolescence.
FRUSTRATION #2 - Here in Canada, apparently Rona bough Lowes a couple years back. Normally I wouldn't give a crap, but the effect of this is that the Lowes near me became a Rona. And has stopped stocking Kobalt trimmers (like, they exist on the website but haven't been in stock for a couple years). So my dream of buying a tool that would match my lawn mower so I could keep using the same batteries seems to be dying, as my suspicion is that the batteries are going the same way.
FRUSTRATION #3 - It doesn't matter if your tool works perfectly if you can't get quality battery to power it any more. And there is no way you can tell if this will be possible years in the future. I might be able to pick up a used one somewhere, but it looks like it's going to be a PITA to get batteries. There appear to be Chinese made clone batteries on Amazon, but given my past experience with similar stuff I'm not sure that these can be trusted to work and not explode in the charger.
So . . . I have a few options here:
1. Buy a different battery powered trimmer and just keep different batteries for the mower/trimmer. (Problem being that the batteries are expensive and don't last that long - they degrade each year whether or not you use them.)
2. Try to sell my mower/batteries on the used market and buy a new trimmer and mower of the same type. (Problem being that this will consume a fair amount of time that I don't want to spend on this)
3. Go back to a noisy gas mower, with all the annoying gas/oil requirements. This still appears to be the cheaper way to go, and given my experience with battery operated stuff may actually be the green option.
Thoughts/suggestions?
