> Electric ones are quieter, inexpensive, and work just as well nowadays. My building has an electric Milwaukee that was 200 bucks and lasts all afternoon on a

> Electric ones are quieter, inexpensive, and work just as well nowadays. My building has an electric Milwaukee that was 200 bucks and lasts all afternoon on a battery or two Not really. I committed to the Milwaukee battery system and now have a leaf blower, a string trimmer, and a chainsaw, to maintain a few acres (nothing fancy just keeping it from being overrun with invasives). They all perform reasonably well in the instantaneous sense, but battery performance is a huge limiting factor. I get about 15-20 minutes of total runtime from everything at conservative speeds (turtle mode for the trimmer/blower, medium speed for the chainsaw). But the bigger issue is heat dissipation, if you actually run them for 5 minutes in a row the battery heats up, drains super quickly, and the thermal failsafe shuts it down. Then the battery takes quite a long time to cool off during which time it can't be charged. To run these things at full load you need a collection of like 10 batteries (very expensive even if using "compatible" knockoffs) and a second person managing the battery logistics. So, using these practically means running them in very short bursts with cooldown time in between, which is usually not conducive to efficient work patterns. For the chainsaw, instead of felling a tree, then limbing/bucking it, then moving the wood to its storage place, it's more like do one or two cuts, move the pieces to storage, repeat - And a helper can't speed things up by moving wood as I'm bucking it. That being said, I typically don't drop more than 1 tree at a time and it is nice to not have to stop and restart a gas chainsaw. The string trimmer is good for hitting small patches / edges separated by distance, but I actually bought another gas trimmer for mowing my rocky+stumpy hillside. The leaf blower is basically garbage I regret buying; I went back to using a rake and have used the blower maybe once or twice for blowing powdery snow off of things and accelerating fires, mostly just because the thing is in my garage. The one consistently good thing about them is it's possible to use them after dark without seeming like a total crackhead, which is nice I guess