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There are problems with battery-powered tools (at least, leaf blowers) still, especially at the commercial level. For one, they just don’t have the runtime. I b

There are problems with battery-powered tools (at least, leaf blowers) still, especially at the commercial level. For one, they just don’t have the runtime. I briefly had an 80V blower. On its highest power – which is the only way it could come close to a gas-powered model, it was barely able to get all of the leaves out of the yard (we had a tree with leaves that had needle-like protrusions, which made them quite hard to dislodge), and lasted about 10 minutes per charge. If you don’t have sticky leaves, or are clearing primarily hard surfaces like a deck, then absolutely, battery-powered is the way to go. But if you’re a commercial operator who is driving tools more or less non-stop all day, it’s going to be a hard sell to have to have a minimum of N*2 batteries (at $150-200 each), plus the downtime of swaps, plus having to run a generator on your truck constantly to charge the off-duty batteries. EDIT: Sibling comment below linked to a Stihl model that appears to offer an hour of runtime at full tilt. It’s also $2400 for the unit / battery / charger, tbf, but it at least has the performance.

xxs 2y ago
A whole hour of runtime would be mean 1C discharge. 80V (which is likely 72V, but in the US it's ok to label the max voltage rather than the actual one) is made of 20 Li-Ion batteries in series. Lets say 2 in parallel, so total 40 batteries. I'd go with 3Ah per battery (could be more for 21700) and around 2Kgs weight. For 1h work that's ~430W of power which is rather under powered. That fast charger (say 30min to charge) for this thing would be quite a thing to witness with over a kW of power draw. About Stihl, it uses a 36V battery, so 10 Li-Ion in series. Which is half as powerful. I can't see a capacity higher than 36V/6Ah from Stihl. Now, it possibly uses multiple batteries, however, the issue with charging still remains the same. Running a generator would be louder than the device, so imo that's a moot point. I'd consider using a massive power bank and/or lots of pre-charged batteries to carry the day but not an inverter.Taking enough batteries to swap and charging them in off-hours seems the only sensible approach (albeit not cheap)
- jandrese 2y ago
  For what it is worth the chargers for tool batteries are almost never fast chargers. So it takes 4 hours to charge for 15 minutes of runtime.

xxs 2y ago

A whole hour of runtime would be mean 1C discharge. 80V (which is likely 72V, but in the US it's ok to label the max voltage rather than the actual one) is made of 20 Li-Ion batteries in series. Lets say 2 in parallel, so total 40 batteries. I'd go with 3Ah per battery (could be more for 21700) and around 2Kgs weight. For 1h work that's ~430W of power which is rather under powered. That fast charger (say 30min to charge) for this thing would be quite a thing to witness with over a kW of power draw. About Stihl, it uses a 36V battery, so 10 Li-Ion in series. Which is half as powerful. I can't see a capacity higher than 36V/6Ah from Stihl. Now, it possibly uses multiple batteries, however, the issue with charging still remains the same. Running a generator would be louder than the device, so imo that's a moot point. I'd consider using a massive power bank and/or lots of pre-charged batteries to carry the day but not an inverter.Taking enough batteries to swap and charging them in off-hours seems the only sensible approach (albeit not cheap)

jandrese 2y ago
For what it is worth the chargers for tool batteries are almost never fast chargers. So it takes 4 hours to charge for 15 minutes of runtime.