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Harbor Freight Battery Powered, Self Propelled Lawn Mower

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4K views 16 replies 9 participants last post by  GunMonkeyIntl  
#1 ·
Does anyone have one? If so, how do you like it?

I had a Lowe's Kobalt battery-powered lawnmower for several years and I liked it. When I thought I was about to move, I sold it. I had already sold my Kobalt leaf blower and chainsaw. Now I'm in a position where I need them again.

I learned last night that Greenworks actually manufactured the Kobalt battery-powered tools, but will not be making the next generation of Kobalt tools. So I decided not to go with Kobalt this time. I have been reviewing EGO and Greenworks, but they are both pretty expensive and most don't have side discharge. Overall the reviews look good, but both have a fair amount of complaints.

So I checked out Harbor Freight and the lawnmower, blower, and chainsaw are all much less expensive and have better reviews. The only drawback I see is they only offer an 80v 2.5ah battery, but the mower does allow 2 batteries to be used with rollover from 1 to the other. With my Kobalt mower, I had a 2.5 ah battery and a couple of 4 ah batteries. At the most, I got an extra 5 minutes out of the 4.0 ah batteries.

I may still get a riding mower for the back 2 acres, but I can wait until mowers go on sale or I find a good deal on a used one.
 
#3 ·
I have bought several power tools there and for the most part, they are OK. Typically they cost about 2/3 of what you would pay at Lowes or Home Depot. The biggest drawback with buying battery-powered tools is the batteries are vendor-specific and batteries are very expensive.

I just compared the ratings for the Harbor Freight battery-powered, self-propelled lawnmower with Lowes's highest-rated one. The ratings are almost identical.

The cost of the Lowes lawnmower, battery, and charger - about $750. The cost of the Harbor Freight mower, battery, and charger is about $460.

The Harbor Freight brand for these is Atlas. There is an 80v chainsaw, blower, and trimmer. If by edger you mean a string trimmer they have it. If you mean a regular edger, then they don't have it in Atlas brand.
 
#5 ·
I mowed about 2 acres for about 3 years with my battery-powered lawnmower and it was still working fine. The batteries didn't last as long as when new, but I still got about 30 minutes off each of them while using self-propelled. The guy I sold my battery chainsaw to kept bugging me for the leaf blower and lawnmower.

Some HF tools are just as good as the more expensive ones sold elsewhere and some aren't. I find the reviews are honest unlike Amazon and some other places.
 
#6 ·
I would like to suggest the EGO line of battery operated tools. Originally we purchased their battery powered string trimmer and edger. I was fed up with having string trimmers that would start when they wanted to and wear my arm out pulling the starting cord when they didn't. It was really nice not having to store fuel for them or go to the gas station to get fuel for them either. We wound up purchasing one of their battery powder push mowers shortly after. 5 years on and both the mower and trimmer are going strong.

Push mower link: https://egopowerplus.com/21-inch-self-propelled-mower/

Last winter, the output shaft on my old Toro snowblower snapped off. Instead of going the gas route, I wound up with the EGO snowblower. This thing is a beast. Two stage, uses 2 56V 7.5AH batteries and will run (actively working) on those 2 for around an hour. I can clear our 2 car deep driveway, the sidewalk in front of our house and the 40' x 20' parking pad at my body shop on those 2 batteries.

Snow blower link: https://egopowerplus.com/two-stage-snow-blower-snt2400/

Over the course of the summer, I wound up purchasing a second string trimmer for the shop, because I got tired of hauling the one from the house back and forth, along with a blower and a pole style hedge trimmer. The hedge trimmer works great on the box elder bushes around our house here in town and I used it to trim back a lot of wild roses and honeysuckle at the homestead.

The EGO products are pretty pricey, but in my opinion very much worth it. They actually now have a ztr that runs on 6 56V 10ah batteries and supposedly is good for 2 acres of mowing on a single charge! My wife and I looked at one at the ACE hardware in the town over, and I was pretty impressed with it. The sales guy actually offered us the chance to drive it, but being that we already have two good ztrs (a JD Z445 and a Gravely ZT4440), I passed. (Considering the price tag on it was close to $5500!)

ZTR link: https://egopowerplus.com/zero-turn-riding-mower-zt4204l/

This is one of those lines of products that I can't recommend highly enough. Oh, and the other nice thing is any battery from any of their tools will run any of their other tools.
 
#11 ·
That’s odd. I’ve seen some really bad products from HF, and often the worst are what I would have thought were the simplest to get right. Their sandpaper, for example, is garbage. I’ve also seen an inordinate amount of their open-end wrenches broken.

I could believe that their older NiCd batteries were junk due to how many opportunities there are to cut corners in the design and manufacture of a custom NiCd cell. With everything being Li-ion and LiPo, now, and being based on standardized cells coming from a handful of manufacturers (all Chinese and Taiwanese), battery pack quality is leveling out, significantly.

Of course there are opportunities to cut corners on the pack shell and small sub components. Also, there are some differences in the ability of different-quality Li cells to safely put out higher amperages, but, strangely enough, the applications that require those massive amperage outputs are flash lights and vape pens. Something like a chainsaw or lawn mower will require higher voltages (more cells in series), and longer run times (more cells in parallel), but their per-cell amp draw is low compared to a high-end flashlight.

Being that pretty much all modern tool battery packs rely on a bunch of commodity 18650 lithium cells, and their amp draw spec is not that high, I’d almost guarantee that, if you gutted a Dewalt and a HF battery pack, you’d find exactly the same stack of 18650 cells. The tool, itself, from Dewalt is likely to be better quality than the one from HF, but, at that point, you’d be comparing the relative quality of their corded tools.

I don’t own anything electric from HB besides a high-wattage soldering iron, but, as far as battery tools go, I’m fully invested in Ryobi One+, and have been for 15 years. In theory, they should be closer to the HF end of the spectrum than the Dewalt end, but I’d put my Ryobi battery tools, especially the brushless stuff, up against Dewalt any day.

I think Dewalt and Milwaukee earned their reputation as the kings of battery tools back in the NiCd days, when the difference in quality of their cells vs that of the cheap guys was huge. Now that everyone is using the same Li cells, I think they’re both just riding out the reputation they earned in the 80s and 90s.
 
G
#9 ·
We've had very good luck with the Greenworks tools. Got a chainsaw, a pole saw, and a trimmer two years ago. Still going strong with no problems. Well, I will say that you shouldn't put too much bar oil in the chainsaw as it does tend to leak some.
Unexpected upside to the trimmer is that the wife can use it. Couldn't pull- start the gas trimmer.
 
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