My dad has been looking at electric chainsaws for a while but hadn’t pulled the trigger on one, and so being the good son I am (especially since he lets me send weird Chinese electric vehicles to his property), I decided to buy one for him. There are a few electric chainsaws out there, but I’ve heard good things about Ego’s tools and so I decided to try one of those. A couple clicks on Amazon and a few days later, a shiny green Ego Power+ 18-inch 56 volt electric chainsaw showed up at the door.
I went for the 18-inch chainsaw model because I figured it would be big enough for pretty much anything he needs to do around his property, and it’s a little bit more robust than the company’s smaller models.
My dad doesn’t have any other Ego tools, so this meant he’ll have to to wrangle yet another charger and battery standard into his garage, but I guess those are just the times we live in. Since this particular tool was a gift, I figure he won’t mind making room on his battery shelf for yet another color of power tool batteries.
And while it’s technically his saw now, he let me commandeer it upon arrival so I could spend a day with it and review its performance.
The first test was definitely not a walk in the park. He’s had a pile of telephone poles on his property for a few years and some of them have gotten pretty nasty to the point where they’re not really useful for many of his various projects.
He wanted to toss them in a construction dumpster he’s got there temporarily, but the problem is they were too long to fit.
This was a great chance to put the chainsaw work cutting these suckers in half. The various telephone poles were somewhere between 12 to 14 inches (30-36 cm) in diameter and the chainsaw seemed to cut through them like a hot knife through butter.
Cutting piles on the ground is a bit tricky, so after doing a few of them, I used my electric tractor to lift them, though that created a new issue when I didn’t leave enough of a relief wedge and the saw kerf would squeeze the blade.
After wrestling the saw free, re-tensioning the blade took about three seconds.
The saw has a very simple tool-free chain tensioning system that uses a convenient twist dial, so it’s very easy to use and you don’t have to spend a lot time getting it set up (or resetting it after you fight to free your saw from a big log).
As long as I had my angles right so I stopped getting my blade squeezed in the kerf, the saw cut through those telephone poles like they were balsa wood. It was pretty darn impressive.
Just for fun, I cut out a few thin cross-sections of the telephone poles, and the chainsaw just went right through them without protesting.
In my first test of getting those telephone poles cut down (and some just plain fun cutting dinner plate-sized cross sections from them), I found that the chainsaw was heavy duty enough to feel solid and powerful, but not so heavy that it was tiring to use when making many cuts in a row.
At around 14 pounds (6.4 kilograms), it’s got modest heft without sapping your arms.
That’s especially important for my dad who is still a strong guy who works with hands everyday, but is closing in on 70 years old, and so I’d rather not have him wielding a super heavy chainsaw.
Next, I had to cut some various logs to get them into the burn pile after a few trees were knocked over in the last major storm. They’ve been sitting around for a while as my dad went back and forth about whether or not to get a new saw.
As I worked on those trees and branches, the cutting was even easier than the telephone poles. That makes sense based on the smaller diameter, but it was still a good test for a more common use case (not many people have a pile of telephone poles).
My last cutting project for the day was to finish felling a small tree that got knocked over in the last hurricane but that was still growing basically parallel to the ground.
My dad wanted to see if he could turn that tree into a bush since it has some pretty flowers that it sends out for a few months each year.
To try to make a bush out of it, we cut it off essentially at the ground to let it start growing a bunch of smaller shoots right at ground level.
For the uninitiated, this is Florida and so that stump is going to be growing back into a tree in no time. You can’t kill things growing in Florida, life simply finds a way. I don’t know if it’s the daily rains or the seemingly 30 hours of sunlight each day, but things just grow and grow. And that tree trying to grow sideways along the ground was just a hazard for everyone. Now it will hopefully turn into a nice flowering little bush.
After an afternoon of cutting just about everything I could find that needed to be cut, I ended up draining only around 20% of the battery.
I don’t know exactly how many cuts you get out of a charge since I don’t have enough stuff to cut to burn through an entire massive battery. They say it will do 300 cuts through a 4×4, but that seems like a very specific use case. If I need to make 300 cuts in a 4×4, I’m using a circular saw!
What I CAN say is that I did a bunch of different tasks around the property that reflect real-world usage, and I still had 80% of the 56V 5Ah battery remaining. And so to me, the battery definitely seems to last quite a long time.
Top comment by Jeff Morse
I have a 18 inch Greenworks Battery chainsaw and it works great ... as long as the chain is sharp. Out of the box it was like a light saber going through a 16 in tree. As with any saw, it gets to be a lot less fun after about 100 cuts as the chain dulls up. Nice thing about these guys is that you toss them in the SUV and don't need to worry about gas for the saw. But don't forget the chain oil, like any chain saw it needs that. Another thing is the push button and trigger and start. No pulling the cord a few times like a gas saw. It is also cooler and less noisy.
For those who need even more juice, you can, of course, just keep a spare battery around. And if you have a bunch of Ego tools, meaning you already have some of their batteries in your garage, then you can save some money by buying just the chainsaw and not the battery or charger.
All in all, I think this was a great purchase and I’m really impressed with how well the saw works. It cost a pretty penny at nearly $350, though the 16-inch and 14-inch versions can save you some dough. Obviously you can get a cheaper little 50 or 60cc gasoline-powered chainsaw, but then you’re dealing with keeping fuel around, and will probably a heavier tool to wield, and you’ve got the potential of frustrating engine problems leading to a bunch of unexpected maintenance.
When you need a chainsaw, you usually need it right then. Discovering that you’ve got a carburetor problem is a real bummer. So that’s the beauty of electric tools like these. They have basically the same maintenance level as an electric power drill, with the expectation of oiling the blade and occasionally replacing it once in a while. But the drivetrain is essentially maintenance-free, just like your drill.
So I’m really happy with this thing. Sure, it’s not cheap, and it will still be a few years before electrics can rival gas-powered tools on price, but it definitely wins in a number of other categories and handles everything I (or my dad) could need for general-purpose tasks.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Comments