homelite 24v cordless is a failure

In 2008 I bought a Homelite 24v cordless lawn mower. It worked beautifully and would often cut my yard twice per charge. That was even with the mulcher in, so it was mulching the whole yard without any problems.

Then in 2009 it wouldn't even charge up far enough to cut the yard once. So I got warranty service on it, and got a free battery out of it. Oh, but they decided it wasn't the battery, it was the battery charger which somehow wasn't covered in the warranty. Replacing the charger and battery cost me 80% of the original cost of the mower when it was new, but of course I didn't find that out until after the work had been done. I put in all of the complaints about that I reasonably could, and just hoped the mower would work for a while.

But no...even the same summer I'd had it replaced the new battery didn't work as well as the original. But it worked well enough to cut the yard. In 2010 I got the blade sharpened and figured out that if I took the mulcher out and was very careful about how I mowed and made sure to mow often and when it was as dry as possible, the mower would reliably cut the entire yard.

Now it's 2011. The first time this year I mowed, I noticed that the mower lost power much more quickly than it should. But it made it all the way through the yard before giving out. So I thought maybe just the first charge of the year was the problem. Unfortunately it rained pretty much all of May and I didn't get a chance to mow, so today when I tried to mow the grass it was a foot high and while I waited as long as I could for it to dry out, it was still pretty wet. The mower wouldn't even finish the front 1/8th of the yard. Now admittedly this is a worst case scenario and would have been a problem even for a gas mower, but I don't think there is any chance it'll work much better later in the summer when it's dry but hopefully it'll get me through this summer.

Next year I'll go get a corded electric mower. I really don't want a corded electric mower, I hate using my corded snow thrower it's such a pain in the ass. but I don't see that I've got much choice since I hate gas mowers even more. I certainly won't be buying a homelite mower again regardless...their service is absolute shit.