Greenworks 40V 21" Brushless Cordless (Smart Pace / Self-Propelled) Lawn Mower (75+ Compatible Tools), (2) 4.0Ah Batteries and Charger Included

This is my first electric lawnmower and I'm never going back to gas. This is such a joy to use compared to my old dependable YardMan 21" self-propelled gas mower. There is room for improvements, but overall, I'm loving this electric mower. This review is for the 21" self-propelled 40V G-Max GreenWorks mower with the Smart Pace feature. I have a 1/3 acre lot with a single-family home. Only about half the lot is grass (big house, lots of landscaping). About half my grass area is sloped. The lawnmower came with 2 of the GreenWorks G-Max 4aH batteries. These are 20-cell 18650 battery packs that charge to 41.3 V on the GreenWorks charger. This battery design is a standard nominal 36V voltage 18650 pack. These two batteries are just enough to cut my entire yard, but I've since bought another off-brand battery to make it easy to cut the yard without coming close to running out. The mower does run with a smaller 2Ah battery, but the battery tends to overheat and won't charge until it cools down. Better to stick to the 4AH sized pack for this mower. The mower can hold two batteries, but it only uses one at a time and switches to the second one when the first runs out of power. Only one battery is needed to run the mower. The mower is lighter when only one battery is installed. To extend the mowing time a bit, it's possible to do a bit of swapping and charging, while you are cutting the grass. So I would use about half the charge of one battery, then put it on the charger, and switch to my second battery. When the second battery was dead, I would then take the first off the charger which had gained extra power while I was cutting, and put the dead second one on the charger. Then I could use the second until it died, ad by then, the first one will have more charge it, and I can cut a little more with it. So playing games like that allows you to cut a bit more grass, without buying extra batteries. The charger is a 2 Amp charger, so a 4 AH battery takes about 2 hours to charge from fully dead. The 2Ah battery takes 1 hour to charge. With maybe 4 batteries and two chargers, you could rotate batteries and cut non-stop for hours. So a yard much larger than my 1/3 acre yard is very doable with this mower if you are willing to invest in the extra batteries. Or if you just cut part of the yard, recharge for a couple of hours, then cut another part. When the battery dies, you don't need to push the mower back to the garage (enough though you can easy enough). Just pull the dead battery, walk to the garage to swap with the new one, and return. The Pros: Very quiet compared to gas. Runs at about 70 dbA noise level, compared to 80 dbA of my yardman (measurement taken at the location of my head when using the mowers. My Dyson vacuum is 75 dBA inside the house. So this mower makes less noise than my vacuum. I could hear the 17-year cicadas over the sound of this mower while cutting the grass. A 6dbA difference is subjectively about twice as loud, so my gas mower is subjectively more than twice as loud as this one. Lightweight. Seems like maybe half the weight of my Yardman gas mower of the same cutting capacity. Easy to push around and store. Switch between bagging, mulching, and discharge, with no tools or nuts or bolts. The side discharge chute is spring-loaded and can just be popped open. The grass bag is just dropped in place and is held securely by a spring-loaded rear access panel. For mulching, you need to add a plastic insert about the size of a loaf of bread to fill the bag discharge port, which is one more part to lose track of, but the mower can operate without it, by allowing the grass bag rear access panel to block the grass bag chute so if you misplace the insert, the mower is still usable. Though I would assume, mulching might not work as well without the help of that insert to block grass from accumulating in the blocked chute. The self-propel feature can be turned on and off with a knob on the handle so you can use it like a push mower. Unlike gas self-propelled mowers that normally have a differential and belt drive that prevents the drive wheels from turning when self-propelled is not engaged, this eclectic motor allows the back drive wheels to turn freely. It's heavy enough that I don't like pushing it without using the self-propel turned on, but it is easy enough to push that I have no problem doing it, even up hills. The handles can be folded down, and the mower stands up vertically. With no oil or gas to spill out, you can store the mower in any position without issues. You could even store it inside a house without issues since there are no oil or gas smells or fire risks. One handle (no tool) cutting height adjustment that adjusts all 4 wheels at the same time. Easy to put together. The handle just needs to be attached with a few bolts. Never hard to start like gas mowers. Just drop in the battery and go. Easy for an older child or woman to use. You don't need bin manly strength to use this. The grass bag is just the right size so it's not heavy to lift and dump. It smaller than my YardMan 21" but yet this bag doesn't seem to fill up as fast. The hardman was heavy and hard to dump, this mower's grass bag is probably 30% lighter, and easy to dump (the grass doesn't get caught in the bag or require violent shaking to remove). My wife can dump this bag, she would not cut with my old mower because the grass bag was too big and heavy for her. The Cons: The mower has a super annoying feature that it won't let you pull it back until after you pause for about 1 second with no motion. You must wait for the drive motor to turn off before the drive wheels can turn freely. Worse, if you aren't patient and just drag the mower backward ripping up your grass, the drive won't ever disengage. You can pull it backward dragging the wheels for an hour and it won't free up the wheels, it will only disengage if the wheels at not moving. So if you don't wait long enough before you pull, you have just reset the amount of time you have to wait still. And, when you are going uphill, if you try to wait, it doesn't work because the mower will try to roll back towards you, and that causes the drive electronics to stay engaged. You have to push to keep the mower from rolling and hold it for about a second before it will disengage the wheels and allow you to pull it backward. My yardman has a one-direction ratchet built into the wheels so you can ALWAYS put it backward, even when the drive is trying to push it forward. This mower design opted not to inc lude that to keep the mower simpler with fewer parts to break (to offset the high cost of an electric motor and batteries). You must learn how to work with this annoying issue vs fight it. Pushing the mower back and forth to get under a bush becomes a big pain. Doing the same to cut a little isolated area of grass, has the same problem. Doing a Y-turn when trying to reverse direction can run into this as well. So I tend to do a wide U-turn when I need to reverse direction vs a Y turn. The other workaround is to just turn the self-propel feature off when you want to do a bunch of back-and-forth motions (which frees the wheels) then turn it back on when you are just going straight. They REALLY need to fix this. I've seen others complaining about this and I've seen the GreenWorks agent try to blame it on user error. I believe all the GreenWorks self-propelled mowers might have this same "design feature". They either need to make the drive disengage instantly, instead of having that 1 second-ish delay, or add a ratchet to the drive so you can always pull it backward. The self-paced feature of this mower is annoying on hills and when trying to maneuver. Only works well on flat ground when driving straight. The feature gives you a bar at the top of the handles to hold with both hands, and push with. The entire bar unit slides up and down about 6 inches on the handle. When you push it down, the mower speeds up and moves forward, when you pull back it slows down and stops. This allows you to walk at whatever pace you want, and the mower will set its speed to match your walking speed. There is no other speed control on the mower. When you push down to try and make the mower take off, it will accelerate slowly, so it doesn't jump away from you. This is fine when you are just starting a long straight path, but is anything when trying to stop and start quickly, like pushing it forward and back to but around a bush or other obstacle. I push too hard, and it slides down a few inches and then bottoms out causing an impact to my hands and wrists which ends up with my hands and thumbs being sore. I have to slow down and take it slower, both because of this behavior, and the problem with reversing talked about above. Give me a lever control for the speed any day. I would not buy this version of the GreenWorks mower because of this. I would buy one with the level control for the speed. But I have never tried the lever control so I don't know for sure I would like it better. This should be fine if you have a mostly flat, and mostly open yard design with few obstacles or bushes to cut under, but with a sloped yard and obstacle to cut around that forces you to have to stop and start constantly, this feature is annoying. This is a consumer-level disposable product. The company doesn't sell replacement parts, so if you damage your mower, you can't fix it. It's designed to be thrown away and replaced if something happens to it. It's well made, strong, but just not designed to be serviced and repaired. Don't try to cut a steel pipe, or hit it with your car, for example. The front wheels are fixed direction. They don't caster like my Yardman does, which means you must push down on the handle to reduce weight from the front wheels to turn. But because the mower is light this is not a big issue. And because the front wheels don't turn, they were able to implement the one-handle height adjustment. I have to remove bolts and remove and reinstall the wheels on my YardMan to change the height which is a real pain. Price. These electric mowers cost more than the gas mowers of the same features. This $500+ mower and battery combination has the feature set of a $300 dollar gas mower. But you can use the expensive batteries on other tools from the G-Max 40V family and share costs that way. Conclusions I have 5 Greenworks 40V G-Max tools and love them all. I expect to get more. The extra cost is worth it to me to get away from dealing with hard-to-start, noisy, polluting, gas-powered tools. I'm never going to buy another gas-powered yard tool. The time for electric yard tools has arrived. This mower and the GreenWorks tools, in general, I'm super happy with. They are consumer-level products, that are made to be lightweight and easy to use by women or young adults and don't require the strength of the larger gas mowers to operate. The lightweight and ease of use make them safer for someone without a lot of strength to operate. A big win for me is the low noise, which means I can cut grass early in the morning, or late at night without worrying about bothering the neighbors. The quality of the cut is identical to my past gas mowers, and so far, I've not had any issues with power with high grass. I've not tried to cut wet grass. Though I'm seeing things I'd like them to address in their future designs, as talked about above, it's still a big net-win for me.

First of all, I rarely write reviews and those I write are because I love something so much I want to share my pleasant experiences. I thought at $400 this would be a very usable machine. In the recent past I accidentally bought a push mower (eGo brand) and suffered through it with my arthritis and hip issues and then when my daughter needed a new mower, I decided to give her that one and splurge and get a SP one. I didn't want to spend the money on an eGo one (although the Push Mower by eGo is a great machine) so I thought this one, based on the reviews would be great. What a MISTAKE! 1. When you want to engage the SP feature, you push down on the handle (think pushing a trombone) and hold it in place like that while you mow. It EASILY slips back out of place as you move. As a result the SP feature turns on and off frequently. 2. The SP feature takes several second to engage so even though you're pushing the handle downward, it doesn't take effect right away and you end up pushing. Considering how often it disengages, that happens a LOT. So, it's barely better than a push mower. It's actually worse because it weighs SO MUCH MORE than a push mower - it's difficult to push! 3. Every time you turn a corner (i.e. doing a rectangular lawn), the SP disengages. At the same time the rear wheels remain locked and the mower is of NO help in maneuvering it around while it's not in self-propel. And pulling it backward (i.e. away from a shrub you're mowing under), is extremely difficult when you're already strained from mowing with this poor machine. 4. The battery ran out of power after 20 minutes of mowing a relatively low height of grass. Then you have to switch batteries. But, even with the second one it wasn't enough to mow 1/6th of an acre (bear in mind most of that property is covered with: house, driveway, pond, gardens, decks/patios... Meanwhile, my push mower by eGo, effortlessly mowed the lawn in 35 minutes with barely 1/4 of the power being used by the battery. The one good thing I can say is: it did mow the grass well. But, it was the most arduous mow I've ever had to deal with and I am beyond relieved to send it back. I ordered a SP eGo the same day and I am overjoyed to have it. Do not buy this Greenworks mower. You will regret it.