Cordless vs Petrol Strimmers: Which Should You Buy?

Strimmers (or string trimmers, if you want to be precise about it) are one of those tools that quietly transform how tidy your garden looks. A mower handles the open lawn, but it's the strimmer that crisps up the edges, knocks back the long stuff around fence posts, and lets you reclaim the patch behind the shed that's slowly turning into a nature reserve. The question I get asked more than any other is wonderfully simple: should I go cordless or petrol?

It's a fair question, because the two technologies feel worlds apart in the hand. A modern cordless strimmer is light, near-silent and ready to go the moment you press the trigger. A petrol strimmer is a proper bit of kit — heavier, louder, thirstier, but with a relentless appetite for brambles and nettles that battery tools have historically struggled to match. Over the years I've spent a fair chunk of my weekends with both clamped to my shoulder, and the honest answer is that neither is universally "better." It depends almost entirely on the size and condition of your garden, how often you'll use the thing, and how much you value your eardrums.

In this guide I'll walk through both camps using real, representative models — from the featherweight Ryobi and WORX battery units right up to the 52cc ParkerBrand brush cutters that wouldn't look out of place on a council verge. We'll dig into runtime, weight and cost (the three things that genuinely matter day to day), then match the right tool to small, medium and large gardens. By the end, you'll know exactly which side of the fence you're on.

The Quick Answer: Garden Size Decides It

If you only read one section, make it this one. The single biggest factor in your decision isn't the brand or the price — it's how much grass and undergrowth you're realistically tackling, and how rough that growth is.

In broad strokes: small gardens are cordless territory, no question. The runtimes on offer comfortably cover a typical edge-trim, and you skip all the faff of fuel, oil and starting cords. Medium gardens sit in the crossover zone — a good cordless kit with a spare battery will do the job, but heavier or wetter growth starts to tilt things towards petrol. Large or genuinely overgrown plots, especially anything with brambles and woody stems, are still where petrol earns its keep. A 52cc engine with a metal brush-cutting blade simply doesn't care about a patch of nettles the way a 28cm nylon line does.

How Cordless Strimmers Have Changed the Game

Let's start with the technology that's been quietly stealing market share. A decade ago, cordless strimmers were a bit of a joke — feeble, with batteries that ran flat before you'd finished one border. That's simply not the case any more. Brushless motors, higher-voltage packs and clever line-feed systems have transformed what a battery tool can do, and for the average British garden they're now the default recommendation.

The headline appeal is convenience. There's no fuel to mix, no oil to measure, no recoil starter to yank repeatedly while your neighbour pretends not to watch. You clip in a charged battery, squeeze the trigger, and you're cutting. They're dramatically quieter too — the Stihl FSA 57 in particular earned the nickname "the quiet professional" from reviewers for its smooth, hushed running, the sort of tool you can use early on a Sunday without starting a feud.

The Representative Cordless Line-Up

Cordless Specs At A Glance

Why Petrol Strimmers Still Refuse to Die

For all the progress on the battery side, there's a reason the petrol strimmer hasn't gone the way of the dodo: brute, sustained power. When you're staring down a half-acre of waist-high growth tangled with brambles, the petrol engine just keeps going as long as you keep topping up the tank. No swapping batteries, no waiting for a charge, no gradual fade in cutting performance as the pack drains.

Petrol strimmers also unlock the brush-cutter category properly. Fit a metal blade to a 52cc machine and you're no longer trimming grass — you're clearing scrub. That's a job a nylon-line cordless tool simply can't do.

The Representative Petrol Line-Up

Petrol Specs At A Glance

Runtime: Where the Battle Is Won and Lost

Runtime is the headline figure everyone fixates on, and rightly so — it dictates whether you finish the job in one go or end up pacing the garden waiting for a battery to charge.

On the cordless side, the numbers have crept up impressively. The DeWalt DCMST561's up-to-40-minute figure on a 5.0Ah pack is genuinely excellent and enough for most medium gardens in a single sitting. The Stihl FSA 57 manages around 25 minutes with its AK 10 battery, the WORX GT 3.0 around 30 minutes from a 2.0Ah, and the Ryobi ONE+ in the 20–30 minute bracket. The smaller Bosch UniversalGrassCut 18V-26-500, by comparison, gives around 20 minutes from a 2Ah battery — and tellingly, takes 1 hour 15 minutes to recharge.

That charge-time figure is the crucial catch with cordless. The Bosch's 75-minute recharge means that if you flatten the battery, you're either stopping for over an hour or you've already invested in a spare. This is exactly why I always suggest budgeting for a second battery the moment you step beyond a small garden — it effectively turns "20 minutes then stop" into "40 minutes of near-continuous work" with a hot-swap.

Petrol, of course, sidesteps the whole debate. Your runtime is limited only by the size of the fuel tank and how quickly you can top it up — pour, prime, pull, and you're cutting again in under a minute. For a large or commercial-scale job, that uninterrupted stamina is petrol's trump card, plain and simple.

Weight: The Factor People Forget Until It's Too Late

Spec sheets obsess over power and runtime, but weight is the factor your shoulders and forearms will remember long after you've forgotten the cutting width. A strimmer is held out in front of you and swept side to side, often for the better part of an hour, and a kilo or two makes an enormous difference to fatigue.

Here, cordless wins comfortably for most users. The WORX GT 3.0 tips the scales at just 2.4kg, the Ryobi ONE+ at 2.5kg, and the Black+Decker STC1820 at 2.6kg — all featherweights you can comfortably use one-handed for edging. Even the heftier cordless units, like the Bosch AdvancedGrassCut 36 at 3.1kg and the Stihl FSA 57 at under 3.6kg, remain very manageable.

On the petrol side, the McCulloch TrimMac is the lightweight champion at 3.9kg — genuinely competitive with the heavier cordless tools and the reason it earns its "best lightweight petrol" reputation. But look at the other end of the scale: the ParkerBrand PGBC-5200 weighs a substantial 10.7kg. That's a tool you absolutely do not want to hold unsupported, which is precisely why big brush cutters come with a shoulder harness to take the load. Once it's harnessed, the weight is manageable, but you'll feel it after an hour, and it's a poor match for anyone with shoulder or back issues.

Cost of Ownership: Look Beyond the Sticker

The price you pay at the till is only part of the story. The real cost of a strimmer plays out over years of use, and the two technologies behave very differently here.

Cordless tools have a clever trick up their sleeve: the ecosystem. If you buy into a platform like Makita's LXT — which shares battery technology across over 300 tools — your batteries and charger are reused across your drill, blower, hedge trimmer and more. Buy the strimmer as a "bare tool" and the running cost is essentially just the electricity to recharge, which is negligible. There's no fuel, no oil, no spark plugs and very little routine servicing.

The broad pattern: cordless is cheaper and simpler to live with for light, occasional use, especially if you already own compatible batteries. Petrol carries higher running and maintenance costs, but rewards you with a tool that — properly looked after — keeps working long after a battery pack would have given up the ghost.

Head to Head: The Honest Pros and Cons

Let's lay it bare. Here's how the two camps stack up once you strip away the marketing.

Cordless vs Petrol: The Direct Comparison

To pull it all together, here's how a typical mid-range cordless setup stacks against a lightweight petrol unit and a heavy-duty petrol brush cutter — three tools representing the choices most buyers actually face.

Which Strimmer Is Right for You?

Our Verdict Ratings

Rather than crown one winner, it's fairer to rate each technology against the things that matter. Here's how they score for the typical home gardener.

Cordless — Best for Most Homes

Petrol — Best for Big & Tough Jobs

Frequently Asked Questions