Wendy Neuman

Just to follow up to anyone following this post: I ended up buying a 40v Greenwise tiller. Despite a few minor design flaws, it is everything I was looking for. Plenty of power for keeping rows neat. The nut sedge is still fighting, but I'm much farther ahead in the fight this year. I find myself relieved when the battery runs down to 1 light as I am usually hot and tired by then. It tends to get long weed/roots wadded up around the tines so I wouldn't recommend it for breaking new ground, but for upkeep, it's getting the job done. Thanks everyone for your input!

Thanks. I know I want a battery powered one, for several reasons. I'm just looking for specific feedback from people who have owned one.

Michael Cox, thanks. I'm not looking to save money so much as to save throwing my shoulder out trying to start a 2-stroke engine. We already have a petrol mantis.

Larissa, thank you! That was exactly the type of information I'm looking for. It sounds like the Greenworks tiller will do exactly what we need to do. It's a shame, the machine we ordered and had to return because of battery incompatibility it was a Greenworks. That was when I set off on my quest to find a photovoltaic rechargeable one. ( We built a passive solar house and decided against photovoltaics for household electricity since our usage with so low, our bill is only about 40 bucks a month.)

Edit, a stirrup hoe is pretty much useless against nutsedge which runs under the ground and stores its energy in tiny bulblets which must be pulled directly up in order to remove. Plus the Stirrup hoe is a challenge with heavy wood mulch. I've been fighting this Foe for a long time.

Doug, thanks for the feedback!. I was hoping to find a battery that is chargeable directly by photovoltaics thereby by skipping the inversion to AC and transformation back into DC steps which results in a lot of waste. I know it seems like a tall order, which is why I called it Pie in the Sky, but doesn't it seem like a no-brainer to offer such a product to people who are trying to live off the land as much as possible?

Thanks Eric! I'm not really expecting anyone to research one online for me, as I said I've done that already. In fact, we actually ordered one in the fall but the listing was wrong and the battery was not compatible with our chainsaw so we returned it. I just figured if there's any place someone would have experience with such machines it would be on this forum! And I couldn't imagine any place else I could ask the photovoltaic question.

Thanks again!

Thanks for your feedback! I have seen a fair number of these on Amazon, lowes.com, excetera and have read about them and the user reviews. I was hoping for someone with first-hand experience.

I suppose I should have explained that I am a 50 year old woman and my garden is in a former commercial soybean field in Southwest Virginia. I have a neighbor with a large tractor do the initial tilling in the spring, and then spend most of the rest of the decent temperature time for the remaining growing season pulling weeds out. I use Ruth Stouts heavy mulch technique but still can't get ahead of the nutsedge and after the inevitable weeks long drought in summer when nothing will succumb to hand pulling out of even the heavily amended clay, the nutsedge wins the final round. We have a medium-sized Mantis tiller but two stroke engines and I do not get along and by the time I get the darn thing started I'm too exhausted to run it. I figured a small battery-powered one would allow me to knock out the the weeds between the rows, even if there's only enough battery to do a few rows at a time. The vegetable garden is about 50 by 100 feet. Our 40-volt chainsaw runs long enough that we are tired of cutting wood by the time it runs out of juice so I was hoping for something similar from a tiller. A photovoltaic recharger is just a Pie in the Sky hope; I'm not sure how long it would take to trickle charge but I probably wouldn't use it every day I have a shed with a big south facing window where it could charge.

I'm looking to purchase a small tiller with a rechargeable 40 volt battery. My purpose is between rows weed management as the nutsedge gets away from me every year, despite much hand weeding and mulching with cardboard and chips. Does anyone have experience with such a machine? I've seen lots of them advertised but would like some real-world feedback. Ideally, I'd love a battery that is rechargeable with a solar voltaic, but I haven't seen any such thing. Thanks for any advice!

I have a building plan which has a roof overhang sized to completely exclude south side summer sun on the upper story, and a balcony which completely shades the lower story in the summer.  I want to use SHGC .66 windows on the south side to admit as much winter heat as possible, but I'm running into trouble with the building inspector.  He approved my permit  (which included a complete window schedule) and then said that I'd need to have windows that pass ResCheck.  ResCheck merely averages the SHGC of all the windows, and since I have hardly any square footage of non-south facing windows, I don't meet the requirement.  There's an option for adjusting the effective SHGC based on the overhang projection, but they don't differentiate among south, west, and east facing windows, so the credit is not really relevant to my application.  Has anyone on here had to face this problem and how did you solve it? I have not broken ground yet so I still have a lot of flexibility. Thanks!