How the Greenworks 40V Chainsaw Changed My Weekend Brush Clearing

The fence line on the east side of my place has been a mess since I bought these 22 acres back in 2019. Privet thick as a hedge, blackberry bramble grabbing at your legs, sweetgum saplings packed in tight, a few old cedars down across the wire. I have been clearing it in sections ever since. For most of that time I did it the way I always had, with a gas saw that needed a pull cord, a prayer, and ten minutes of patience before it would settle into a rhythm.

A couple of springs ago I finally got tired of it. Not the work, I do not mind the work. The saw. The fuel mixing, the choke, the way it would flood if you looked at it wrong, the ear protection you had to keep on even when it was sitting on the tailgate. On a Saturday morning I would spend more time coaxing that thing to life than I did cutting. Carol started calling it the temper tantrum, and she was not wrong.

So when my neighbor showed up with a Greenworks 40V chainsaw and told me to try it on the privet, I will admit I was skeptical. I have spent forty years around gas equipment, on the county road crew and then on my own place, and I figured a battery saw was for trimming a branch or two, not for real work. He handed it to me, I squeezed the trigger, and it just started. No choke, no prime, no pull cord. That was the moment I stopped being skeptical.

I used his for an afternoon, then ordered my own. The Greenworks 40V 16 inch Brushless Chainsaw, with the 4.0Ah battery and charger included. It showed up in a plain box, I had it set up in about ten minutes, and I have been running it every weekend since. It is the first saw I have owned that I actually look forward to starting. That sounds like a small thing until you have spent twenty years dreading the first pull of the day.

I squeezed the trigger and it just started. No choke, no prime, no pull cord.

The spec sheet says the 1.5kW brushless motor and 16 inch bar will handle trees and limbs up to 28 inches in diameter, but around here the real work is smaller. The sweetgum saplings are three or four inches thick, the privet is maybe two, and the cedars that came down are a foot or so across. The saw cuts through all of it without bogging down. I have buried the bar in a freshly cut cedar and it just keeps pulling. That is the part that surprised me most, that there is no lag, no moment where the motor has to catch up.

The automatic oiler is the feature I did not know I needed. With the gas saw I was always checking the bar oil, always carrying a bottle, always wiping the mess off the tailgate. This one oils the chain as it runs, so I fill the reservoir when I charge the battery and I do not think about it again. The chain stays sharp longer, and the low kickback design and chain brake mean I do not flinch when the bar catches on a knot. For a saw that gets used hard on bramble and fence wire, that peace of mind is worth a lot.

Runtime is the honest part. The 40V 4.0Ah battery gives me enough cutting time to clear a good section of fence line before it needs a charge, and it holds that charge for 12 months or more. That matters more than you might think. In the winter the saw sits in the shop for months, and when spring comes it still starts. A gas saw that sits that long needs the carburetor cleaned or the fuel dumped, and the fuel itself goes bad sitting in the tank. This one just goes. I have stopped keeping a can of mixed fuel around the shop altogether.

At 10.4 pounds it is light enough to run one-handed when I am reaching through bramble, though I do not make a habit of it. The 2-step easy start means there is no starting ritual, no moment where you brace yourself and yank. You squeeze, it runs, you let go, it stops. After a morning of cutting I am not worn out from fighting the saw, I am worn out from the work itself, which is how it should be.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

Here is the honest part. A battery saw is not a gas saw. If you are dropping big timber all day, if you need to run a saw for hours at a stretch, you probably want a gas saw and you should say so. But that is not what most of us are doing on a Saturday. We are clearing saplings, trimming limbs, cutting up fallen cedars, and for that work the Greenworks is better, not just easier. It starts every time, it is quiet enough to hear yourself think, and there is no fuel to mix or spill. If you are on a few acres and you are tired of fighting an old gas saw, this is the one I would tell you to look at first. And when a job gets too big for it, that is what rental places are for. It is not the saw for every job, and I would not pretend otherwise. But for the work most of us actually do on our own land, it has earned its place on my tailgate.