Felco Powerblade electric shear

Hi Kathleen

I love love love my Felco Pruners.  We purchased the 822 model. I think it depends on the age of your trees as we had some larger diameters branches that needed to be removed.  There is a semi open setting that allows you to close the blade 50% for smaller cuttings and to save the battery and time.  I do not notice the weight as a problem.

We purchased the extension pole at 1.5 meters. Again with the older trees we needed the additional height to top some of our oaks. Definitely recommend the double battery as well.  To date we have pruned 2 hazelnut fields for a total of 87,000 cuts-yes thousand cuts.  It’s was completed in 80 hours averaging over 1,000 cuts per hour.  The blue tooth app for these details is easy to set up and pretty cool to see your efforts and it also reminds you to sharpen, adjust blades as well as times to service. What use to take us a couple of months now is only a couple of weeks. It is the best justification of a labor saving device that I have found. The cost has already paid for itself in one season. In addition the savings of the physical cost, wear and tear on the body vs using hand shears and loppers can’t be denied.

I would highly recommend this equipment for anyone that needs to prune trees!

Staci

I second Staci’s comments. We have two pairs of the 812 and used them last season. I don’t think we could have pruned the 1,000 trees we did last year without these tools. Oak is a hard wood and we don’t have the forearm strength. The 812 is not too heavy for a day long use and it is powerful enough to go through quite thick wood. We have both extension size but did not need them last year.

This year will be a different story. We are getting ready to prune the orchard next week… And this time around we will have 3,600 trees to prune! We are going to top the tallest tree but for those we probably will use a pole rather than the sheers.

We also give a big thumbs up to the Felco PowerBlade pruners!  We have the 812 model.  We use it to cut all the hazel suckers and to trim up the oaks.  We were able to prune over 160 trees (mostly hazels and a few oaks) in 8 hours (actual time on the pruner) making over 10K cuts.  On average, we were able to prune a tree in less than 3 minutes, making about 64 cuts/tree which averaged over 1200 cuts per hour.  And no carpal tunnel or hand or wrist pain!  We highly recommend this tool as a major labor saving tool!  Here’s a hazel pre-pruning

Here’s the ‘post pruning’ picture after about 3 minutes of cutting with the Felco 812 pruner.  It’s an amazing labor saving device and we highly recommend it!

The Felco system (battery backpack and holster with the handpiece) is very comfortable to use/wear and it makes very quick work with hazel suckers.  Here’s the system on a pile of hazel suckers after only about an hour of cutting.