When I was studying musical theatre in 1979 at what was then called The Banff School of Fine Arts (yes, musical theatre was a fine art then), I used to gaze longingly at the skinny, leggy, tanned girls on the grounds crew. Not because I fancied them, but because, while I did scales and jazz hands, they got to run the gas-powered maintenance equipment including giant lawn tractors.

Those girls got to be outdoors all day; they didn’t have to wear leotards or memorize the history of vaudeville and most importantly, they got to work on engines and smell of gasoline.

Back then, I thought gasoline smelled good. It definitely smelled better than the dance studio. And gasoline had so many positive aspects, besides its fragrance. For example, Dad used to employ it in every chore, from patio cleaning to spot removal. He’d even pour a couple of inches of gasoline into the sink to clean his paint rollers. Good clean gas. Those were the days, weren’t they?

Splendor in the Gas

Nowadays, we’re not such fans of gasoline. We consider gas-powered tools loud, stinky, expensive to run and bad for the environment.

We prefer battery-powered implements that are lighter, quieter, un-smelly, non-polluting, and utterly lacking in swear-stoked pull starts.

But battery-powered tools have a tragic flaw; they’re traditionally weak in the oomph department.

Take the common whipper snipper, or ‘line trimmer’ to use the formal moniker.

Any gas-powered weed whipper is ridiculously powerful compared to a battery-powered unit. But it also smokes, it’s heavy, it’s hard to start, it’s noisy and its combustion engine throws a lot of heat. But power? Scads of it. Cuts tough brush like buttah.

In contrast, cordless models, which first emerged back in the seventies, have always been light-duty. They weren’t much more than fans on a stick. They blew the grass over better than they cut it, and had to be recharged after every seven minutes of use.

Strings and Eros

Things have improved steadily in the cordless outdoor tools department, but even modern battery-powered weed trimmers have tended to be too lightweight to be adequate replacements for gas trimmers.

Happily, we’ve reached the cusp of a new age with this season’s latest entry in the whipper snipper wars. Black and Decker’s new 36-volt string trimmer is the closest thing yet to the power of a gas trimmer without the gas.

Here are some of its more fetching attributes:

• The 36-volt lithium ion battery is always ready to go (holds a charge for months in storage).
• It has a 13-inch cutting swath - way swathier than the usual eight inches
• A variable-speed trigger means you can adjust the cutting speed from one to six, depending on the material you’re trimming, so you can conserve power and make the tool run longer on a single charge
• Backed by a full three-year warranty and a 30-day risk-free trial
• The unit is 28 per cent lighter than a similar gas model with a full tank
• Low vibration means the operator doesn’t tire as quickly
• The cutting head swings to vertical position for trimming alongside sidewalks

In Black and Decker’s tests, the 36-volt unit trimmed over one mile of grass and weeds per charge (on the lowest speed setting). In real people units, I tested it on the #3 speed setting and got about half-an-hour of use out of it on lighter trimming around buildings and trees, and about 20 minutes on thick swaths of two ft-tall field grass that clogs our ditches and fence lines.

The unit has nice balance and a large spool so you’re not changing it every couple of weeks, which was a huge weakness in earlier line trimmers. And the spool lengthens the cutting line automatically as you work, so you don’t have to whack it on the ground to get more line.

TIP: The supplied battery charger takes several hours to top up a depleted battery, so if you need to do a lot of heavy-duty trimming it might be worth buying a second 36-volt battery to swap out. Or, since there are a couple of other tools in the new 36-volt line-up (an outdoor sweeper/blower/vac and a 24-inch hedge trimmer), you could start building a 36-volt system and share batteries.

The 36-volt string trimmer is available through Lowe’s and Rona for about $200. If that seems pricey, consider the fact that you’ll never need to buy gas for it.