Bare tool or kit: which should you actually buy?

Almost every cordless yard tool is sold twice: once with a battery and charger, once without. The listings look nearly identical and the difference in what arrives is enormous. Here is how to work out which one you are actually shopping for, before the box turns up with nothing in it.

The rule, in one line

Which tools ship which way

This is not consistent within a brand, let alone across brands. Our registry splits roughly down the middle.

When the kit battery is the wrong battery

Manufacturers pick the included pack to land a runtime claim on the box at a price that sells. That is a marketing decision, and it sometimes collides with the acreage rating printed two lines below it.

That is not a fault in the mower — its spec sheet is the most complete we hold, and we say so on every page it appears. It is a demonstration that the kit pack is sized to the claim, not to your lawn. If your lot sits at the top of a tool's rating, plan on a second pack from day one and price the purchase that way.

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Does a bigger pack buy proportional time?

For steady-draw tools, yes, and one manufacturer publishes enough data to prove it. EGO gives runtimes for its edger attachment on three different pack sizes.

Now contrast that with a blower on turbo, where the draw is anything but flat: the LB7650 works out at about 18.7Wh a minute flat out and about 1.9Wh a minute on low. Buying a bigger pack for a blower you run on turbo buys far less extra time than the amp-hour increase suggests, because the tool is the variable, not the battery.

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A four-step decision

1. Is this your first tool on the platform? Buy the kit. You need a charger and you need a pack, and buying them separately is rarely cheaper.
2. Do you already own a pack on this platform? Work out the new tool's watt-hours per minute from its published runtime, multiply by your job length, and check your existing pack covers it with about a third in hand.
3. Does it cover it? Buy bare. This is the whole payoff of having chosen a platform in the first place.
4. Does it not? Buy bare anyway, plus the pack size you actually need. That is usually better value than a kit built around a smaller pack you will then own two of.

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The charger nobody counts

A bare tool leaves you with one charger for a growing pile of packs, and published charge rates in this category vary by a factor of six. Greenworks publishes 40 minutes for a 320Wh mower pack and 30 minutes for a 160Wh trimmer pack; Toro publishes 150 minutes for 324Wh. If you own two packs and one slow charger your effective runtime is capped by the charger, not the battery. The published rates are all in how long batteries take to charge.

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What we cannot tell you

We do not quote remembered prices, so we cannot tell you the break-even point between a kit and a bare tool plus a pack in your local market this week. Bundles change constantly and any number we printed here would be wrong by the time you read it.

What we can tell you is the energy arithmetic, which does not change: know the tool's watt-hours per minute, know your job in minutes, multiply, add a third, and buy the configuration that covers it. The box will not do that calculation for you.