Bosch 18 Volt Hedgecutter AHS 55-20LI

I bought this as a replacement for my Bosch corded hedge cutter, which has a 70cm blade. I've now used it on some of the laurel hedge in my garden. I'll list pros and cons.Pros1. Good cutting action. Blades are sufficiently spaced for cutting laurel and very sharp2. Lightweight - considerably lighter than my corded hedge cutter3. East to use safety feature which requires you to be gripping the handles with both hands4. Battery life is good (better than expected). We used it continuously for over an hour and the battery was still only partially depleted. I'm not sure I'll need the spare battery I bought.5. Cordless! Having cut through the cords of my other cutters more than once, this is a real boon.Cons:1. I was expecting the blade to be shorter at 55cm but the last 10cm has smaller blades designed for a sawing action, reducing the effective length for hedge trimming to 45cm. I tried the saw action and found it pretty slow on laurel, which is soft when it's green. I imagine it would find yew impossible. My laurel hedges are a metre deep in places so we had to revert to the corded cutter to trim the tops.2. Terrible manual. It's 296 pages long in 31 language. Just 9 of these are in English. There's a table of symbols which, having been explained, appear nowhere else in the manual. The instructions are scant and mostly statements of the obvious. In places where I could do with more information there was nothing. For example, the manual refers in at least three places to lubricating the blades 'with a protective spray' both before and after use. What sort of protective spray? Bicycle chain oil, chain saw oil, teflon? It also refers at one point to cleaning the blades. What with? An oily rag, hot soap and water? I looked online for a better manual but only found PDF versions of the one I have.3. The hedge cutter came with a product registration card. I failed to sign in to my Bosch customer account (that I set up for my Bosch oven) and the system did not send me a new password link. I suppose I'll have to set up another account.Overall, it's more convenient for small, lightweight jobs but I'll continue to use the corded cutter until it breaks on the high, deep hedges. I'll oil it with whatever comes to hand and hope that's what Bosch would have recommended if they had bothered to write a decent manual.P.S. Picture of high and thick laurel hedge attached now. This was beyond the capabilities of this tool in every respect. To use a food metaphor, it can cope with a light salad and thinly-sliced ham but a beef steak is too much for it.

Despite all the reviews we found this great to use but underpowered with thicker stems that crop up in the old 'field' hedge that we have one side of our property. On the other hand, it's much easier to 'get up and going with' - none of that lead extension to roll out/cut through (!) and rewind which is an absolute boon. Glad we bought it and it was certainly ok on our escallonia hedge and mostly ok on our beech hedges - we have roughly 60m length of beech x 2m high. They are cut in stages ..

I've now had a chance to use these, and they smack of quality, they cut through my hedge like butter, just make sure you keep spraying the blades with a good quality lubricant. The battery holds more than enough power to cut my hedge, in fact I have only charged the battery up once when they were delivered, but have now cut my hedge twice. I'm very happy with these trimmers.

Really excellent cutter. Wish I had bought one like this before now! What a difference from previous one. First class service.

Very pleased with this electric hedgecutter. Significantly lighter than our old one but does the job efficiently.

Great hedge cutter. Cuts well not heavy and the battery lasts a long time.Very pleased so far.