Litheli U20 13 inch Brushless Mower Review

Hi, I'm Mike with House on the Mend, and in this video we're going to be reviewing the Leifli brushless lawnmower using the very sleek U20 battery platform. So let's get started. Now, I'm not paid nor sponsored by Leifli. They reached out and sent me this unit free for my independent review. Let's open up the box and see what comes inside. So you've got an outer box and then an inner box to ensure that everything is nicely protected while in shipping. All right, here's everything that comes in the excellent packaging. So you have the unit itself, which we'll go over in depth. It has the lower arms actually connected to it. The upper arm here with the safety and the on-off switch are disconnected. We'll mount those in a minute with this hardware that's included. And then we also have these little clips that are to hold the wiring cable along and police that up. Next, we have the grass catcher. This is a 30-liter grass bag, and you open up this back hatch here, which is spring-loaded. Set the grass catcher right onto the two little support hooks like that, and then it holds in place. Pretty nice. I like this handle here. There's also a carry handle on the unit itself. On the left side of the unit is the height adjustment. I like that it's got five stages of height adjustment, and you can go from a cutting height of one inch to just over two and a half inches by adjusting here. Another thing that's cool is it's not just adjusting the rear wheels with one. It's got this bar here that connects to the front wheels, and as you adjust, you can see all four wheels are moving at the same time with one adjustment lever. I've seen some mowers where it only adjusts the rear so you get kind of an angled cut, or that all four tires have one of these, so that's pretty innovative there that one lever does all of it. If we look here, this big sleek dome is the battery port, and it's just held by a little clip here up front, and you've got two ports. One of them is for the battery to actually run on. The other one is for a spare battery if you have one, and then to release them there's this button right here that has a little lock symbol on it. You press that and both of them come out. Now speaking of the battery, it does come with one four amp hour battery from the factory. It's got about 75 percent charge. Now as I turn this over and I see right here in this picture, it has 74 watt hours, so I did the math, and that is 3.7 amp hours, which is close to the claimed four amp hour. Most battery manufacturers for these kinds of tools do round up to the nearest half of an amp hour, so not bad at all. That's going to give us quite a bit of power. That is the largest capacity battery of any of the tools I have thus far reviewed, which is the hedge trimmer and the string trimmer. They were two amp hour and 2.5 amp hour respectively. Now let's flip the tool over because I want to take a look at the mower blade here. This is a nice solid steel mower blade. This is not very sharp, so I guess it's working on speed to do most of the cutting. Let's take a measurement. It's supposed to be 13 inches across, and it is exactly 13 inches. There is a 16 millimeter nut right here in the center. If you ever wanted to remove the blade to sharpen it or replace it with another 13 inch blade, you can do that by simply unscrewing this bolt. In addition to the front carry handle, I also see a little spot right here for your hand, so if it's flipped over this way, you can put one hand on this carry handle, the other underneath in that spot, and transport it. So let's take the battery inside and charge it. While it's charging, we can come right back out here and assemble the handlebar. So let's take a closer look at the Lightly U20 battery. First of all, it is really sleek and cool looking. It's got this kind of carbon fiber pattern on the sides of it. It looks like, as I've said before, something out of the space program. I love that it comes with a battery life indicator. From the factory here, we have about a 75 percent charge, and if you flip the battery over to the other side, you can see that not only do we have the two ports here that actually attach to the tool and supply power to the tool, but we also have a USB and a USB-C port, both of which can supply power to your electronic devices, and then the tool is also charged through the USB-C port. Now, the only thing I don't care for on these batteries is there's no outward way to tell which battery is which. We have a two amp hour, a two and a half amp hour, and a four amp hour battery. All are the same height and width and thickness. Interestingly, the USB port, as you can see here, are a different color for each one of them, but the only other way to tell the difference is to flip over the battery, look at this tiny little writing that says the watt hour capacity, and then do the math and figure out which one is the two, the two and a half, and the four. So instead, what I've done is made labels for all of my batteries that I have from Lifely so I can distinguish them, and I just put on there whatever the amp hour is. In this case, four amp hour, and we can attach that right there to distinguish. Now, the battery doesn't come with its own wall charger. Instead, it comes with this really nice braided cable that is USB on one side, USB-C on the other, or you can separate off this piece that is attached and it's USB-C to C, which is pretty neat. So your standard wall charger for American 110 volt is going to be anywhere in this area here of 5, 9, or even 10 watts, but the manual states that the maximum allowable charging input is 45 watts, which is four and a half times the biggest one I have. So instead, I purchased this 45 watt charger. I'll leave a link to it. It works great. Simply plug it right in here, and then the charger comes with this really nice thick cable. So let's plug that in there, and then into the USB-C port of the battery. You can see we immediately start blinking. It's got three solid lights and one blinking light, which indicates that it's 75 percent of the way charged. When all four are solid, we will have a fully charged four amp hour battery. Let's start our timer and take an initial reading just to check and make sure when we're done that we haven't heated up the battery to an alarming amount. 82 degrees Fahrenheit. All right, I'm going to start by rotating up the handle. There is a spot right here where it is missing a tooth and is a wider space, and so it locks right into place there so there's no risk of them being all cattywampus. So I like that. Let's tighten this down. Just give this a few spins and then rotate it over and lock it into place. Nice. I'll move that forward so you can see right here where we're working. We are going to install these two handlebars together just like this with the included screws. So let me get one of them going. We're going to need to back off this bolt, put it through here, do the same on this side, then we're going to put in the little circular disc. Kind of a washer. Screw that tight a little bit and then lock it down into place. Pretty easy. Now when storing it, you can easily undo these four clasps a bit and collapse the handle down. I'll show you that in a little bit. So we're going to want to put these little wire clips, I would say, fairly close to the two pivot points. You can always easily adjust them. All right, let's go check on the battery. All right, just under 40 minutes to fully charge this battery and 100 degrees. So it went up 16 degrees Fahrenheit in 40 minutes of charging. So a quick look at the likely 4 amp hour battery against four of its competitors shows that it's got a slightly larger perimeter. However, it's much smaller in thickness and it's the lightest coming in at one pound two ounces. All right, let's get a dry weight, no battery on the unit. This will also be without the grass catch and it is 22 pounds. All right, let's do a runtime test with no load and see how long the battery lasts. I've got a couple wheel chocks in the back for safety and a sandbag up front so this guy isn't rolling away someplace while we're doing our test. Open up our door here, slide in our freshly charged battery, clicks right into place, good to go. Now this orange on-off handle here doesn't do anything by itself. For safety, you need to first press the button right here, then pull the handle and that engages, wow, a very quiet lawnmower. All right, let's start our test. I'm going to put a little clamp here to keep it running. Grab my phone, start our timer, and let's see how long it goes. Still going after an hour and 10 minutes and we're only down two bars. So the battery lasted just over two hours of runtime without any load on it, meaning not actually cutting grass, but I think that gives us a pretty good indication of how long it's going to last under load, which is going to be some assemblance less than that. Now it took an hour and 40 minutes or so to fully charge with the 45 watt charger, so I would definitely go for one of those, otherwise you're looking at like a four hour charge time. So I've got a little collapsible bag here. I've got the grass catcher on the back. Let's do some cutting and see how it performs. Nice and quiet. I do see a lot of rocks over here, so I'm going to avoid the big ones. Now with only 13 inches of blade width, you're going to be making a lot of tight passes on your lawn, so that's a consideration on whether or not you want a unit this small. Super easy to maneuver since it's so lightweight, and I'd have to say the loudest thing about it is definitely the rocks it's picking up. I love that smell of fresh cut grass. So it sounds like an electric break kicks in after a short period of time. Let's see how we did here. Oh yeah, that's going to be real nice. Pretty easy. Come right back in here, load it back up. This little grass catcher doesn't quite line up. You have to pry one side closed. I wish it was a little bit wider. Let's do some more. Let's lower it one and see what happens then, or is that the lowest? That's our lowest setting. All right, this guy's super lightweight, but I can still make out the tire impression, so I can follow my line. I'm just going around rocks here. So it took all those passes to go from about right here. This is too much rock, so from about right here to right here. It's probably not even six feet, and it took us a bunch of passes to get there, so I think that stands to the thinness of the blade, and that's really going to be the biggest consideration for this guy. It's obviously performing well. This grass isn't long enough for it to bog down, but let's see if I notice anything else while we're cutting. I like that brake for safety. That is pretty cool. You've got to think it's building up quite a bit of centripetal force, and objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an equal or greater force, so the fact that it slows down that quick tells me it's got an electric brake of some sort in it, which I like. So there's a little bit of debris that's staying in there, and this isn't even wet grass, but it's dry enough. I think I can just kind of shake it, move it out, but quite a bit that didn't actually blow into the grass catch bag. So to break it down for storage or to carry it away, you simply undo these two, and that lets it go forward like that. Break these two down, and that allows us to bend it back this way. And there we go. This little guy flung off, but I saw where it went luckily. All right, it's ready to be moved. For safety's sake, I popped the battery out of it, but now it's a nice little collapsible thing. You can carry it back, put it on your trailer, or put it in your shed, wherever you store it. Pretty good. Yeah, with a 13-inch blade, you definitely have to know your scale, right? You're not going to be cutting this big, beautiful lawn at the park. And the cleanup couldn't be easier. Just wiping it down with a wet rag once the battery is removed. So I think that's enough testing for me to give you my pros and cons. So first, the pros. The build quality, like all of the Lifely tools I have reviewed so far, is really good. The other ones have been excellent. Just really strong feeling of quality. This one's a little bit lighter weight, but still everything is well made. All the plastics and molding and everything are well finished. There's no stickers that are going to come off. So really good build quality. I love that it has a brushless motor. That shows that they are up to date with today's technology. Also, of course, the battery platform, which I'll get to in a minute, shows that they care about good quality. The power seemed really good. It never bogged down at all. Now granted, the grass that I had access to here in Las Vegas on a hot June day was very dry. So if you have longer grass that has a lot more moisture content, you might want to raise up the wheels as much as possible and make several passes to get to your ideal cutting. But in my testing, the power was more than sufficient. Next thing would be the battery life. It was really good. I think two hours of runtime is great. It's a good indicator of just how much you'll get when it's under load. Speaking of the battery, I love that it has this backup port right here. So if you go out into a big area, you can carry the battery that's going to power the unit and then also a spare. This little door here is really well manufactured. Now I like that it has five levels of adjustment with the wheels. If your grass has been growing for quite a while and is getting kind of long, you're going to want to start real high and then work your way down to that optimum cut length. And I like that you can do that with just one adjustment handle. Pretty cool. Lastly would be the battery platform. Not only do I think this battery is really cool the way it doubles as a charger for your electronic devices, but the range of tools that they have right now are all really good quality and there's a bunch more to come. If you check their website, the link is down below. You can see a picture of some of the next ones that are just about to announce, but they're going to have plenty more on this U20 battery platform and I just think it is a sleek, nice product line. Now the cons, and I have just two. First of all, the 13-inch mower blade length is just depressingly small for me. If you look at this simple search I did on Amazon, the overwhelming majority of lawnmower blades are around 21 inches. So that means that for every five passes with your standard lawnmower, you're going to be making eight passes with this one because of that smaller blade. This unit had plenty of power. I wish they could have worked out a way that you would get a 21-inch blade. I think it would just bring you into that normal range and you're going to be spending less time mowing your lawn and you can get to doing other things. The next thing would be this grass catcher here. I noticed when putting it on that it would go on to one hook real easy, but the other one I have to take my hand off the handle and I have to physically bring it over and stretch it out a little bit and then lock it into place. And that's an extra step that shouldn't be necessary. Maybe it's just from shipping that it was a little bit crimped or something, but their packaging is so good that maybe it's a design flaw. But every time I take the grass catcher off, I did notice that I have to take my hand off the handle and pry it over a little bit to latch it on. So if you found this video helpful in making a purchasing decision, will you please give it a thumbs up? It really helps the algorithms to start suggesting it to more viewers like you. Also please consider subscribing. I'm working really hard to put out good quality content, tool reviews. We have a van build series going on that I think you would also enjoy, and it's really easy and free. You just log into your account and click subscribe, or if you're on Rumble, follow. It really helps the channel. Now I'm going to leave a link to this unit as well as that 45 watt charger in the description below. Full disclosure, those will be Amazon affiliate links, so if you click on them and end up making any purchase, it won't cost you a thing, but I do get a small reward at the end of the month. It helps to justify all the time it takes to make these videos. I would like to thank Lifely for once again sending me another tool for my independent review without any preconceived agreements on what I was going to say. It shows that they believe in their product, and I think it takes some bravery to do that, and I want to thank them for that. Until next time, thank you for watching.