STIGA VS 100e Cordless Blower / Vacuum Shredder
I didn’t think I’d ever need a leaf blower, or a leaf vacuum for that matter, but sooner or later the trials and tribulations of maintaining a presentable (read: suitable for your kids to destroy again) garden catch up to you. They caught up to me.
Artificial grass, I thought, when we first moved in a few years ago. That’ll never need maintenance or cutting or cause any fuss or hassle. I was wrong. For starters it’s become a persistent weed bed, and the crime of owning an artificial lawn has made me reluctant to further sin by attacking it with chemical weed killer. Furthermore it’s covered in mud, stones, leaves, bird poop and all manner of other junk. These things look rather more out of place on a pristine, short, uniform green outdoor carpet than they do a slightly overgrown lawn and I’ve been finding new, imaginative ways to tackle them year after year.
A broom doesn’t work, failing for the same reason you wouldn’t sweep your carpets- the bristles of the broom interact with the lawn and simply ping all the debris away. Brooms are hard work, anyway, and with it either raining or being 30 degrees outside with apparently very little in between these days I’m not partial to outdoor work. Nor am I terribly fit for it, with old surgery severely limiting how much I can do before regretting it for a week.
Fresh out of the box, it’ll never look this shiny again!
So what about a leaf blower. Or, better yet, a leaf vacuum? In a frankly absurd interaction with STIGA’s PR – whereupon I had some not very useful critique of their addition of AI to robot lawnmowers – I somehow ended up securing their VS 100e Cordless Vacuum Shredder.
True to its name this cordless behemoth takes not one but two of STIGA’s 20v batteries, large ones too, bigger than those in the SC 100e Cordless Pruning Shears I tested (4Ah vs 2Ah), but nonetheless interchangeable. These come in the box of the VS 100e kit, which also includes a double charger (C 216 DU) for charging both at the same time.
Two batteries and a charger in the box make it a pretty good deal- albeit only because they set the RRP for batteries at £65 😵💫
Batteries are the blessing and curse of cordless tools, though, and if you’re buying into a system you’d better be prepared to replace them at some point in the future- STIGA sell the 4Ah “E 24” separately at £65 a pop, so that’ll be £130 for a complete battery replacement. Or, heck, you could just spend the extra £75, get their chainsaw and swap the new batteries between the two tools… what’s that, sunk cost fallacy? I can’t hear you over all my tools.
Jokes aside, £65 puts STIGA’s 20v, 4Ah battery at the high end of the price spectrum, with the going rate being about £40-£50 but when you consider RYOBI’s cordless vacuum shredder is £165 at Amazon prices for *just the body*, with the recommended battery costing £80… well the STIGA isn’t so bad. Positively a bargain, even! Unless uh… you’ve already bought into that other system.
Sticking a 4Ah battery on some pruning shears is a little over the top, but it works.
The STIGA is a well built tool. I know because I had to build it. Or, at least, assemble much of the blower/vacuum portion onto the main body by means of a slot-in assembly with two screws. It comes boxed in two parts so the packaging isn’t hilariously huge, but once put together it’s not likely to come back apart for storage or wielding like a giant Quake gun so don’t get any ideas.
Accidentally vacuum shredded an IKEA tumbler…
The fan that serves as vacuum, blower, and shredder looks like a significant chunk of probably cast metal, and it made short work of a plastic cup and seems to shrug off small stones.
A view down the vacuum tube revealing the shredder fan in all its glory.
The separate zip-up bag for storing shredded leaves must also be installed for the vacuum to work at all. Most likely because it would be outrageously dangerous to expose yourself to all the random small stones and other detritus that might otherwise fly out of the vacuum hole. Interestingly the bag is secured to its plastic clip with nothing more fancy than a trimmed zip tie so, as I discovered when sucking up a bunch of hefty, wet soil, it’s easy to repair if it should start to slip off.
I vacuumed up so much wet soil that the bag fell off its plastic clip.
A downside of the fabric bag itself is that it’s prone to entrain dust and debris in its creases and crevices. This I also discovered when taking a freshly baked in the hot sun vacuum out of storage and firing it up- the resulting poof of dried out dust left a noticeable mark on my shorts. The process of unzipping and emptying the bag is also a bit of a nuisance, the zip is prone to getting stuck and encouraging a bunch of shredded leaf matter out of a floppy fabric sack is rather more hassle than I’d hoped.
The bag is secured to its plastic clip with none other than a humble zip tie. If it works it works!
I’m almost tempted to say STIGA should take a leaf (ha ha) out of the vacuum cleaner manufacturers page and introduce disposable bags for this, they already have an interchangeable locking mechanism and I’m sure finding a safe way to hook a sturdy biodegradable bag into the plastic part isn’t far outside their expertise. That said, it’s secured with that aforementioned zip tie… I’m pretty sure I could improvise if I wanted. You don’t have to empty the bag after every use, but since the bag has to be porous for airflow you might get the same dusty experience that I had when the hot weather saps the last molecules of moisture out of that mulch.
Emptying the dusty awkward bag with the stubborn sticky zip is by far the worst part!
The actual process of vacuuming, or blowing, itself is relatively simple. With the Blow/Vacuum lever in vacuum mode it works, more or less, like a real vacuum cleaner. That is, at least, if your real vacuum cleaner is so hefty it needs a shoulder strap and a set of wheels to take the load off. Having just complained about using a broom being a lot of work, I’m not entirely keen on the idea of lugging this thing around but I do get the distinct impression I look a lot cooler and a lot more like some kind of green-fingered garden genius when I do. That’s if anyone’s actually watching…
Anyway it’s a hefty tool, tricky to manoeuvre and you definitely need to employ the shoulder strap at the very least. But it does deliver on the promise of vacuuming and shredding. I managed to suck up the aforementioned wet soil and make rather a mess of the insides, most likely now requiring a thorough clean to get it back to its fresh-out-of-the-box performance. It still happily sucks up leaves, moss, small stones and other unwanted lawn accoutrements so that’s a win. Oh and stones… it’s not that bad, I use it to vacuum the leaves out of the stones that edge my house and it doesn’t hungrily chow down on the stones too, just the odd rattle here and there where there’s a particularly light one.
I’m finding that a fair portion of the air sucked up through the main intake- which forms the vacuum in vacuum mode- is being blown out through the smaller blower nozzle. I think that’s part of the mess I made when sucking up wet soil, making the little internal flap not seal down over the outlet quite as well as it should. In vacuum mode I think all the air should be directed into the bag, otherwise you end up in a weird simultaneous and frustrating mix of blowing and vacuuming which isn’t all that useful… okay in hindsight, having written this and tried the vacuum shredder again I discovered I simply wasn’t flipping the switch until it snapped decisively into position. Classic user error!
A view inside the vacuum bag connection reveals the internal flap for switching between vacuum and blowing mode.
The VS 100e really does need dry, moderate weather to be usable and most of the time it took me to review this thing was finding the opportunity to actually use it. If the leaves are wet then sucking sucks (or, rather, doesn’t) and you’ll just be blow drying them. For the most part I used the vacuum shredder mode, since I don’t really have anywhere to blow things to, but I did briefly use the blower.
In blower mode the bag is closed off and all of the air from the large intake is directed through a smaller nozzle along the bottom. It works really well for blowing more or less anything around the garden, including toys, balls, scooters and more. It’s also surprisingly pretty good at blowing leaves and soil, the latter of which the kids have a habit of digging out of our unplanted planters and leaving absolutely everywhere for me to struggle to clean up. Eventually I resigned to just blowing the soil under the planters and forgetting about it, out of sight out of mind?
Planters in bloom! Absolutely packed with wildflowers. Perhaps we overdid it..,
Oh those planters are now lush with a ridiculous quantity of sprouting wildflowers, which are half way between a part of my penance for owning an artificial lawn and a little grow project for the kids. We emptied an entire box of wildflower seed into an area suited for maybe one tenth of it, so they’re looking pretty lush and will no doubt have some fierce competition for growing room. I guess we’ll see!
Back to the STIGA. Run time… it doesn’t feel all that long, but it also feels long enough. I’d deign to measure it with a clock or some fancy equipment other than vibes, but STIGA’s claimed 23 minute runtime is not exactly a brash and bold claim. It feels more or less accurate, and trust me 23 minutes is about as long as you’re going to want to run this thing before you get tired of either the weight or the noise. In particular I find it just a shade too short for my height, so like every cordless vacuum ever I get backache from using it. If you’re a short king or have teenage kids this won’t be a problem, but otherwise you should weigh it against the aches and pains of regular low tech sweeping.
Picking up small weeds and dirt scraped out of the patio is handy.
There’s something to be said for sweeping and picking up, even if it leaves me groaning about aches and pains for a week. If brooms worked a damn on artificial grass I might almost be tempted to give it a go… I once took an indoor cordless vacuum cleaner out there and it actually worked pretty well until it got hopelessly clogged. That’s something to the STIGA VS 100e’s credit… can’t clog if you’re turning everything into a fine mist upon entry. With the exception of the aforementioned wet soil – which I have discovered is a fine way to ruin a brand shiny new cordless vacuum shredder – this thing is uncloggable. Thankfully wet soil dries and most of it was eventually blown through or dislodged by the maelstrom of shredded debris.
Overall it’s a great tool, and complaints about the weight aside it’s easy to trot out for a quick whip around the garden, vacuuming and shredding, and worrying about emptying it later. A few five minute bursts here and there keep the leaves and clumps of moss (damn you, birds, why do you keep throwing them off the roof?) at bay much more efficiently than grabbing a broom, sweeping everything into a pile, finding gloves, picking up the pile, inevitably leaving a bit of dust you can’t pick up… if you’ve ever tried this you know the story.
Gratuitous cover image shot!
What’s more, when the batteries aren’t used with the shredder they can expand the runtime of the small hand tools and you can prune for days! Though I now have quite the collection of superfluous battery chargers…