How Long Does It Take To Charge A Stihl Battery?

Battery-powered outdoor equipment might be the best thing that happened to the environment — and your ears! — but they're not without their drawbacks. Perhaps the one thing many homeowners hate about using such a tool (even if it's from one of the major cordless yard tool brands) is the limited runtime and long charging time. Say, you can run the unit for an hour or so, but before you even finish what you're doing, it starts dying on you. That's why it's recommended to have at least one spare battery in cases like these.

But if you only have one battery on hand, you should know how long your downtime will be as you wait for the pack to be topped up. For Stihl batteries, this charging time can take anywhere from 25 minutes to over seven hours. The exact duration, though, depends on two factors: the capacity of the battery and the specification of the charger it's connected to.

Stihl offers only one battery model — the AS 2 — for the tools in its AS battery system. It's a 2.6Ah pack rated at 10.8V, just enough to power the small but powerful mini Stihl tools. To recharge the battery, you can pick from one of three available AS chargers: AL 1, AL 5, or AL 5-2. With the AL 1, it will take an hour for the AS 2 to reach 80% and another 20 minutes to fully charge. But using either the AL 5 or AL 5-2 charger, you only need to wait half an hour to charge the AS 2 to 80% and a total of 50 minutes to hit 100%.

This difference in charging time has a lot to do with the amperage rating of the charger. The 33W AL 1 can only deliver a charging current of 2A, while the 60W AL 5 and 120W AL 5-2 chargers both double this output at 4A. Generally, the higher the amperage, the faster the charger can top up the battery pack. If you have more than one AS 2 pack, you can opt for the AL 5-2 charger, which takes in two units simultaneously, so downtime is much shorter.

Stihl's two other battery systems (AK and AP) share the same battery chargers. You can use the AL 101, AL 300, AL 301, AL 301-4, AL 500, and AL 501 chargers with most of the models in either system. However, since the AK line is designed for residential use and the AP range is built for professionals, there's a massive gap in the battery capacities for each system, and thus a difference in their charging times too.

The AK batteries that range from 2Ah to 5Ah need 25 to 160 minutes to charge to 80% and 35 to 205 minutes to get to 100%. Meanwhile, the AP batteries with capacities from 2.6Ah to as large as 42.2Ah take 25 to 330 minutes for an 80% charge and 35 to 430 minutes for a full charge.

The chargers do play a part in how long it takes to charge the Stihl batteries. For instance, when the 2Ah AK 10 is connected to the 75W 1.6A AL 101 charger, it will fully charge after 95 minutes. But this duration is cut in half, specifically to just 40 minutes, with the 300W 6.5A AL 301 Rapid Battery Charger.

The same goes for even the highest-capacity AP battery, AR 3000 L. The AL 301 charger can get the battery to 80% in 5.5 hours and to 100% in more than seven hours. If you plug the pack into the 570W 12A AL 501 High-Speed Battery Charger, the charging time will be just 2.8 and 3.7 hours, respectively.