How Good is the DeWalt® DCPS620 8” Cordless Pole Saw?

hey dirt fmer J here from dirt fj.com it was finally time to add a pole saw around here and we think we got a good one let me show you what I mean hey dir farmer J here from dirtfarmer j.com it was time to buy a pole saw a lot of our trees and shrubs have grown into sizes it gets harder and harder to reach up and prune them and it became time to get one of these also we have a lot of cherry tree volunteers that are popping up all over the place and I hope to trim these off a little bit low keeping the blade out of the dirt of course but really reducing the amount of work of me getting down on my hands and knees down in there let the P saww do the work we bought the DeWalt DCPS 620 bare tool only from a Home Depot cost us about $179 at the time of filming and uh it actually came with a neat little accessory pack where they gave us an extra bar and an extra chain uh that was thrown in it was less expensive than just buying the whole setup uh just the bare tool it'ss by itself they had a promo going on so that worked out really well well let's walk you through it here you can see the uh box that it came in uh this is going to be in three parts uh and so it's really nice that it actually disassembles into three shorter sections therefore the boxes is reasonable when you cut open the box and open it uh documentation is right at the main end uh that's got both the instruction manual some technical sheet and then of course there's some packing material that allows you to easily access the three main components that are in here again remember this is a bare tool so there was no charger or uh battery we've already got plenty of those so I don't need any more of those and this is part of The Suite of the 20 volt Dewalt tool Suite that uh fits all the other batteries so it's very handy interchangeable batteries well there's three sections in the box there is the power head there is an extension and then there's also the trigger in or the control in where the battery pack goes those three need to be assembled together when it comes time to assemble it they did a pretty intuitive system you'll see here alignment arrows that tell you exactly what sections line up with each other now the way we're generally going to keep this configured is just the power head and the control without the middle extension what are the lengths when you have uh the different pieces in it well overall the saw without the extension is about 60 in long or 152 CM if you add the 3ft extension section in the middle uh that adds another 91 CM or 3 foot overall you're going to get something that is around um 8T long or 243 cm and if you add an average height person uh that means you can get some pretty serious reach up on the other end of reaching up when you do cut branches that sort of thing wear safety glasses I would suggest hearing protection and uh make sure you're not standing under the debris as it comes down you just never know what's going to fall out the tree and how sharp the matter is going to be speaking of safety we think dewalt's done a good job of the trigger unit there's a safety on it that there's a little kind of three-step thing that you do uh and I've read online there's several people that have been complaining about this um it was very intuitive to us I handed to Rob who's behind the camera and said would you uh would you trigger this he automatically pulled back the top latch depressed it brought up the bottom latch and that's exactly what it's designed to do it's just like any other tool you develop a little bit of muscle memory with it and that allows that end which you can understand is pretty dangerous and daunting uh that there's always a little bit of forethought before that end comes on and you know exactly where it is it's not by uh an object or a person or an animal uh that you value now something that's a misunderstanding also I've seen on the reviews is where the battery is placed in here on the power head itself several people have thought this is the battery it is not it's the motor housing they've done a nice job of branding it their beautiful black in yellow with the XR system extended run but that is the motor housing the battery actually goes on the other end down here which actually serves a purpose again Rob immediately observed oh that gives you a little bit of counterbalance here uh to where uh when you put a battery depending on the weight of the battery how much that's going to fulcrum down here overall weight of the unit about 8 and2 pounds without the battery so depending on how many amp hours of battery you put in it is going to make the overall size and something we notice when you first pick it up at 8 and 12 lbs it's pretty heavy and it's front heavy but several people and I agree that weight actually becomes a friend for you because when you put it up in the tree on a branch the weight carries the blade through the work without you having to put down pressure again a great feature once we had the battery installed I couldn't help it I had to be the first person to trigger it on and see how it ran and you can see it running right here even though we hadn't put oil in it so I'm only going to run it just for a few seconds uh don't want it to wear uh on the the bar at all so but you can see it runs very nicely another thing that comes with it is a Scabbard that safeties the end when it's not in use and the Scabbard has a multi-tool that snaps into it one end down here is used to adjust on the front end of the saw the in and out of the bar to tension it and the other end this hex area over here is the bolts that tighten the bar into place so that is right on board being carried with the tool wherever you go to make immediate adjustments and you will need to do so because change Str stret from the get-go they're going to stretch the most those of you musicians know what it's like if you have a guitar you string it at first it stretches a lot until those strings settle in and chainsaws are the exact same way they're going to stretch until it settles in and then you're going to get continue to get some stretch and lead to continued tension and then eventually when it's worn out you're going to start all over again something you need to be aware of is the angle of the head is fixed if you've seen some of those flexible swivel head uh pole pruners you may think that that is the case here that you're able to adjust the head for different angles you're not it's fixed at this angle which works really well off the ground and will allow you some reaching down but that's not really what it's made for uh so I want you to be aware of that the second thing here is this hook and what this hook does because a shape allows you to get leverage this kind of grips into nooks and crannies the backside allows you to drag out um twigs and branches or what you've just cut freely and that kind of is like a pruning hook in the sense that after it's been cut loose you can pull down the debris out of the tree again making sure that you're not directly in the path or where it's going to exit out and come down and of course before you start to run this you absolutely need to fill up the reservoir with bar and chain oil and there's different kinds of oil or diff uh different types one is more vegetable-based therefore it's not petroleum uh based oil that's getting slung around uh if that is important to you uh then there is that readily available and then there's also the other more petroleum base now what makes this kind of oil different than just standard motor oil is it stickier therefore while the Chain's running it doesn't tend to sling the oil off as much the oil sticks to the bar the groove that the chains running around and lubricates the teeth on the bar now right in the instruction manual DeWalt says to make sure that you empty the reservoir every time you use it well we have the electric chainsaw as well and we found that if you leave oil in it uh and come back it will have puddled all the oil out that's because both the chainsaw and this pole trimmer do not use a pump system it's a dribble system so if there's oil in it and the dribble point is facing down it's going to empty out so if you want to keep the oil in there uh one thing we found out is if you turn the unit over so as you can see right here there's the reservoir head if you turn that over and store it like that then it won't drip out and we tried that kept it overnight uh in a pan and not a trace of oil the next day however when we disassembled this and after we'd actually drained all the oil out of it uh except for what clung to the inside of the little Reservoir we put it back in the box we found that oil had leaked all over the place you can see here on a piece of paper there's some of the oil uh that it does leak out so that might be a workaround but their Factory recommendations are is that you empty the oil out of the device every time you're done using it so our Impressions right out of the box overall is very good it looks like a durable tool as Is our commitment to you always a year later when we do some kind of initial Impressions on a tool set like this we come back and let you know how it held up in real life so uh watch for that video we'll make sure it comes out a year from now and let you know of experience usually with the DeWalt tools we have great experience with our fit and finish uh and been pleased with all we had a little bit of a weird thing happen this time around we bought this is a brand new tool when we got it out number one the Box may have been retap and number two in the extension section in the middle here there was like a scuff and there's scuffs on here and there a dent right there that none of the packaging would explain my suspicion is someone made light use of this maybe wanted to cut down one thing cleaned it up or decide it wasn't what they wanted and send it back um but I don't think that's going to really affect um affect the performance of The Tool and it's very likely you'll see more scars of this on this handle pretty quickly when we put it to use here's another DeWalt tool that has been time tested we've had it for a couple years and that's DeWalt DCB L 722 cordless blower this axle blower puts out an incredible amount of air using the 20 volt batteries we use it around here for all sorts of things go for control cleaning out gutters blowing off fresh snow Leaf all of that sort of thing take a look at it and see what you think and if it's a good tool for you and while you're at it also check out this other video that YouTube has chosen from our catalog that they think you'll be interested in and we hope you will be too until the next time this is dirt farmer J going out to prune some trees