The symptom pattern

The battery’s in, the grass basket’s on, and squeezing the switching bar on the handle does nothing at all. On a mower, that reads like a dead motor or a dead battery — but Einhell’s own troubleshooting table for the GE-CM 36 Li lists six possible causes for exactly this fault, and only two of them are an actual electrical fault. The other four are ordinary conditions the mower won’t start under by design.

What Einhell’s own table says

Section 12 of the manual gives these causes for “Motor does not start”, in the order Einhell lists them: a defective capacitor, motor terminals or the capacitor disconnected, the mower standing in high grass, a clogged mower housing, the safety switch not inserted, and the battery not correctly inserted. Four of those six are things anyone can check and fix without tools: cut shorter grass first or raise the cutting height, clear a clogged deck, press the handlebar safety switch before the switching bar, and reseat the battery properly.

The safety switch point catches people out because it isn’t obvious: the manual states the mower “is equipped with a safety switch which must be pressed before the switching bar can be activated” — the switching bar on its own does nothing, by design, until that separate safety switch has been pressed first. The battery cause is just as mechanical: the two packs need to fully seat and the cover needs to latch, and Einhell is explicit that the two batteries should be charged to the same level together, since the mower’s run time is set by whichever one is lower.

The remaining two causes — a defective capacitor, or motor terminals or the capacitor disconnected — are both given the same remedy in the manual: “by customer service center”. There’s no test procedure or user-level fix offered for either, which is Einhell’s own way of saying this is wiring inside the motor housing, not something to open up and probe.

Working through it

Check the easy, free causes first and in the order the manual gives them: grass length and any clogging under the deck, then the safety-switch-before- switching-bar sequence, then both batteries removed and refitted with the cover properly latched. If the mower still won’t start after all of that, and both batteries are confirmed charged, the fault has narrowed down to the capacitor or motor wiring — at that point Einhell’s own documentation sends it to a service centre rather than giving a repair step, so that’s the right next move rather than opening the motor housing on a guess.

Verdict

This is one of the more forgiving “won’t start” faults to diagnose, because Einhell’s own manual gives a short, complete list and four of the six entries on it are free and immediate. Work through grass length, housing clogging, the safety switch sequence and the battery seating before assuming anything has actually failed. If it genuinely comes down to the capacitor or motor wiring, that’s a service job by the manufacturer’s own instructions, not a DIY repair with a published procedure to follow.