Few garden frustrations are as familiar as a petrol mower that fires up willingly, runs for three or four seconds, then dies as if you had switched it off. Pull again, same result: a brief eager burst followed by silence.…
The first thing to do when your mower starts smoking is to switch it off and look at the colour of the cloud, because the colour is the diagnosis. Blue and white smoke almost always mean oil is being burned…
The air filter is the cheapest part on a petrol mower and the one most likely to kill the engine if you ignore it. A clean filter costs a few pounds and takes minutes to change, yet a neglected one…
The single rule that prevents most slope mowing accidents is also the one people most often get backwards: if you use a walk-behind mower, cut across the slope, side to side, never straight up and down. If you use a…
The honest answer to whether you should buy a battery or a petrol mower comes down to two things: how big your lawn is and how often you cut it. For most small and medium gardens, a modern battery mower…
Stihl built its name on professional chainsaws, and the same engineering culture runs through its lawn mowers: heavy-duty build, strong batteries, and a price that sits above the supermarket brands. The question for most gardeners is not whether a Stihl…
If you push your mower up and down the garden in the same tramlines every week, you are slowly working against your own lawn. The grass starts to lean, the cut looks worse over time, and on heavier soil you…
Turn almost any mower on its side after a season of use and you will find a thick, hard crust of dried grass packed into the underside of the deck, often a centimetre or more deep around the blade and…
A good used mower is one of the best value buys in the whole garden. A quality machine that cost several hundred when new can change hands for less than a third of that a few years later, and with…
A mulching blade is not simply a sharper version of the blade your mower came with. It is a different shape designed to do a different job. Where a standard blade flings clippings out of the deck and into a…
