A strimmer that snaps its line every thirty seconds turns a ten-minute edging job into a frustrating afternoon of refeeding the spool. The cause is almost never a faulty machine. In most cases the line is the wrong thickness for…
A robot mower trims a little grass every day and mulches the clippings back into the lawn, so the grass never grows long enough to need collecting. For the right garden it removes mowing from the to-do list entirely. The…
If you have a bank, a terrace, or a steeply sloping lawn, the safest machine is almost always a hover mower, because its deck floats on a cushion of air and you sweep it sideways across the slope instead of…
A mulching mower does not collect your grass clippings. Instead it cuts them, then cuts them again into pieces a few millimetres long, and drops that fine confetti back down into the base of the lawn where it breaks down…
When two petrol mowers sit side by side at similar prices, the name stamped on the deck tells you far less than the name cast into the engine. The engine decides how easily the mower starts on a cold morning,…
A mower pull cord that has gone solid, or that pulls out a few centimetres and jams, almost never means the engine is finished. In most cases the cause is one of a short list of problems you can check…
A thin ribbon of standing grass left behind on every pass is one of the most irritating mower faults, partly because it looks like the machine is mocking you. The fix is usually quick once you know which of a…
A thick crust of dried grass under your mower deck is not just untidy, it quietly wrecks the quality of your cut. The deck is shaped to create a controlled airflow that lifts each blade of grass upright a fraction…
A mower that suddenly shakes, buzzes through the handles or rattles louder than usual is trying to tell you something, and the message is almost always the same: something is spinning out of balance. In the great majority of cases…
Cylinder and rotary mowers do the same job in two completely different ways, and the difference decides which one will give you the lawn you want. A cylinder mower shears each blade of grass like a pair of scissors, producing…
