Line trimmers

Overall score breakdown

Our overall score comprises two equally weighted sub-scores:

Performance

Our performance scores are based on:

• Horizontal trimming (with the head parallel to the ground) of short- to medium-length grass along fences, walls and areas of lawn.
• Vertical trimming (with the head at right angles to the ground) along path and garden edges to assess whether they’re able to create razor-sharp lawn borders.
• Cutting long, thick, weedy grass.

Ease of use

Our ease of use assessment looks at:

• The general comfort and ergonomics of the line trimmer, including weight, balance, shaft length, visibility, and the ease of using the controls.
• Ease of re-spooling the line.
• Ease of starting.
• Ease of feeding out line.
• The level of vibration.

Our recommendation

We recommend petrol trimmers scoring above 85% overall. While the performance and ease-of-use of the best petrol trimmers in our tests has hovered at or above this level for a few years, battery-electric models continue to improve year on year.

We raised the bar for the performance of battery-powered trimmers to 80% after a batch of 7 cordless models returned impressive performance in our 2017 test.