Power, performance and convenience are our main considerations when testing a line trimmer.
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.
We've tested 29 line trimmers.
Find the right one for you.