Line trimmers
Keep your garden tidy and tackle long grass with a line trimmer.
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 (50%)
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 (50%)
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.
