Garden And Gardener

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Black & Decker 18v Cordless Strimmer String Trimmer & Edger

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Black and Decker StrimmerReview of the Black & Decker® 18v Cordless Strimmer® String Trimmer & Edger

If you’ve got a lawn then you need a strimmer. They’re one of those incredibly useful tools that can really finish off your garden and make it look perfect. A smooth flat lawn is nothing without neat edges. If you have paths or borders to your lawn then you must know how much effort it is unravelling the lead on the strimmer and minding the plants whilst you avoid desperately trying to strim the edges.

What you need is a cordless strimmer – and whilst they’ve been around for some time they have now entered the modern age! This Black & Decker® 18v Cordless Strimmer® String Trimmer & Edger is powerful yet light and easy to handle.

Previous cordless strimmers didn’t have the battery power that you need, were heavy and didn’t meet the needs properly. This Black and Decker strimmer is 18V though which makes it really powerful.

Being only 5’3 I’ve always found strimmers designed for someone taller than me, which makes them a little more awkward to handle, but this strimmer is different. It’s got a height adjustable section in the body of the strimmer. This is a revolution and will help you to use this tool even more safely. When a tool is the right height you can use it with more confidence and with more safety as you’ll have more control.

The battery needs an 8 hour charge – but this is similar to all battery powered items – battery technology isn’t yet at the stage where we can have an instand recharge. But that’s probably a good thing – strimming even with a lightweight strimmer is quite tiring on your arms! If you use this one until it’s flat then you will have probably overdone it and your arms will ache the next day!

To test this strimmer out we found a garden in dire need of attention. The grass in this lawn hadn’t been cut for some time – possibly over a year and was definitely too long for the lawn mower. Would our battery powered strimmer manage to get through it! It did! And with ease! It was only as we’d finished doing the lawn area that it started to give out. Time flew whilst I was strimming too – it was very easy to handle and I found myself enjoying strimming for the first time not having to worry about a cable, yet it being as light almost as the mains lead strimmer I usually end up using.

Of course in a normal garden you’d never have that much strimming to do – and so the machine will manage it all easily on one charge and probably have enough charge left to do it all again – depending of course on the size of your garden. The manufacturer reckons it will do 1000m worth of strimming on a charge – which is a huge amount – probably more than your garden needs, but great to know you can do it all in one charge!

It uses the Reflex® Intelligent Line Feed System to automatically feed out replacement line making it simple and effort free to strim.

The edging tool has a guide to ensure you do a neat job. This tucks neatly away when you’re doing normal strimming and you simply set it up to edge by twisting the bottom section around and locking it in to the alternative position.

Out of the box it takes a minute or so to put together – you do need a screwdriver to do up a few screws around the plastic guard. It is simple – and it will probably take you longer to get it out of the packaging than put it together!

Using this Black and Decker Strimmer is easy. It’s got a button on the top which you need to hold until you’ve pulled the trigger. This is a useful safety feature that stops you accidentally using it when you didn’t mean to!

After use you should of course clean all your tools and put them away. The plastic guard did seem to collect a lot of grass underneath in the nooks and crannies of the reinforcing ridges and this did need a couple of minutes cleaning to get rid of it all. The top of the guard brushes clean easily and you can then hang it up in the shed or garage. The battery charging instructions are clear to follow in the short manual that comes with it.

This is the ideal strimmer for someone who hates strimming! It’ll make light work of the actual trimming and edging and saves you all the messing about with cables that make gardening such a chore. It does seem powerful enough to do a decent size amount of work too – which is very important if you’re not going to leave your garden half done!

You can of course strim safely round trees with this strimmer and you can easily get it under bushes and shrubs. Being cordless means you can quickly walk to the areas you need doing wihtout needing to unwind more cable.

Black and Decker GLC2500 18v Cordless Strimmer® String Trimmer & Edger – RRP £64.99 – Available from Amazon.

This cordless strimmer gets the thumbs up from me! It’s lightweight, easy to use and lasts a long time!