Monkey 28/05/2019 16:14:16
For the last maybe 20 years, I've used corded Bosch Rotaks in different sizes, all have been good, but the build quality was never great and all failed after 3-5 years. This time, I fancied a cordless mower and the equivalent Bosch was £450! It didn't get very good reviews, so I settled on a Makita DLM460z, but could not find any in stock in the UK, so went for the DLM431z. The DLM431z ticked all the boxes, the build quality was very good and a significan step up from the Bosch offerings, but sadly, the Makita was very poor at cutting grass. If you went to the lowest cut, which is around 1.3cm, it would really struggle to cut even short and thin grass, the motor would grind to a halt and that would be that. It took me about 3 times as long to cut our lawns and they are relatively small!
So, this Greenworks caught my eye, it was well priced at £400 inc 2x 2ah batteries and a charger.
I let my grass grown for a couple of weeks and tried it on the shortest cut, which although the tooled-up website says 1.5cm, it is actually 2.5cm, which is a little disappointing, but it still looks OK, nice and short. That said, if you have perfectly level lawns with the type of grass that likes to be super short, like a bowling green, then this is not the mower for you!
Build quality is excellent, I was actually very surprised, everything feels like good quality and a large leap from the Makita. The green powder coating on the deck and levers feels like decent quality and looks great, too. Even the Mrs commented that it looked like it meant business.
This mower has a little motor to self propell it along your garden and it works well. If, like me, you lawn goes fence to fence, this self propelled feature will probably not get much use and the mower's turning circle is quite large, due to the large wheels. You could mow round the border of the lawn first and then you would have a larger area to tun in without missing any grass. I tend to let the mower pull itself along, then disengage the drive motor and push it a couple of inches forward and then I am able to pull the mower backwards while cutting at the same time, this saves turning at the end of each cut. Doing this, I noticed that it is quite heavy and a little awkward to pull. Also, sometimes the real wheels tend to lock up, not sure why and it leaves a skid mark on the lawn, expecially if it is damp.
The cutting quality is very good, there were no noticable slow downs, even on the thicker clumps of grass. The motor automatically speeds up and slows down, depending on the load it is faced with. Even when spinning up a gear, it is still much quieter than any other mower I've owned. So far, I have only used it on 2-3 inch grass which was dry. A big complaint I've had with the Rotaks over the years is that they are useless when the grass is wet or damp as the hole between the deck and the basket is very narrow. On the Greenworks mower, the hole between the metal deck and the basket is over twice the size of any mower I've used and so it is doubtful that it would get blocked in that way. The grass basket fills up nicely, but what you will notice is that after your first use, especially if the conditions are dry, the mower will look like an old one! Everything collects the dust. There's a video on youtube of one of these collecting leaves, check out the end, you'll see what I mean!
The cutting height is very easy to adjust, again, this is the best one of its kind that I have used. Its a simple lever that moves backwards and forwards and clunks into place. Excellent.
Operation is simple, there are two levers (not sure of the correct name) on the handlebars (same again!), the top one is for the cutting motor, pll it towards the handlebars while pressing the green button and it will fire up. There is another lever which you pull up to make the mower move forward, this has a delay of approximately 1 second. The speed of the mower's self propulsion can be