Stuart Williams
Maintaining lawns and gardens take a lot of efforts and time and ultimately it should look the best. Main effort goes in trimming grasses, small plants and weeds especially.
There are a number of weed eaters, also called as string trimmers available in the market today. Based on what your requirement is, and what are the different features available, select the one that suits you the most.
Basic selection criteria
The buying guide for weed eaters begins with the area of land to be trimmed and matching that to the required power of the weed eater. Based on the power of the machine, industry offers Light, Medium, Heavy and professional weed eaters.
Light ones could be used for general trimming of thinner grasses and some weeds on a maximum of one acre of a land and not beyond that. The medium ones could trim thinner and thicker grasses and weeds too. They have enough power to work continuously for an acre or two with same consistency of performance.
Heavy weed eaters are for grasses and weeds that are tough and thick and cannot be easily and uniformly trimmed using the light and medium weed eaters. They can be used for large landscapes up to around 3 or more acres.
Last type are the professional ones, that can handle any kind of trimming task without any constraint of power, size of landscape or its performance.
Select Amongst the types
#1 Electric weed eaters
As the name suggest, electric weed eaters take their power from electricity. These are available with electric cords and are extremely easy to operate. With just a press of a button, your trimming task could be taken care of very smoothly and with a noise free operation unlike other counterparts of electric weed eaters.
The best part of electric weed eaters is that they do not require periodic charging and can carry trimming for hours continuously without any breaks, until of course you require a break.
Performances of electric based trimmers are extremely tough and effective and require lesser time relative to other types of its kind. Due to the presence of cord it is restricted to the length and area, the cord covers. To extend the length, source of electricity should be extendable.
#2 Battery powered weed eaters
The ease with battery powered weed eaters is that they can be carried anywhere on the land to be trimmed as they are not corded like electric ones.
But since they run on batteries, long tasks have to be periodically broken so as to recharge the batteries. This is one constraint of the battery based, but performance wise it is comparable to other types of weed eaters.
#3 Gas based weed eaters
Gas based weed eaters are the strongest amongst all other types, even the electric ones. The impact of these gas based is way higher than electric ones and are used only for extremely thicker and long rooted weeds and grasses.
These are also cordless and hence can be carried anywhere on the land for trimming. Some models of gas weed eaters have gas storage inside it and start with just a pull of a button. There are few models that are attached to external powerful device offering gas as a source of power. Relatively, these turn out to be expensive and require only a certain quality of fuel below which they will not be able to perform as expected.
Mower
This is another kind of weed eater that is extremely large and is not really a handheld device unlike the three mentioned above. These are used in areas that are not accessible by handheld weed eaters. They can be heavy to handle and tough to maintain and are used generally for industrial purposes.
