How we pick
The methodology, published in full, so you can check our work rather than take our word for it.
What we do not do, stated first
Everyone in this category says they tested twenty mowers. We have not tested any, and we say so.
The number
0
Units we claim to have tested.
Also zero: free products accepted, sponsored placements sold, and payments taken for inclusion.
There is no test lab, no owned equipment, no staff and no credential behind this site. We could describe an "evaluation process" in language vague enough to imply otherwise, and plenty of sites in this category do exactly that. It is the easiest claim in the field for a reader to disbelieve and, when it is false, it is a deception the FTC takes an interest in.
Then why trust us?
Because everything we publish is checkable, and because we are useful in a specific way nobody else in this category currently is. Here is exactly what we do.
1. We compile published specifications and cite each one
Every spec on this site comes from the manufacturer's own product page, spec sheet or owner's manual, and every page links to the document it came from. We do not cite other affiliate sites as a source for a fact, ever. If a manufacturer has not published something — and in this category that happens constantly — we write "not published" rather than fill the cell.
2. We compute what those specs mean
This is the part that replaces a test lab, and it is genuinely original work. The manufacturers publish raw figures; almost nobody converts them into anything comparable.
Every one of those is a division of two numbers the manufacturer published. None is a measurement we took. That distinction matters and we keep it visible on every page: the arithmetic is ours, the inputs are theirs, and you can redo both.
3. We check prices daily and stamp them
Prices come from a live daily check, not from a number typed into a page. Anything older than 48 hours disappears automatically and the page falls back to "check price" rather than showing you something stale. Last verified: January 1, 1970.
This is also why you will not find a price band anywhere in our prose, including on the page about how much to spend. A band typed in September is misleading by October.
4. We show the working
Every computed figure on this site appears with the arithmetic that produced it, in a box you can read in about ten seconds. If our conclusion is wrong, the error is visible and you can find it. That is a stronger accountability mechanism than a claim of expertise, and it is available to us in a way a test lab is not.
How a pick is chosen
Each roundup weighs a small number of criteria appropriate to the category, and the criteria are visible on the page as a score breakdown. Across the site, four principles hold:
- Published detail beats marketing volume. A brand that publishes weight, recharge time and blade speed is easier to hold to account than one publishing a torque figure and a slogan, and we score that.
- Usable range beats peak. A blower's turbo number describes about a tenth of your usage. The bottom of its variable range describes the rest.
- The warranty on the part that fails counts double. Motors rarely fail in a decade; lithium packs are warranted three to four years for a reason.
- Buyer-first beats commission, always. Where the cheaper product is the better answer, that is the recommendation. Several pages here rank a cheaper tool above a more expensive one for exactly this reason.
The visible score out of 10 is our editorial weighting of published specifications. It is deliberately kept out of the structured data on every page — marking an editorial score up as a review rating would be asserting a test result we did not produce.
What would change a pick
- A price move that changes the cost-per-watt-hour ranking
- A product being discontinued or persistently out of stock
- A new model that supersedes a current pick
- A manufacturer publishing a spec we previously had to mark unknown
- A correction — ours or a reader's — to a figure or a calculation
Prices are checked daily. Specs are re-verified quarterly against current manufacturer documentation. Dated roundups are refreshed annually. The editorial policy covers how corrections are made and marked.
Independence
| Our position | |
|---|---|
| Free products accepted | None. Ever. |
| Sponsored placements | None. Nothing on this site is paid for by a manufacturer. |
| Payment for inclusion | None. |
| Pre-publication review by brands | Never offered, never given. |
| Affiliate commission | Yes -- disclosed on every page and on the disclosure page. |
| Does commission affect rankings | No. Where the cheaper product wins, it wins. |
Full detail on the affiliate disclosure page.
Where we are weakest
This is the section most methodology pages leave out, which is precisely why it is here.
- We cannot tell you how anything feels. Balance, vibration, trigger action, how a self-propel drive behaves on a slope, whether a harness sits comfortably after an hour. All real, all outside documentation.
- We cannot tell you how loud a mower is. We went looking. Not one of six flagship manufacturers publishes a decibel figure, and we wrote that up rather than inventing a ranking — the page is here.
- We cannot tell you about year three. Nobody publishes capacity retention for these packs, so honest longevity guidance stops at the warranty term — including ours.
- Manufacturer figures are measured by manufacturers. Noise and runtime claims come from each brand's own conditions, not a shared standard, so cross-brand comparisons of those figures are directional rather than precise. We say so wherever we make one.
Where hands-on data is what you actually need, read publishers who genuinely bought and ran these machines — TechGearLab, Pro Tool Reviews and Bob Vila all run real test programs in this category. Sending you to them costs us a little traffic and is simply true, which is the whole point of this page.
The scale of what this covers
38 published pages, 25 products in the registry, every specification traced to a manufacturer document, and every computed figure shown with its arithmetic. Corrections are welcome and are how this gets better — tell us what we got wrong.