Top 4 Best Lawn Aerator & Dethatcher: Expert Picks

Customer Review: So I had topsoil delivered to plant new seed, to make a new lawn area. Seed cake up nice and green. Had a drought and heat spell, everything died. What a mess, it was a matted mess of thatch. I decide to get this instead of hand raking. So glad I did. This pulled up all the dead grass, made it so easy to put in piles and collect. I’d still be raking if it wasn’t for this.

Customer Review: Unbelievable that they would have a round bolt going in a square hole.

Customer Review: Only used it a handful of times but does pick up a lot of the dirt and dog hair out of our turf!! So far loving it easy to handle too just need a super long extension cord to use it.

Customer Review: It doesn’t get all the way to the edge, but we knew that from other reviews. It does a really good job. I wish it picked up dog hair a little better, but we have high shed dogs so it just takes extra passes. Overall, it had been a good product.

Customer Review: The tool appears to be sturdy and well constructed, but one tine is bent (welded that way). I was able to pull cores on a small area. The next time I used the tool I did not get cores, the tool instead pressed the dirt down as the tines were clogged. Not sure how saturated the soil needs to be to get a good core. First aerator tool I have used. If you want to tediously clear the tines repeatedly it is a good budget friendly tool.

Customer Review: The product is very sturdy. It will take a deliberate effort to bend it out of shape. My dislikes are: The vertical steel bar, if not careful, will cause knee bruising. If this was made with two vertical steel bars to allow your knee to go in between this would have been a better tool. 2nd, plugs only came out out of spike about 30% to 40% of the time. The other spike remained clogged constantly. I believe, as one reviewer pointed out, there’s left over metal that was shaved down when wielded together inside one of the spikes that cause the dirt to get stuck. However, I was still able to put lengthy holes in the soil with ease. Moving plugs or not having plugs removed still accomplished the main objective of putting holes in the soil…aerating.

Customer Review: This is a middle range consumer level product. Bad reviews either expected too much or were written by people who didn’t read the manual. There is a lot of useful info included in the manual including the proper use of the machine and proper preparation before using it. You should definitely take the time to read it if you go for this Dethatcher/Scarifier. It should be suitable for most suburban lawns. Mine is 7500 SF and I did everything at least twice so 20,000SF wouldn’t be a problem. I’ll give my thorough review and add in some advice based on the mistakes I made. If you’re like me then you haven’t dethatched in a long while and you’ve noticed irrigating and fertilizing aren’t giving the same results you expect. Thatch is a fibrous layer of plant material that builds over itself year after year. Thatch should be broken down by microbes, worms, etc but excessive pesticide use or certain soils don’t give an environment for them to thrive in so more thatch is put down each year than the biology can remove. Also certain species of grass produce significant thatch while others produce next to none. Thatch is not the dead or burnt out grass you can rake up. If you trowel out a square about 4″ deep and look at it from the side, thatch will be a dark brown layer sitting right on top of the soil. It might be anywhere from nothing to 1″ thick. Power raking is using a machine to rake for you. Power raking picks up a lot of dead leaves of grass and other debris to give more light and air to the soil. Dethatching is ripping up that top fibrous layer to expose the soil. This machine does both but cannot match the power of a gas powered dethatcher you might rent. For power raking purposes it’s very well suited. For dethatching it will get it done with a little extra effort. This product should more be thought of as something you use to maintain your yard. It is designed around yearly or bi-yearly dethatching/power raking and not really designed to take the toughest of jobs with ease. That said, it can definitely be used to get a tough job done as it did for me. It will require more effort than you may be thinking it should however. The bag is small as many reviewers said, but after I got through the thickest thatch and was on my last pass the bag was actually perfectly sized. It is small enough so you don’t overload it weight wise and easily detaches for emptying straight into a can or bag. For maintenance purposes I have no doubt the bag will be extremely useful. A few things you need to do/know first. 1) Cut your lawn short to around 1-1/2″ if you can do it. People complaining their healthy grass got ripped out didn’t read the manual. It will scalp your lawn if the grass is too long. I’m on a hill and have uneven ground so I was probably around 2″ and it ripped some up. I think even at shorter lengths you should expect some thinning but if you plan to overseed or have a spreading type species you want it thinned. 2) Understand that the height settings are not so you can dig deeper but so you can adjust the machine based on how much wear your tines or knives have. Get on the ground and look at where the tines extend down to. If they go digging into the dirt you will rip stuff out and wear them down way too fast. The dethatcher attachment works great on the highest setting right out of the box (transport mode) if you have a lot of material to clear out. The scarifier attachment should be set so the dig through the thatch layer and 1/8″ into the soil to help open it up and aerate. Going deeper with either attachment will work but it will cause more damage to your existing lawn if that matters for your project. 3) My first impression after opening the box was that it was going to be a cheap piece of garbage based on the feel. The plastic felt flimsy and it didn’t seem to weigh enough. Gas engines are heavy, need heavy frames and wheels but this is very light. It’s rugged enough and doesn’t need to support a combustion engine. I’m glad I didn’t return it based on first impressions. 4) You need a quality extension cord. I used a 50′ 14 AWG cord on a 15 amp circuit and I think I got as much power out of it as possible. They recommend a 12 AWG cord in the manual for cords 50′ and up but the cord holder on the handle is too small for a 12 AWG which seems like a design flaw. I have a shorter 12 AWG cord I tried and I did not notice a difference in performance between that (25′) and my 14 AWG (50′). The longer your cord the more voltage drop you have and that can drop performance but I think my 14 AWG was fine. 5) The air intake vents to cool the motor are in a really poor spot right next to the height adjustment lever right over the wheels. The holes will get blocked up from material that you have to clear out often. As an electric motor it will burn out if it gets too hot. It was about 80 degrees out and I let it cool down every 30 minutes to be safe. You spend more time raking up anyway. 6) The height settings are counterintuitive (to me anyway.) #1 is the tallest height while #3 is the shortest. 7) The cord will get in your way, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not a big deal. Just make sure you start closest to the outlet and work your way out. The cord should always lay over the area you already worked so you don’t run the risk of running it over. 8) If you have sprinkler heads, tree roots, etc, mark them with flags or something else so you don’t run over them. 9) You have to keep moving. Slowing down or stopping with the machine running strips it bare. I started with the dethatching tines and the bag on but it filled too quickly. I took the bag off and stuck a piece of wood under the rear hatch which made it a little easier for the thatch to go out the back. I did the first pass on the transport height setting and it raked out many barrels of old material. I raked this up and then went again with it set a little lower and it still pulled out a lot. I raked that and then realized that the tines were not doing a great job of taking out my thatch layer. I switched out the dethatcher for the scarifier – super easy to do. The scarifier will kick back rocks so I took out the wood piece. It worked great on the thatch. It cut right through it to the soil in one shot. I played with the height to get it where I wanted it. The scarifier will chop up any little bumps or unevenness which is good but it destroys more of your lawn while doing that. At this stage I felt like I might’ve been ruining the lawn because it was looking pretty bare and weak. I overseeded so it was important to me that I actually expose the soil completely since you need soil contact to properly germinate. 3 weeks later and I can see good strong growth from my existing and the new stuff is coming in. Next spring I believe it will fill in and do great now that water and nutrients will actually hit the soil. I neglected the lawn for a while so it will take time to bounce back. But all I have to do is maintain it next year which should be easy. You can see how much wear I put on the tines and the scarifier. I did not call the company to find out how much replacements cost but I think I can get another couple seasons out of these and decide if I want to replace them then. This unit can definitely handle what you throw at it. I treated it gently in the beginning but not so much towards the end and it held up. It’s tougher than it looks. A screw came out where the handles attach directly to the motor housing and I lost it somewhere. I just used a spare screw I had instead and it was fine. All in all, I would recommend this machine if you only need maintenance or if you can spare the extra days it will take to do the tougher jobs. The only drawbacks are that it could be a little more powerful and the tines and blades got more wear than I expected. For a middle range product it is good enough and for the price I got it ($95) it’s a deal.

Customer Review: Now I read the reviews before I bought it. After it was delivered in a package that wasn’t damaged. I unpacked it and assembled it with ease and put it right to work. Now I did use a bungee cord to hold the back of it open as I walked so nothing would clog up. I did this for two hours straight without anything heating up or shutting down. I did put it on the deepest setting. After three months the grass I did it in grew phenomenally well.Now like all my equipment as soon as I was done, scaring the grass or detaching, whichever one I was doing, I do clean my equipment up right after and put it away. It’s very light to use and easy to use and adjusting it up and down for depth is also very easy. Plus swapping out between scarifying and detaching is as simple as switching out a roller. Literally so easy anybody could do it.