Flymo Power Trim 500 Electric Strimmer

Having successfully sliced through my Marley plastic downpipe whilst using a 1000watt Ryobi strimmer, I considered it was time to buy something a little less powerful.

I purchased the Flymo Power Trim 500 XT from Argos in early April (only to see the price there drop 2 weeks later by 25%).

The device employs a twin feed system whereby a single spool is separated into an upper and lower section, each loaded with nylon strimmer line. The line is fed manually by depressing a button on the side of the spool once it has stopped spinning.

In practice, this line was snapping every couple of minutes, necessitating many 'stop-feed-start' cycles which is simply unacceptable. The line also managed to wrap itself up on the spool several times resulting in much time wasted in dis-assembling the spool and untangling the line.

In addition, the length of the line is governed by a post that effectively cuts the line to a pre-set length which I found to be too short to allow the strimmer to trim grass growing beneath picket fencing, even with the tree guard in the raised position.

All things considered, this strimmer was a bad buy and I wouldn't recommend it to others. The difficulty is, I haven't seen another strimmer that works any better. I only hope the performance of the Flymo improves when I fit an OEM strimmer line unless I decide to take it back for a refund instead.