Who writes this

Jean-Benoit Buisson

Every page on LawnVerdict is written and signed by one named person. This page explains where the judgements come from, lists what the author is not, and gives an address for corrections.

How this began

It started with a number of square metres. An area printed on a mower, read by almost everybody as a measurement of their own garden. It is nothing of the kind. That figure assumes dry grass, level ground and a cut taken often enough that there is little to remove — conditions the listing almost never names — so two machines of the same width are honestly offered for 200 m² and 400 m² depending on the lawn somebody had in mind. Once that gap is visible, the same shape turns up across every shelf. Burst pressures on hoses, quoted where a working pressure is what a buyer needs, and published together only once in this whole catalogue. Sprinkler coverage stated at eight bar, which is not the pressure at the end of twenty metres of half-inch hose. Sowing rates that assume bare soil on a lawn that already has grass on it. And most pages answering these questions look identical: a ranked list, a score, a button, and not one figure a reader could hold against the maker’s own sheet.

The second problem arrives after the carton is opened. This equipment is bought on a headline and kept or returned on a fitment. A blade of the right length with the wrong centre bore. An air filter ordered by machine name for an engine that takes two different shapes. A hose bought in three-quarter inch for a garden full of half-inch fittings. A rake head with a 26 mm socket and a 30 mm handle in the shed. A gas cartridge with a screw valve where the torch wanted the EN 417 fitting. A tap adapter for a kitchen mixer, sold on the same shelf as the one that fits a garden tap. None of that is on the front of the carton, and each one decides whether the purchase was worth making.

So the site does the tedious part. It reads what manufacturers and standards bodies publish, confirms each reference market by market, and writes down the line that settles the question — a stated area next to the grass it assumes, a burst pressure next to the fact that it is not a working one, a coverage figure next to the pressure it was taken at, a blade bore next to the machines it will and will not meet — and it states plainly when a figure was never published. That last habit matters more than it sounds: a great deal of the disappointment on these shelves comes from a number nobody printed, or one printed without the condition that gives it meaning.

Under each published page sits a notebook for its family: the single dimension the purchase hangs on, every spot where a manual disagrees with its own sales page, which fittings lock an owner into one maker for everything bought later, what a figure means when it is quoted with no condition beside it, and the specific error each shelf invites a buyer to make. This site is that notebook, tidied and set out, in five languages — the same questions get asked in French, German, Spanish and Italian, and get worse answers in most of them.

Every write-up, listed by the build itself

Nobody maintains the list below. It is rebuilt from the catalogue on every build, one line for each published page, growing and shrinking on its own as a shelf opens or a reference disappears. It records what has been written up, which — to say it without dressing it up — is not a list of what is parked in anybody’s shed.

Three things I paid to find out

The line in the biggest type is almost never the one the purchase actually hangs on. A mower is sold on watts when the cutting width decides how long the afternoon takes. A robot is sold on square metres when the slope it will climb decides whether the bank at the bottom ever gets cut. A pump is sold on litres per hour, measured with the water going nowhere, when the suction height is a hard physical limit that no amount of power moves. A hose reel is sold as sixty metres without saying sixty metres of what bore.

Keeping a machine running costs more, over its life, than getting it home ever did. A mower whose blade is fixed by a pattern only its maker reproduces has a service life set by that maker’s spares list. A catcher moulded to one deck is a catcher replaced whole. A cordless tool belongs to a battery platform for the rest of its life, and that choice sets the cost of every tool bought after it.

And the thing you finally judge it by is hardly ever on the specification sheet at all: whether the catcher still fills when the fabric has clogged with dust, whether the self-propelled drive is repairable in its fourth season, whether the tyre holds its pressure over a winter in a shed, and whether the part that fails first will still be listed on the day it fails.

What I am not

I am not a groundsman, a greenkeeper, an agronomist, a small-engine mechanic or a certification body. I hold no qualification in any of those fields, I have never worked for a manufacturer, an importer or a dealer, and nothing on this site leans on a professional title. A page here describes a product — its dimensions, its declared figures, any standard it cites — and stops there. In particular, every cutting width, motor power, stated area, cutting height, catcher volume, slope limit, flow rate, head, suction height, burst pressure, sowing rate, coverage figure, NPK analysis and machine weight on this site is reported from the manufacturer, with its unit as published and its source named, and never derived by me. Where a maker states a figure together with the condition it was taken under, the page credits both to that maker and never separates them, and nothing here is described as quieter, stronger or safer than anything else on the strength of a specification sheet.

This site is not an operating manual and not advice on using a chemical. For the protective equipment a machine requires, for the clearance a flame needs from a hedge or a fence, for the dose and the re-entry period of a treatment, for what may never be applied to a lawn, and for the authorisations a product carries, it points to the maker’s instructions, the label on the container and the standard the listing cites, rather than paraphrasing them. Two statements are repeated rather than assumed. a declared value and the condition it was measured under are one object in two pieces, and this site never prints one without the other; each page gives the value, its unit and the maker who published it. Second, no mower, no biocide, no glove and no guard is described here as making anything safe. What a page carries is the figure a maker published and the condition attached to it; everything past that point is settled by the instructions in the carton, by the plate on the machine, and by the label on the bottle.

A name at the bottom of a page settles nothing, and nothing here asks to be taken on one. Each judgement carries its evidence in the page that makes it, and the full account lives at how we judge and rank.

Five rules, applied to every page

No figure gets in without its source next to it — a datasheet, a manual, the plate riveted to the machine, a named standard, or what owners agree on after a season of use.
No hole is ever filled to make a table look complete. Not a price, not a reference, not a dimension. Where a maker printed nothing, the row stays blank and the page says as much in words.
Every reference is checked store by store before a page goes up. Where a model is not on sale in your country, the button runs a search there rather than opening a listing that has gone.
Where the cheaper option is the right one, the page says so — and where the right answer is a sharper blade, a soil test or an afternoon with a rake rather than any purchase at all, it says that instead.
No family is ever ordered around the number in the biggest type, and where this season’s model is barely distinguishable from last season’s, the page says so.

The price of reading one of these numbers wrongly

This equipment is sold on numbers that state one thing and are read as another, and the gap usually surfaces on the first warm Saturday. A stated area stands where a lawn is assumed. A burst pressure stands where a working pressure is assumed. A coverage figure stands where the mains is assumed to deliver eight bar. Meanwhile the things everybody treats as afterthoughts — a blade sharpened, a tyre inflated, a cut taken at the right height, a fortnight of not letting a seedbed dry — repeatedly decide whether any of it worked.

A great deal of what counts on these shelves is free to learn and reduces to a single sentence: a stated area records what a maker was willing to print against a lawn it chose, and undertakes nothing about the garden you are standing in. Most of the rest is the same kind of thing. Cutting higher than feels tidy, because longer grass shades out moss and survives a dry August. Mowing across a slope rather than up it. Sharpening a blade instead of buying a bigger machine. Watering deeply twice a week rather than lightly every evening. Sites that exist to shift equipment walk straight past all of that. It is not walked past here.

Sending a correction

Point at something wrong and it gets put right, and the date of the repair stays on the page for anyone to see. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · LawnVerdict · Montrollet, France