Gtech Small Cordless Lawn Mower SLM50

Design and Features

• Two mowing heights
• Interchangeable handle section
• Safety key

The Gtech Small Cordless Lawn Mower SLM50 comes with a 2.0Ah battery that might seem small, but this is a micro lawn mower, not a huge machine for tackling football pitch sized gardens. Clipping nicely into the handle, it features four green LEDs around the power button that show charge level in 25% increments.

Coming in at £179.99, including the battery and charger, this is a fair price for a small mower. If you buy the body only however, the price is knocked down to a respectable £89.99. Not bad if you happen to own the GT50 grass trimmer or HT50 hedge trimmer already.

And, if you own the GT50, you can save space by buying the SLM50 has a body-only model, as both devices share the same handle.

What’s great is that it’s ultra-light at just 3.5kg and extremely easy to manoeuvre and carry between lawns. The single handle setup makes it feel more like a vacuum cleaner than a mower, and it’s just as easy to guide around the grass.

You can’t expect a compact mower like this to tackle huge lawns, so the cutting width of 25 cm and 30 minute run time is wholly forgivable considering its feather-like weight.

Setup is as easy as sliding the handles into place until they click, then attaching the battery. Think of it more as a cordless vacuum cleaner than a lawn mower, and you’ll get the idea.

To cut down on weight, the SLM50 on has a single cutting blade. You won’t find a grass collection box either. This mower is mulch only, which if you mower regularly, is better for your lawn anyway. Provided the lawn cuttings are small, they’ll break down into the ground and feed the lawn. For bigger cuts, you might need to rake the cuttings and dispose of them by hand.

But like much bigger mowers, you can choose between two different cutting heights (40mm and 50mm). You simply flip over the cutting deck and adjust the two sprung bars, which is a little more fiddly than having an external joystick to make the adjustment.

While the SLM50 lacks the range of cutting heights (and ease of adjustment) found on other small mowers, such as the Husqvarna Aspire LC34-P4A, it’s a pretty impressive feature on such a tiny mower.

This mower doesn’t skimp on safety features either. There’s a safety key to lock out curious little fingers, and a safety cutoff that kills the motor when the handle is angled to an upright position. Presumably this is to avoid running over your foot if you were to pull it backwards too far.  

Performance

• Surprisingly powerful
• Easy to manoeuvre
• Not great on long, thick grass

I tested the SLM50 out with a few cuts on the smallest of my test gardens. Measuring just 20m² it felt right for this type of mower. And because it was the first cut of the season, the grass was long and quite wet after some rain.

Initially thinking that this mower would never tackle long grass, I was pleasantly surprised to see it happily cut without complaining too much. It bogged down in the wetter sections, but that was to be expected.

Because the SLM50 doesn’t have a grass collection box, I needed to rake the cuttings off the surface of the lawn. It was a bit of a pain, but necessary to avoid stifling the grass underneath. Returning to cut the lawn again a week later, there was no need for raking. When you’re only taking off a centimetre or so, the cuttings will naturally fertilise the lawn without risk of suffocating it.

This mower is not designed for tackling long, heavy grasses that have been left growing for months on end. It’s meant to be used regularly for lawn maintenance, and it does that rather well.

For something I thought would behave like a toy, it was pleasingly powerful and incredibly easy to use. As easy to push around the lawn as a toy, it actually cut plenty of grass.

Being so small and easy to move, I didn’t need to move garden furniture around to cut the lawn. The handle pivots at the base, so like a vacuum cleaner, I could push it neatly under tables and a garden bench.

Something that became a bit annoying was the tiny safety switch found on the right side only. It didn’t feel very intuitive and was the cause of a few cut outs. I preferred the handle on the GT50 grass trimmer, the safety switch was more pronounced and operated from both sides of the handle.

The quality of the cut wasn’t up there with the likes of the Stihl RMA 248.3, but I think that as a maintenance mower, over time it will keep any small lawn neat and tidy.

At the end of both cuts of the small lawn, I just managed to finish before the battery ran out. And that’s a good thing because the charger is particularly slow. Taking up to four hours to fully charge the battery, it doesn’t have a quick turnaround.

Should you buy it?