What Makes A Good Lawn Aerator?

Different Types Of Aerators

Between the small aerators that you can wear on your feet to the large industrial grade monsters, choosing the best aerator for a lawn can be difficult. Aerators are supposed to effectively aerate the soil and grass roots, break up hardened or settled dirt, and allow fertilizer and seed to penetrate the ground, all without breaking up more of the existing lawn than necessary. While there are many aerators on the market that can perform these tasks, there are also some that can even do more harm to your lawn than good.

What Makes An Aerator Perform?

The simple answer to this question is weight, but weight alone does not guarantee a great aerator. Drum style lawn aerators are exactly what their name says, hollow drums laid on their side, that are then filled with water to add weight. While the water added can easily add hundreds of pounds of weight, if the tines that do the work are not coring tines that remove plugs of dirt from the ground, then the weight doesn’t matter because you are not achieving the goals of lawn aeration. The spikes found on some lawn aerators do penetrate the ground, but since there is no hollow core for the dirt to move into, they actually compact the ground around the hole even more, making it harder for roots to grow through on new grass.

The Right Kind Of Coring Tines

The optimum length of cores that you want to pull from your lawn is around 4″, this means that the coring tine needs to be about 5″ in length, and have a tapered shape to allow the cores to easily travel through. Tines of the proper length are essential, but to make a truly great owning experience, an aerator should have easily replaceable tines, not small cores welded directly onto the drum.

Turning With An Aerator

Turning is sometimes necessary when aerating your lawn, but with a drum style aerator, it is not possible. A drum style aerator will bend or break tines off in the ground if you turn with it, due to the number of tines in the ground at the same time, and them all being attached to the same object. There is a style of aerator that is called an independent lawn aerator that has several wheels, this allows the aerator to have some turning capabilities by all the wheels being completely independent.

All styles of lawn aerators are available at EverythingAttachments.com