The Flymo Hover Vac 280 is a corded electric lawnmower aimed at the cheaper end of the gardening tools market. Just because it is cheap though, doesn’t mean it’s not any good and in this review, we will break down what you get for your money, what features it offers, and how easy it is to use.
Quick Overview
Flymo have long been synonymous with good quality and cheap garden tools. The Hover Vac 280 is no exception and for the price is great value for money.
The Hover Vac is a cheap, lightweight mower that glides across lawns using Flymo’s patented hover technology. It includes a 1300 watt motor for cutting even the densest grass easily and a 28cm cutting deck to reduce the amount of time needed to mow a lawn. The mower’s blade is metal, which is surprising for one so cheap with most of the competition using cheaper, less durable plastic blades. Another advantage of having a metal blade is that it can be sharpened to keep it working in tip top condition for many years to come.
The mower comes as a one-piece machine with no assembly of parts required and folds down easily into a compact form to allow for easy storage.
What’s in the Box?
The Flymo Hover Vac 280 comes with the following components in the box:
- Mower
- User manual
- Guarantee registration card
Key Features
In this section we’ll take a look at some of the features of this Lawnmower and discuss their benefits and usage:
28cm Cutting Deck
The 28cm cutting width is ideal for small and medium gardens. The size is pretty standard at this price point but combined with Flymo’s patented hover technology makes getting around a garden relatively painless.
There are other mowers out there with larger decks, but they tend to come in significantly more expensive than the 280.
Great Usability
As mentioned earlier, it uses Flymo’s patented hover technology to glide across a lawn making mowing a breeze. It really is a wonderful technology and works well on all but the longest grass.
On top of this, Flymo have created a nice ergonomically designed handle that feels great in the hand and along with its lightweight design makes the Hover Vac a pleasure to use.
20 Litre Grass Box
The mower has a moderate sized grass box that holds 20 litres of grass cutting. The clever thing about the Hover Vac 280 is that it compacts grass as it cuts making the 20-litre grass box capacity last longer than you may think it would.
While a larger box would be nice, at this price point to have a grass box at all is a bonus.
Adjustable Cutting Height
As with most lawnmowers, it comes with a selection of 4 cutting heights giving grass lengths of between 10-30 mm.
Foldable Handle for Storage
Includes a foldable handle design that reduces the mower’s footprint for storage. Once folded, the 280 really is small and will fit into any shed or even under a staircase with relative ease.
What we liked
There’s a lot to like, including:
- Foldable handle and compact design making it very easy to store in even the smallest of garden sheds.
- Cutting height can be changed easily… but the longest is only 30mm making cutting dense or longer grass more difficult.
- The hover technology along with the lightweight design reduces cutting friction making it easy to push around a lawn.
- 28cm cutting deck is decent for small to medium sized lawns.
- For the features it provides the Hover Vac 280 is incredibly cheap.
- The grass box is useful, and compacts cuttings well to collect more grass than its headline 20 litres might suggest.
What we didn’t like
With a mower at this price point there are always going to be a few areas where it could be improved and the 280 is no different. Here are the things we would have liked to be better:
- Grass box is still relatively small and will need emptying more regularly than many other model. We also noticed that the collection of grass by the mower is a little hit and miss and some clumps of grass escaped.
- As with all cabled mowers, the cable not only gets in the way but it is not long enough to reach the far corners of most gardens.
- Cutting deck doesn’t really go edge to edge meaning a strimmer will be required to get those hard to reach areas at the edge of your garden.
Conclusion
There are a lot of different mowers at the cheaper end of the gardening tool price spectrum, making it difficult to figure out which ones are useful and which should be avoided. Well we are happy to confirm that the Flymo Hover Vac 280 is definitely in the former camp due to the ease at which it cuts and the added extras that come as standard. If you are on a budget, then you could do far worse than buying this mower.
ild on over 50 years of success in the industry and are a name that offers trust.
| Preview | Product | Rating | Price | |
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Flymo Hover Vac 280 Electric Hover Collect Lawn Mower, 1300 W* | 1,756 Reviews | BUY ON AMAZON |
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Last update on 2023-04-21 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
