Hover mowers are a compact, maneuverable alternative to conventional wheeled rotary mowers.
These mowers float on a cushion of air rather than sitting on four wheels, which means you can move them in all directions, rather than in the back-and-fourth motions required to mow with a wheeled mower.
Here, I’ve outlined the advantages and disadvantages you should consider when deciding whether a hover mower is the right mower for you.
✅ Key Takeaways:
The key advantages of hover lawn mowers are that they’re affordable, more manouverable than wheeled mowers, easy to assemble and carry, good for mowing unusual lawn shapes or sloped lawns, space-saving, and suitable for people with mobility issues.
The disadvantages of robot mowers are that they’re too small to efficiently mow larger lawns, they have a small grass box, their power source options are limited, they can’t be used for a striped lawn, and their cut height adjustment feature is more difficult to use.
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👍 Hover Lawn Mower Pros
Here are some of the key benefits of hover mowers compared to other mower types:
💰 Affordable Mower Type
In my opinion, the biggest benefit of hover mowers is their affordability.
A hover mower is one of the cheapest lawn mower types, costing £75-£140 on average.
If you have a small budget or you simply can’t justify spending hundreds of pounds on a new lawn mower, a hover mower should be just what you’re looking for.
Hover mowers are cheap to maintain, too, with durable, long-lasting rotary blades, so you get great value from your initial purchase.
🚜 More Maneuverable Than Wheeled Mowers
Another key benefit of hover mowers is that they’re more manouverable than traditional mowers with wheels.
Hover mowers work by floating on an air cushion, so they can be freely moved in any direction – forward, back, left, and right.
You can turn a hover mower in a single sweep, rather than having to move the mower back and forth in a multi-point turn as you would with a wheeled mower.
A hover lawn mower won’t get stuck in thick grass or a muddy part of your lawn, either, since it’s raised above the ground on nothing but air.
Flymo EasiGlide Plus 330 Hover Collect Lawn Mower
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Brand: Flymo
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Price: £
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Power source: Electric corded (hover)
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Cutting width: 33cm
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Cut height range: 10-30mm
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Weight: 8.2 kilograms
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Grass box capacity: 20 litres
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Dimensions (DxWxH): 52.8×29.5×32.7cm
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Power: 1700 W
🏋🏻 Lightweight & Easy To Carry
Hover mowers need to be light enough to effectively float, which means they’re the lightest lawn mower type, weighing as little as 6 kilograms.
The lightweight design of a hover mower means it’s easy to carry in and out of storage, and is less likely to cause neck or shoulder strain to the operator.
The smallest hover mowers can be carried and operated with just one hand, so they’re a far cry from the clunky wheeled rotary mowers that most of us are used to.
🟩 Ideal For Unusual Lawn Shapes
Because of their lightweight, compact design and great maneuverability, hover mowers are ideal for using on an unusually-shaped lawn.
If your lawn has lots of curves, tight corners, flower beds, trees, and other obstacles, a hover mower is the best lawn mower for you.
Hover lawnmowers make the most sense in a lawn mowing situation where standard mowing practices (i.e. back-and-forth laps of your lawn) aren’t convenient.
If your lawn is oddly shaped, it’ll probably be quicker and easier to mow with a hover mower’s sweeping motion, and the extra maneuverability means you can mow around obstacles and corners without having the effort of getting the angle just right.
🏞 Better For Sloped Gardens
If your lawn has steep slopes or bumps, a hover mower is ideal for you.
Pushing a conventional rotary mower on wheels is challenging on hills, especially if you want to change directions. Using a hover lawn mower is much easier because the mower’s mobility isn’t restricted by wheels.
Plus, if you have a lawn with bumpy or uneven terrain, a hover mower is easier to use and provides a more even cut because the mower doesn’t physically touch the ground, so it won’t bump up and down as you maneuver it over your lawn.
🏠 Take Up Less Storage Space
Because hover mowers are small and slim, they’re the easiest mower type to slot into a small storage space, like a crowded shed or outhouse.
Most hover mowers have a cutting width of around 26cm, so they’re not bulky, and they’re lightweight enough to keep on top of other heavier items in your storage space.
The best hover mowers should also have a number of useful storage features, including a foldable handle and a hook for hanging the mower from a wall, so it doesn’t have to take up any horizontal floor space.
🦾 Good For People With Mobility Restrictions
I’ve already mentioned that hover lawn mowers are easy to maneuver and lightweight. These features make hover mowers ideal for older gardeners or people with mobility restrictions.
You’re unlikely to injure yourself using a hover lawn mower because, unlike a conventional wheeled mower, you don’t have the resistance of pushing your mower through thick grass or muddy terrain, and you can cut around obstacles and corners with a simple sweeping action.
Hover mowers also require very little maintenance, so they’re a great choice for anyone who can’t – or doesn’t want to – spend a lot of time on their knees performing maintenance and servicing tasks.
📦 Easy To Assemble
DIYaphobes will be happy to hear that assembling a hover mower is easy thanks to the mower’s simple design.
Most hover mowers come partially pre-assembled, so you just attach the large mower parts and make sure the blade height adjustment is correct, then you’re ready to go.
Even if you hate long assembly processes and confusing instructions, you should be fine to assemble a hover lawn mower yourself – most likely within 30 minutes of unboxing.
👎 Hover Lawn Mower Cons
There are a few disadvantages of hover lawn mowers that you should also be aware of:
🤏 Too Small For Larger Gardens
One of the biggest setbacks of a hover lawn mower is that it isn’t suitable for cutting large spaces.
Hover lawn mowers have a cutting width ranging from 25-30cm on average. Some are wider than this, but they’re still not suitable for cutting large gardens because they’re not designed to provide a cut style that’s efficient for big spaces.
If your lawn is bigger than 250 square metres, you’ll generally be better off with a wheeled lawn mower that you can use to cut your grass in back-and-forth laps.
📏 Not Good For Cutting Long Grass
Another disadvantage of hover lawn mowers is that they’re not good at cutting thick or tall grass.
Hover mowers are lightweight by design, and they’re not generally powerful or heavy enough to effectively cut long grass.
You’ll also experience strain on your upper body if you try to cut thick or long grass using the hover mower “sweeping arch” cut.
On a similar note, a hover lawn mower isn’t a good solution for cutting wet grass, either. Electricity and water don’t mix, so you’ll need to save your lawn mowing for a sunny day.
📦 Small Grass Box
There are plenty of hover lawn mowers that collect grass as they mow. But because they’re small and slim, hover mowers have a grass collector that’s smaller than the grass box on a conventional mower with wheels (around 20 litres on average).
That means the grass collection box will fill faster whilst mowing, and you’ll need to stop to empty all the grass clippings into your garden waste bin or compost heap more frequently.
If you want to get your lawn mowing done as fast as possible, you’ll be stalled by the need to empty the grass box every few minutes.
🔁 Can’t Be Used For Lawn Stripes
For anyone who loves the look of a beautifully striped lawn, a disadvantage of a hover lawn mower is that it can’t be used to achieve lawn stripes.
Because a hover mower floats above the ground, and because it’s not typically designed for straight back-and-forth mowing, there’s no point in this mower being equipped with a rear roller.
That means you can’t flatten your grass in opposing directions as you mow, so a striped lawn is unachievable.
🧰 More Difficult To Adjust Cut Height
One notable disadvantage of a hover mower’s performance is that adjusting the cutting height is a hassle.
Height adjustment in a hover lawnmower involves partially disassembling the mower to adjust the cutting blade itself. This is tricker and more time-consuming than changing the cutting height of a wheeled mower, which typically has a simple, single lever for this purpose.
Thankfully, cut height shouldn’t be something that you have to change frequently once you’ve done the initial setup and adjusted the blade to your desired grass height.
🔌 Limited Power Source Options
The final setback of hover mowers is that your choice of power type is restricted with this mower type.
The majority of hover lawn mowers are corded electric models. A few brands sell petrol hover mowers, but I don’t generally recommend these because their additional bulk and weight makes them difficult to maneuver.
There are currently no battery-powered or manual hover lawn mowers available. So, if you have your heart set on one of these mower types, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
🤷♂️ Are Hover Lawn Mowers Worth It?
You should now be aware of all the advantages and disadvantages of owning a hover lawn mower, so you have the knowledge to decide, based on the pros vs the cons, whether this mower type is right for you.
I think that hover lawn mowers are worth it for folks with small gardens and smaller budgets, especially people with an oddly-shaped or sloped lawn that will create hassle for a traditional wheeled mower. If you’re over the age of 60 or have mobility restrictions, a hover mower is a smaller, lighter mower that should be easier for you to use.
However, if you have a medium-t0-large lawn, you want to mow stripes into your lawn, or you have your heart set on a manual or battery-powered mower, a hover mower isn’t the right solution for you. For larger lawns, I recommend electric or petrol mowers with a wider cutting deck of 38-50cm (depending on your lawn size), which will get the job done much faster.
Ready to start looking for the best hover mower for your lawn? Our best hover mower reviews guide is a great place to get started.