Which magazine and stuff.

Before the Net, your local reference library would have had the current paper issue, and probably four or five years of old copies. The items reviewed were still difficult to find locally, and likely to be expensive.

There are Internet sites proclaiming '37 best XXXs of 2024' but again the items listed may be difficult to find locally. Strangely, it is often Amazon selling the items. Accuracy is not always the strong point of these sites, I recently looked at '10 best hinged-lid halogens ovens', to find that only two of the ten actually had hinged lids and two more were not halogen ovens.

Lidl and Aldi sell this kind of thing randomly from time to time, and generally sell the batteries for cordless items separately. Usually garden stuff comes around in the spring, but anything that doesn't sell just sits there for a while. I can't remember if hedge trimmers featured this year, I don't have a need for one.

All the online suppliers will have reviews from purchasers, the only problem being that you don't know which of them, if any, are genuine.

I grew up with a stack of old Which magazines in the house. Even then some of the recommendations were a bit odd. For example home computers - in the

These days retailers play games so is the Which recommended ABC123 the same inside as the Curry's-only ABC124 or the John Lewis special buy ABC122F, etc? Maybe one has a grey control panel and the other one a white, but did they change the internals as well?

Those are just SEO/affiliate link garbage - it's worse now there's AI to churn out huge volumes of garbage with minimal effort. Even before then it was clear the best you'd get was the 'journalist' had read some Amazon reviews, and not actually touched any products.

Just avoiding any articles with 'best' or '2024' in the title is a good start.

Youtube is now the place to go for reviews, because they actually use the products and you can see the results so they're harder to fake. There are channels like Project Farm where they put the items through standardised testing - they're American (so lots of Harbor Freight tools etc) but we do get some of the brands over here.

I'm sure there's ways to manipulate them (watch for sponsorships etc) but if you watch a few videos by different people you tend to get a feel for what's out there.

I think one of Lidl or Aldi had a cordless trimmer a few weeks ago (can't find it now) but it was only a short one - maybe a foot long.

Lidl's long one was on sale 21 September last year:

They can also be picked up on ebay, although you'll pay more than the Lidl price.

Yep, and with AI it's easy to generate fake ones. I only bother looking at the negative reviews as there's usually more information about whether the thing broke (or if the user was a numpty - a low star rating can sometimes result from numpties unfairly giving low scores, because the courier took too long to deliver or whatever).

Theo

I've always found this to be the main drawback to Which reports and rankings. Almost always, the feature which(sic) their "Best Buy" excelled in, was something which I didn't care about. "This vacuum cleaner is great at removing pet hair!" I don't have a pet.

In the early days of colour tv, they rated the Echo much better than the HMV. They were identical chassi in different cabinets (plastic or plywood). Many years later, I saw the test results, they only had one HMV set!

I gave up on the which? in the days of VHS recorders when they ranked two recorders, one as best and the other as worst. The problem with that was I knew that they were both the same internally with just a different badge.

The other problem was a item with lots of widgets always scored more than one with fewer widgets even though most of the extra widgets were completely useless and just marketing BS.

Which Reviews, IME, are mostly content-free.

The key to keeping the price down on cordless tools is to not keep buying new batts and chargers with each new tool. Pick a platform (preferably a well recognised "pro" one with a wide range of tools, and parts availability), and use it for most cordless tools moving forward.

Also when looking at the first tool, it can sometimes be cheaper to buy that "body only" (i.e. no battery, charger, or carry case), and buy those separately.

E.g.

Full kit:

(BTW, I have the model, it is not that heavy, and will do a prodigious amount of work on a single charge - about 3kg with battery)

Wander into a proper tool shop if you can find one, they are more likely to have models that you can handle and feel.

As with many of these decisions you soon forget the price if it works well and does what you need every time you use it. Ultimately more rewarding than lamenting how it gets on your t*ts every time you use it, and trying the consolation "that at least it was cheap!"

Any comnmercial magazine rating products is an invitation to corruption.

Also, once you're on battery platform X, it's often possible to buy adapters to platform Y. So if you need to buy one tool from a different manufacturer you can do that (but there are caveats).

Sometimes, but often it's cheaper to buy a starter kit. Although the kits tend to one have popular tools (eg a drill), you may find it's cheaper to buy the drill+battery+charger kit and either use or resell the drill rather than buy the battery and charger separately.

Some sellers take the kits and remove the batteries to sell separately - eg I bought a lawnmower that had 'includes two batteries' written on the box, but it didn't (and was priced that it didn't).

Theo

The point about Which? was that it was not a "commercial magazine".

Which helps me sort the wheat from the chaff, then I start thinking. I often find that Which Best Buys can no longer be obtained, but at least I've got a head start in looking. Maybe it's shopping for the hard of thinking :-) (Me)

The magazines also regurgitate the same reports periodically (there are product reviews which appear about every 12 months or so and look very similar), with nothing much new. The Which website is pretty good though.

Since I take both ordinary Which and Computing (now 'Tech') Which, I get peeved when they reprint the same article on both (as they did in the Aug 2024 issue for printer inks). Paying twice for the same duplicated article? I bet if XYZ shop charged you twice for the same item, Which? would be hauling them over the coals, but it's OK if Which?do it. Do as I say, not as I do ...?

(I have no connection with Which other than as a subscriber)

Of course it was and is. Its turnover is in excess of £50m All that needs paying for. And if you think its staff are incorruptible I have a bridge to sell you

I have this one, and cannot fault it, £88.:

Too late. Out of stock, even for delivery :(

Back in the dim and distant, we used to take Which magazine, and paid for it via a Standing Order. Each year they would let us know what the new charge was to be[1], so I set up the new SO with the new value. Which would then take BOTH the old value SO AND the new SO out of our account. IIRC they did this for several years in a row.

I wonder what a consumer affairs magazine would say about that sort of behaviour?

Why didn't you just modify the existing SO?

I thought SOs were 'push', ie they couldn't take anything - you just asked your bank to pay £x a month/year. Maybe they provided a form to send to your bank to ask them (perhaps with Which acting as post office, collecting and sending a big bundle of forms to each bank), but that's all Which could do. If you want to cancel the arrangement or modify the amount you tell your bank - Which couldn't change it themselves. That only came later with Direct Debits.

Maybe some banks had a way to amend the SO by sending them a new form with a new amount, and other banks took the same form to mean setitng up a second SO with the new amount? ie it's a problem with the bank, not with the recipient.

They probably would have dug into why it was happening.

Theo

If it helps, I bought a MacAlister Corded hedge trimmer several years ago - pre COVID I can’t be more exact. I bought it from Screwfix.

It has a long pole and strap etc so you can work from the ground.

It was far cheaper than £300, I think under £60.

I clean it, oil it etc after use. It has been used every year at least once, sometime more if son in law borrows it.

It is sold elsewhere, not just at Toolstation.