Sun Joe AJ801E 12-Amp, Electric Dethatcher and Scarifier w/Removeable 8-Gallon Collection Bag, 5-Position Height Adjustment, Airboost Technology Increases Lawn Health, 13 inch, Green

Funcional máquina para principiantes, muy buen costo beneficio! Gracias por su atención.

For a mere $159 one would think that you can hardly go wrong with the purchase of this Sun Joe Electric Lawn Dethatcher & Scarifier, when a gas powered lawn dethatcher starts at $3,000. How could you go wrong? I will answer that for you. Assembly I won’t spend much time on assembly, as a six year old could assemble it from inspection. Although I did read the manual and assembly instructions before I used it. I will say, the assembly instructions were poor. The illustrations were not particularly clear where they would need to be and I thought it was foolish to ship with the scarifier drum in situ rather than the dethatcher. Moving on. Preparation I installed a 20 amp, GFCI, outdoor rated outlet to power the Sun Joe. I used a 100 foot, 15 amp rated extension cord to connect the unit to power. I cut the lawn the day before I began to use the Sun Joe. My backyard lot width is 100 feet. I used the accompanying collection bag. The collection bag. Fitting the collection bag in place was like enduring a bad joke being told over and over again by someone who expects if you tell it enough times, it will eventually be funny. As you know, it doesn’t; you politely excuse yourself and talk to someone else. The bag has a metal frame with extensions on each side to form pins that are intended to slide into oddly designed v-shaped slots. The catch is, they don’t seem to want to engage at the same time. Meanwhile, the spring loaded cover wants to fight you for privilege of articulating the pins into place. This wouldn’t be so bad if you only had to do it a few times…. The problem is you will have to reinstall the bag so many times it is utterly worthless. You see, the bag fills long before 100 feet is reached. In fact, after about 20 feet, it is full and starts dropping thatch anyway. So, if you plan to have a containment point for collecting the bag contents at any place in the yard, you will be disappointed. This is one of the points the YouTube “lawn experts” fail to demonstrate when recommending this device. You will be walking back and forth with your collection bag or yard waste container regardless. I noted about 60% of the time, the Sun Joe belches the contents of the bag onto the yard anyway. Since you can’t go farther than a few feet without filling, you have to rake anyway, making the bag really pointless. So, unless you have a yard the size of a postage stamp, this is a bag of burden. Being plugged in I wonder if the product development people at Sun Joe thought, since it is electric, no one will complain about this “feature.” When I was in product development, “feature” was the phrase we would use to describe a serious issue, so that in the event our intercompany emails were subpoenaed, we would not have made an admission against interest. For those who are interested in the topic, see the parol evidence rule. If you are wondering whether being plugged into an outlet will hinder your progress, you would be correct in thinking so. It absolutely does. I have quite a bit of experience with roping from my days working horses, and I will tell you it pays off when using this machine: you will spend a good amount of your time wrangling the cord out of the way – specifically every row. You will hate it by the time you are done. Operating the machine Before operation, as I said above, I read the manual. I set the depth according to the directions. You depress a button on the side of the handle before you can engage the drum. It should be common sense, but you need to move forward at this point. If you stand there, you will give your dog a great start to a future project. That being said, I lost count the number of times the machine stopped running, presumably due to overload, where I had to stop for about 3-5 seconds before the drum would begin turning again. It never tripped the circuit breaker. Which leads me to the next point. This machine gets stuck, a lot. Yes, my yard should be perfectly flat, and there should not be potholes in a road, either. But the reality is, that isn’t reality. The fact is, it is too small to do what it is really intended to do. Not only from a ground clearance standpoint, but also, width. It feels like a toy when a tool is actually required. When I was 6, I loved my tool kit. It was an awesome blue. I couldn’t wait to use it. But it would take forever to get any kind of job done. So does this. The time it took to dethatch my backyard. This would be the first thing I would read in any review. After all, the point of a machine is to save human time. If you are using something just because it is electric, you are an idiot. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Vitamix blender. I can add frozen berries to water and have a great, healthy beverage. However, I am left with the impression that although the Sun Joe claims to be heavy duty, it simply isn’t. As I said above, it feels more like a toy. The working width is just over a foot. By the time I was a ¼ of the way through dethatching the back yard, the Sun Joe had earned itself a very unkind nickname. After I actually finished the back yard I came in for water and to check the time and was shocked to learn it took me 2.75 hours to do the back: it felt like 4 hours. Notwithstanding, I would cut my entire lawn more than two times over in that time with a walk behind mower. Conclusion As I dethatched the front with the collection bag well out of sight, I wondered to myself, what is the value proposition here? Would I pay $159 knowing what I know now? Absolutely not. Would I take one for free? If I had not used it before, I would arrive at the same conclusion. Otherwise, I would put it on Craigslist seeking a good home for someone without a yard, because I am not so cruel that I would knowingly give to someone who would use it for its intended purpose. I look at it this way, having someone use the Sun Joe to dethatch their lawn is like having Gordon Ramsay cook Thanksgiving dinner using only an E-Z Bake oven. If anyone can do it, he can. But why? The reality is you can rent a top notch gas powered lawn aerator for half of what this will cost and you will be done in a fraction of the time, and you won’t have to keep it in the garage. Also keep in mind, how many times do you really need to dethatch your lawn? Once with a good machine or…I don’t know how many times with the Sun Joe. My previously green lawn now looks like it has hosted chemical warfare training, so I won’t know until spring whether it really did something beneficial. I do know it took a lot longer than I wanted, was aggravating to use, and I could have done it by hand faster. Steve Lukather could probably make a Teisco Del Rey semi-hollow sound better than anyone, but there is a reason he used his ’59 Les Paul on so many albums. The reality is, I don’t know why someone would really need to buy one of these. If you need to dethatch your lawn, just rent the right machine and be done with it, rather than going through all of the above and then realizing you need to add it to a landfill or hand it off to someone else after you are done. Please, beware of YouTube advice. With very few exceptions, you are not getting advice from experts.

I done a lot of research and there were two or three products that kept coming up. I settled on the Sunjoe finally based on the reviews, YouTube videos and price and that it comes with a scarifier. It wasn't a huge out of pocket expense so if it didn't pan out I'd chalk it up to another one of life's lessons. The product came in a good box and was well packaged. Assembly was simple and instructions were clear. The product is amazingly life weight and all plastic construction except for the handle bars. At first I thought it was cheaply made but boy was I wrong! Using the Sunjoe worked better than I could imagine. I used it on my front lawn which hadn't been dethatched in years. I used the mid setting and as you can see it pulled up loads of dead moss and grass. I ran the machine in one direction and then used my lawnmower with a rear bagger to collect all the debris. I then used the Sunjoe again at right angles to the first and it pulled just as much as before. Using the machine is easy as it's almost self propelled due to the rotary action of the roller. The important thing is to go slow and let it do it's job. Sometimes you have to hold back on the machine as it has a tendency to pull forward when it hits a large clump of moss but it has no problem going through anything. The machine sounds like a angry vacuum cleaner when you use it but it's not loud. I highly recommend this product and am very pleased with the results. Don't know what else to say but I give it 10 out of 10.

me gusto su fácil manejo y el resultado que logras con esta operación, se de verdad quieres tu césped no dejes de hacer esta labor para lograr un césped sano, bonito y disfrutable

I love the unit however the robustness of it has alot to be desired. The 1st unit I had broke within 10 minutes of use. I had the proper size extension cord and to be fair I believe I hit a tree root pretty hard. I did get that unit replaced under warranty which was awesome. Now I used my device for the 2nd time this weekend and I have a typically subdivision sized yard. About 2 hours into use I started smelling burned electronics but the device kept working. Today I went to touch up a couple spots and upon activating the device I saw alot of sparks through the plastic cracks. All this was with the spring attachement. Needless to say I am very disappointed with the longevity of the device, but when it works it does an amazing job.