If the Ego ST1511T is not available, our next choice is the Ego ST1521S Power+ 15″ String Trimmer with Powerload. It’s Ego’s previous version of the tool, and it is nearly identical to the ST1511T, other than that the shaft does not telescope, and the trigger design is slightly different. The ST1521S costs costway patio umbrellas about the same as the ST1511T and sometimes even more, so we’d always opt for our main pick first. But if you need something in a hurry, and the ST1511T is not available, the ST1521S is an excellent second choice. You can expect about the same power, run time, and charge time as with our main pick.
I used to try a string trimmer in that area, and it would blow the grass, weeds, and stalks all over the place; the cut stalks would then dry out, turn brown, and look awful. Using a scythe leaves me with orderly costway patio furniture rows of cut vegetation, which I can quickly scoop up and dispose of. The result looks way better, and the work actually goes a little faster (as this scythe versus string trimmer video demonstrates).
Unlike the lights on all of our other picks, however, the ones on this tree are traditional incandescents, not LEDs, and they come only in clear. But if you prefer the warmer glow of incandescents, that’s a feature, not a bug. And even if one bulb burns out, the rest of the bulbs keep working (unlike with some incandescent Christmas lights). The King of Christmas 7-foot King Noble Flock Fir is a so-called Euro-style tree, with fewer, more naturalistic branches than you find on plump, symmetrical American-style trees.
This change required us to set our sights only on the most convincing, lifelike artificial trees, which usually carry a correspondingly high price tag. When we began this research several years ago, we were surprised to find how much a good fake tree cost. I use a scythe to take down a weedy area that once housed pigs so the ground is too lumpy and bumpy for any kind of wheeled mower.
The other is contact with PVC dust beneath the tree, the result of physical decomposition of the “pine needles”—a particular concern for crawling infants. Significantly, new trees (new in 2004, that is) generally showed much lower levels of lead than trees manufactured in the 1980s and 1990s. We did a battery test on an earlier version of this Ego trimmer, and on a single battery charge it cut down about 3,400 square feet of dense overgrown grass, weeds, and stalky shrubs (an area measuring nearly 60 by 60 feet).