Buying or Hiring Garden Equipment and When Each Makes Sense
Every family shed tells a story. A wood chipper bought for one overgrown conifer. A rotavator that dug a single veg bed three springs ago. The pressure washer, meanwhile, gets borrowed by half the street because nobody else thought to buy one.
Most people decide by looking at the price tag. If it looks steep, hire. If it looks cheap enough, buy it. That rule gets plenty of shopping wrong, because the price is only one part of what a tool asks of you.
Each piece of kit brings a burden with it. It needs space. It needs looking after. Some need skill to use safely, and some only earn their keep if they run every week. Weigh all of that and the choice between buying, hiring and borrowing becomes much easier.
Four questions to ask before you buy any garden tool
Run through these at the kitchen table before anything goes in the basket.
- How often will it run? Count real jobs, not hopeful ones. A tool used every fortnight is a different decision from one used every few years.
- Where will it live? Sheds fill up fast, and a bulky machine pushes the bikes and the paddling pool out onto the lawn.
- What does it need to keep working? Petrol engines want servicing, blades go blunt, and fuel left in a tank over winter can stop a machine starting in spring.
- Can you use it safely? Some machines need gloves, goggles, ear defenders and a steady hand. Others need two people.
Then do one quick sum. Divide the purchase price by the cost of a day’s hire. If you expect to use the tool more times than the answer, buying starts to make sense.
Small and handy tools worth owning
A basic electric pressure washer costs somewhere between £30 and £100. Hiring one runs from about £25 to £55 a day. After a few hires, buying your own may make sense. It can serve several jobs: the patio after winter, bikes after a muddy weekend, the bins in August, garden furniture before the first barbecue.
The same logic covers hedge trimmers, strimmers, leaf blowers and good loppers. They’re light, they hang on a hook or sit on a shelf, and they get used several times a season. Battery tools that share one charger save space and spare you from buying the same battery twice.
If you’ve recently gone through laying a concrete patio, a pressure washer is the tool that keeps it looking new. A light clean each spring stops moss and algae getting a hold, and that takes ten minutes when the machine is already in the shed.
Big, heavy and rare tools to hire
Some machines do one job and then wait years for the next one. A wood chipper turns branches into chippings. A stump grinder cuts a tree stump below soil level so you can reseed the area. A turf cutter lifts old lawn in neat strips, while a rotavator breaks up hard ground for a new bed or lawn.
All four are heavy, loud and built for a specific project. Owning one means finding room for it, servicing an engine that sits idle most of the year and keeping blades sharp. They also call for a safety kit and a bit of practice. A hire shop takes all of that off your hands and sends out a trade-grade machine that has been checked before it leaves the depot.
The numbers back this up. A chipper strong enough for proper branches costs thousands to buy, while a day’s hire usually comes in well under £150. Cheap garden shredders do exist, but they struggle with anything thicker than hedge clippings.
Chipping on site also changes what happens to the waste. Branches that might have filled a skip shrink down to a few bags of mulch for the borders. For household clutter, the site’s post weighs £95 a month in storage against one skip hire to clear it. The same cost-conscious thinking applies to garden waste.
How to hire well?
Group jobs into one booking. If the rotavator is coming for the veg bed, use it on the border too.
Ask about delivery. Many heavy machines won’t fit in a family car, and some hire shops include drop-off and collection.
Measure the side gate. Some machines need a wide opening to reach a back garden.
Check the small print. Find out the deposit and the late return charge before you book.
Leave a spare day. British weather has ruined plenty of hire weekends.
The middle ground
Some tools fall between buying and hiring. A scarifier, for example, rakes moss and dead grass out of a lawn. Electric models cost roughly £90 to £200 to buy and around £50 to £60 to hire for a day.
If your lawn gets scarified every autumn, owning a small electric one pays off within a few years. If the job comes round once in a blue moon, hire a petrol machine and let it do the heavy work in an afternoon.
Aerators and small cultivators fall into the same gap. This is where sharing works best. Two neighbours sharing one scarifier save shed space and split the cost. Community tool libraries let members borrow kit for a small fee, which suits a job you might only tackle once.
Second-hand is another route for mid-priced kit. Garden machines turn up on local selling pages every spring, often after a single season of use. Ask to see the machine run, check that spare blades and parts are still sold, and pay by a method with buyer protection.
The weekly job is the one to rethink
The mower sits in a group of its own. A lawn cut regularly from spring to autumn can need dozens of cuts a season, and hiring a mower for each cut rarely makes sense. Owning one is often the practical choice. The question is how much of the burden you want to carry.
A petrol mower brings a yearly service, fresh fuel every spring and a Saturday morning every week of the growing season. An electric or battery mower lightens the upkeep but still needs someone to push it up and down.
A robot mower takes the weekly job off the family rota. Segway Navimow models work without a perimeter wire, so there’s no cable to bury around the edge of the lawn before you start. With a robot mower for everyday mowing, the cutting happens little and often on its own schedule, and the grass stays at one height all season. Saturday mornings go back to swimming lessons, football or a lie-in.
That matters more the longer the garden gets used. Our guide to making more use of your garden all year round sets out ways to enjoy outdoor space for most of the year instead of a short summer. More months outside means more weeks of mowing, which makes it worth handing that job to a machine.
The bottom line
Buy the tools that are small, cheap and used often. Hire the ones that are big, costly and needed once every few years. Borrow or share the ones in between. For the job that comes round every week, think about how much of your own time it takes and whether a machine could carry it instead.
Before the next purchase, ask the four questions. A tool that passes them earns its place in the shed. One that fails is better off staying at the hire depot.
