The Cobra Fortis Cordless Cylinder Mowers have recently garnered glowing reviews, especially from The Telegraph, which has recommended the FORTIS 17E as one of the best mowers in its category.
Best electric cylinder lawn mower, 9/10
We like: Capable of much more than just mere mowing
We don’t like: Heavy, so only the fit need apply
- 83.8kg weight
- 43cm/17in cutting width
- 6-30mm cutting height
- 65l collector
- Cordless
- 2 year warranty
Tested at home
While rotary mowers rule the roost when it comes to lawn mowing these days, there are still many situations where traditional cylinder mowers, like this Fortis, hold sway. If you’re after a very low height of cut, for instance, or want to create stripes in your lawn, they’re still largely in a class of their own. It’s also one of the reasons why they’re so beloved by cricket, tennis and bowls groundsmen, alike.
What sets the 17E apart from most other mowers – cylinder or rotary – is that it isn’t just a one-trick pony. Yes, as standard, it comes with a 43in/17in six-bladed cylinder cartridge, but that’s just the start. At the time of writing you can also choose from any – or all – of six optional, drop-in cartridges (ranging in price from £120 to £335), each designed to handle a different aspect of lawncare.
These include a scarifier, dethatcher, lawn brush, aerator, and a Verticut cartridge, as well as a 10-bladed cylinder, for truly bowling-green grade cuts. While you could certainly buy individual standalone tools that could carry out all these tasks, they’d take up vast amounts of room when not being used; Cobra’s solution is indisputably more space-efficient (there’s even a neat stand you can buy to store the cartridges).
With an all-up weight of more than 80kg, though, it’s monumentally heavy. Self-propulsion and a well-designed centre of gravity help to mitigate its tonnage when being moved around.
Our 17E review sample arrived with Verticut and scarifier cartridges which we used over a few summer months. Swapping the cartridges around does take a few minutes (a basic toolkit is supplied) but it’s not a massive challenge once you’ve done it a couple of times. Incidentally, minus points to Cobra for the poor A5 instruction booklet supplied with the mower. Go online and you can find a better quality colour version of it.
Power for our 17E came via a pair of high capacity 56v/5.0Ah EGO lithium-ion batteries, conservatively rated for around an hour of mowing. You can run it off a single-battery, but you’ll get a lower running time. The battery charger is fan-cooled, so it’s a little noisier than you might expect in operation.
This isn’t a mower for long grass, or anything other than a fundamentally flat lawn, but if you crave that bowling green style finish, few other machines come close to matching this behemoth. Even with ‘just’ the six-blade cylinder, the cuttings are so fine you end up involuntarily cooing over them when emptying the grass box.
Thanks to its huge weight, you can also see the cast rear-roller gently flattening/striping slightly uneven loose ground as it repeatedly trundles over your lawn, though, happily, its ‘split’ roller design minimises grass damage when you turn the mower. Swapping over to the scarifier and verticut cartridges is both painless and very worthwhile. The amount of thatch I extricated from my lawn was eye-opening, leaving me very confident that its health would benefit in the coming months.
As for the electric versus petrol debate, let’s put that one to bed right now: it’s no contest. Zero fumes, vastly reduced maintenance and a more than adequate running time (I managed to mow 700m2 of lawn on a single charge) mean that for domestic lawn-mowing, at least, battery power is a no-brainer.
So long as you’re starting off with a reasonably flat lawn, and can physically cope with its enormous weight, I think this is an amazing ‘do-it-all’ lawncare solution. Expensive, yes, but the designed-in versatility is a massive bonus. Plus the build quality is such that you’ll probably be able to pass it down as a family heirloom.
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