I usually wait around 6 months before writing a review in order to keep it fair for all of my readers, but this recently purchased Tiller most likely won’t be used again for a good while. Partly due to not working at present whilst we are under threat by the coronavirus (covid-19) as well as the fact that this is an electric machine for domestic use, which we wouldn’t usually use for our gardening and landscaping business. But we were so impressed with this cheap bit of kit and knowing that most of the buyers will be using it for their own domestic gardens on a ‘here and there’ basis, why not let you know our first impressions!

Why we used this domestic YT5601-01 Tiller for our gardening business

We finished our last job on Friday 27th March before stopping due to the coronavirus (covid-19) threat, which involved the laying of 90 squared meters of turf, which I will be writing about soon. Hopefully on my next post.

This particular job had already had all of the turf removed (before and after picture below) so all we had to do was remove a huge pile of earth, level the ground and lay the new turf on top. Usually, we would almost always use new top soil when laying new turf, especially when we are re-leveling the ground. The problem was that when it came time to order the top soil, that all of the building merchants local to ourselves had closed amid the coronavirus, which meant that we were literally stuck. We had the £300 worth of turf ordered and ready for collection, with no top soil to lay it on!

The next best thing to do was to use our rotivator to turn all of the existing soil up as best we can (to be fair the soil was lovely) which would allow us to re-level the ground. So once all of the we had filled up 2 8 yard skips of the earth, we brang in our old petrol rotivator ready to start churning the soil. This is where the problems started!

We spent about 3 hours trying to start this rotivator with no luck, and when it did run it ran for around 10 seconds before cutting out! We couldn’t believe it! With all local repair shops closed and trying everything from adjusting the cables to cleaning the carb, we were stuck!

Usually in this situation we would spend £300-£500 on a new petrol rotivator, but with Screwfix being our only hope and all rotivators and tillers on a next day delivery basis, our only option was to give the £49.99 electric YT5601-01 800W 28CM Tiller 220-240V a go!

My review of the electric YT5601-01 tiller

Baring in mind that this tiller comes with a 1 year warranty, this is still a domestic machine and shouldn’t be used for heavy duty use. When we first took the machine out of the box, we both laughed at how light the machine was, and the fact that we could put it together with nothing but hand tight spindles in a matter of minutes. At this point we was unsure on how good the tiller would actually be! We explained to the customer why we were using an electric one, and once plugging in the extension lead we were ready to go.

It’s important to note that the turf had already been removed from the ground, so we were using it on soil, but we were absolutely amazed with how good the YT5601-01 electric tiller performed! Apart from the initial bounce here and there on hard surface, one you got into the ground it was amazing. We must have used it for about 6-7 hour in total with no problems and never lost power despite being put through its paces. It had plenty enough power for what we needed it for!

If you have an allotment or garden where the ground needs to be rotivated, I would 100 recommend this cheap machine. If it could withstand the pressure that we were using it for, then I would definitely recommend it for domestic use. It was actually alot easier using this compared to our petrol ones just simply to not having to keep pulling a pull cord every time we wanted to use it and how much lighter it was to move around. If the worst comes to the worst and the machine breaks down then you have the 12 month warranty there for peace of mind! Here is a video below showing it in action!