Worx WG163E Review – UK Tested

I’d had the box sitting unopened in the shed for the best part of a fortnight before I got round to building it, which says more about my spring than about the trimmer. It was one of those grey, in-between weekends where the garden needed doing and nothing else did, and I only really got going because the neighbour two doors down had already started his mower and I felt obliged to keep pace.

It’s a 30cm cordless trimmer running on Worx’s PowerShare 20V battery, weighing 2kg without the battery fitted, closer to 2.4kg once one’s clipped in.

Overview and first impressions

Once it was out of the box, the head pivots properly, not just a single click between flat and ninety degrees, but anywhere across that whole range, so you can set the angle to whatever the job wants rather than picking between two fixed positions. It makes a proper clunk doing it too, nothing broken, just a louder, less refined sound than the rest of the tool gives off. Drop the wheels down and tip it right over and it walks itself along a path edge instead of cutting flat. I’d assumed for a while that was a gimmick on the box art, the kind of thing that looks clever in a product photo and is fiddly in practice, and then I gave it a proper go and went weeks doing nothing but trimming before I bothered switching it over, which in hindsight was a bit daft given how well the edging mode works once you do.

Worth knowing before that head ever gives you trouble: if it does eventually fail, it isn’t a part you can just swap out yourself, the whole tool becomes scrap at that point rather than a quick fix.

It runs on the same battery platform already in use elsewhere in the shed, so there was nothing new to charge or learn there. Picking it up by itself doesn’t tell you much though, it’s the using it for half an hour that actually tells you whether the weight matters, and next to the old petrol strimmer still gathering dust at the back of the shed, this is something like a quarter the weight and takes up a fraction of the space to store.

Specifications and scores

One genuine gap worth knowing before you buy: the head only ever takes line, there’s no fitting a blade attachment the way some rival trimmers allow. Worx also run a spools-for-life scheme, register the tool and replacement spools turn up for the cost of postage rather than a fresh purchase each time.

How it performed in our tests

On a patch of long grass and weeds that had built up round the base of a tree, it cleared the lot without hesitation, leaving a clean ring where there’d been nothing but overgrowth. Switching it into edging mode took more effort than I expected the first time, pressing down with my foot while twisting the handle felt like it might snap something, but the technique came after a couple of goes and never gave me trouble again.

Once in edging mode, the wheels did exactly what they’re meant to: stabilised the weight and guided a crisp line along the lawn edge rather than the wandering cut you get freehand. Worx claim around 150m of edge from a single charge and that tracked roughly with what I got through, give or take how overgrown a stretch was to start with.

It’s not a quiet tool. Ten minutes in near the house and someone two doors down was asking their dog what the noise was. Further down the garden it bothered nobody, but I’d think twice about running it close to a fence on a Sunday morning. The one other complaint that stuck with me came secondhand: I lent it to a left-handed mate for an afternoon and he reckoned every button and lever on it assumes you’re right-handed, which, fair enough, I’d never have noticed that myself.

Battery system and runtime

The kit version reviewed here comes with two 20V 2Ah batteries and the standard charger rather than the faster one, which makes sense once you’ve used it: swap to the second pack and keep going rather than waiting on a single battery to top up. A single charge lasted 30 to 40 minutes of regular use, plenty for the edges and odd patches a mower can’t reach. Charging is mains only, there’s no car or van charger option, which never bothered me at home but would matter if you were gardening somewhere without a socket handy.

PowerShare is the real reason to consider this over a single-purpose trimmer, a proper cordless tool platform rather than a one-off battery. The same batteries already running my hedge trimmer slot straight into this with no adapter, no separate charger, nothing extra to buy. Stack two packs together and the same system scales up to Worx’s bigger 40V and 80V tools too, not that a grass trimmer needs that kind of power.

A battery I’d run completely flat was back to full in two to three hours, which is a fair bit quicker than the manual’s own estimate suggests. Keep the battery out of the rain, away from anything it wasn’t designed for, and out of reach of children when it’s not in use.

Performance and limitations

What this gets right is the two-tools-in-one promise, delivered in full rather than just claimed. A strimmer that actually edges well, a line feed that never needs touching, and a battery that does double duty across other tools already in the shed. The pivoting head turned out to be the feature I used more than I expected, getting into spots a fixed-head trimmer simply can’t reach.

The honest friction sits at the edges of the experience rather than the core of it, the kind of thing that costs you a few minutes once and then never again. None of it touches how well the thing actually cuts.

For thick, established weeds gone truly woody, I’d reach for something heavier. For everything a normal garden throws at a trimmer week to week, this handled it without complaint, and by the time I’d finished that first overgrown patch the neighbour’s mower had long since stopped, so clearly I wasn’t keeping pace with much after all.

Final verdict

This earns its two-in-one billing. The edging mode genuinely replaces a separate tool rather than being a token gesture, and the line feed means that’s one less thing to think about during a job. Battery life and the spare pack covered everything I needed without a single interruption.

None of the rough edges undid what works well once it’s set up and running. They’re the kind of thing you learn once and then forget about.

For a garden with proper edges to keep tidy, especially one already running other Worx PowerShare tools, this is a sound, versatile pick.