Worx Nitro WG737E review: A mighty mid-sized cordless mower

One of the biggest concerns people have about cordless lawn mowers is that they lack the powerful grunt of a petrol mower and so will struggle when the grass gets long or tough. With some cordless mowers, there’s some truth to this – they’re fine on a flat lawn with short, lightweight grass, but they’re constantly jamming once you hit clumps of more resilient ryegrass. However, the Nitro WG737E, from Worx, is made of sterner stuff. It’s still a relatively compact and inexpensive cordless mower, but its 37cm blade and 40W brushless motor can take on more demanding mows, while still doing a fantastic job on easy-going lawns.

I’ve been using this mower for the best part of a month on both my small, flat-ish front garden and my far more unforgiving, overgrown, sloped rear lawn. Over that time, the Nitro WG737E has had a serious workout, so how well has it performed?

Worx Nitro WG737E review: What do you get for the money?

The Nitro WG737E is a 40W cordless mower with a 37cm blade and a 40l collection bag. It runs from two 20V, 4A batteries, charged by a 2A dual-battery rapid charger. Handily, both the batteries and the charger are included in the price, rather than an add-on at purchase. It has a choice of six cutting heights, from 20mm up to 70mm, and Worx suggests that it’s good for garden areas up to 550m² in size. If you don’t fancy making regular trips to your garden bin or compost pile, you can swap out the grass collection bag and fit the supplied mulching plug, and just leave the mangled clippings to feed your lawn.

It’s a relatively big mower, 42cm wide and up to 117cm long with the handle fully extended. It also weighs a hefty 14kg just for the main unit, and 15.3kg with both batteries installed. I found I could just about lug it between the front and back gardens and down my rear garden steps but, even with the chunky carrying handle on the top, it’s quite hard work. On the plus side, the construction feels extremely robust and, between this and the straightforward bar and button controls, the WG737E has a very sturdy, semi-pro feel.

Unfortunately, the WG737E requires a fair bit of assembly before use and the pictorial instructions aren’t always clear. For example, the two lower sections of the handle need to be attached to the rotating mounts at the base – locked and bolted into place – and then the upper section needs to be attached and bolted to them. However, once this is done, the quick-release bolts make it relatively easy to fold the handle down for storage. The WG737E doesn’t quite fit into the suitcase-sized space of the Husqvarna Aspire LC34, but you can still cram it into a space roughly 90 by 55 cm.

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Worx Nitro WG737E review: How easy is it to use?

There’s no way to adjust the length of the handle but the rotary mounts and quick-release bolts give you a range of comfortable working heights. The chunky wheels make the mower surprisingly manoeuvrable, even over quite rough or undulating lawns, while on flatter lawns it’s an absolute doddle to keep it rolling forward.

The orange lever makes short work of changing the cutting height: you just shift it to the left to release it from its current position, then push or pull the deck upwards or downwards to your desired height, then release the lever back into its grooves to lock the deck in place.

My only serious grumbles are that the quick-release bolts that hold the handle in position would sometimes pop out of place while trying to screw them in. As a result, it could be tricky getting the gears on the rotating mount to mesh properly, which meant that the height of the handle would sometimes drop while I was pushing the mower around.

Worx Nitro WG737E review: How well does it mow?

The WG737E is an excellent mower on flat lawns, leaving a nice, crisp cut that’s superb at the second or third-lowest cutting height. It’s great at sweeping the clippings into the collector at the back and it also cuts fairly close to the edge of the deck, so you won’t leave more than a centimetre or so of long grass if you’re mowing right next to a garden fence or wall. It’s not the quietest cordless mower I’ve tried – putting out around 80 to 85dB while running – but it’s still much quieter than the average petrol mower.

What really impressed me was how it handles more challenging conditions. I put it to work on my sloping rear garden – after just a week of sunshine following a month or so of rainy weather, it had grown seriously unruly – and, though I gave the grass a quick trim with a cordless strimmer, I didn’t hold out hope that the WG737E would be able to make much headway.

It choked on a few rough patches where the grass had grown thick or stringy, and I had to pause to pull bunched-up clippings from the deck. Most of the time it just kept chopping and growling through the grass on the fourth height setting, leaving it an awful lot neater than when I started. Even sections that made the Aspire LC-34 grind to a halt couldn’t stop the WG737E.

This cutting power does have an impact on battery life though. Cutting flat and better-cared-for sections of the garden, I found the two 4A batteries lasted somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes; however, in those tougher conditions, this dropped to around 25 minutes as Worx’s IntelliCut technology automatically increases the torque to deal with the thicker, longer grass. It only takes just under two hours to recharge both batteries again, so it’s not a complete write-off if you happen to run out of juice halfway through.

Worx Nitro WG737E review: Should I buy it?

Simply put: yes. The Worx Nitro WG737E is a brilliant cordless mower that delivers excellent results on the average flat lawn, but also has the power to deal with the kind of thicker, longer grass that can snarl up many smaller, lighter models. 

Its size and weight mean it’s not the best option for smaller gardens, and it lacks the space-saving features of the Husqvarna Aspire LC34, but it’s a serious rival to mid-range champs like the Bosch UniversalRotak 36-550. Frankly, the Worx Nitro WG737E is one of the best mid-sized, mid-range cordless mowers you can buy.