Opmeiro Lawn Aerator review

Whether you’ve got a lawn like a putting green or a patchwork quilt of grass you can barely keep alive, the upkeep is mostly the same: treat for weeds, provide fertilizer and water, and overseed.

One step that gets overlooked until it’s too late: aeration.

While most of us think about the grass part of our lawn, aeration is all about the soil around it. It’s the process of digging in and slicing out little “cores” of dirt, giving the soil a chance to loosen up and room for water and air to reach your grass’s roots. If your lawn is rock hard, full of bare patches, and tends to have water puddle up, you probably need to aerate.

I’ve aerated my own lawn a couple of times, but one particular section remains compacted due to some heavy equipment that continuously rolled over it during a septic replacement. It’s bad, with low spots that cause water to pool up after every storm.

Two main lawn aeration options

The traditional way to aerate your lawn is to use a giant machine called a core aerator. You can rent one for $100 for a few hours, but you’ll usually have to get it to and from your home. This requires a bigger vehicle and at least another person to help lift it in and out.

Core aerators work great and are useful on even medium-sized lawns that need aeration. They’re tricky to use at first, but once you get going you can easily aerate a 10,000-square-foot lawn in a couple of hours.

But, what if you have a smaller area that you need to aerate, or just can’t get a giant machine to and from your house?

That’s where a manual aerator comes in.

What is a manual lawn aerator, like aerator shoes or spikes?

From shoes with spikes on them to rolling “spike” aerators, there are plenty of cheap aerators that don’t work at all.

However, the manual Opmeiro lawn aerator caught my eye online. It is cheap, lightweight, and promises to let you easily aerate a small patch of grass in no time. Would this manual lawn aerator be any different?

To find out, I put the Opmeiro hand aerator to the test on my own lawn.

What we liked about the Opmeiro

Setting up the aerator was literally as easy as taking it out of the box—it was already assembled and ready to go.

The aerator looks a bit like a pogo stick, with a wide padded handle, metal frame, and a spot at the bottom to stand on.

It aerates just like larger core aerators, with two hollow spikes that slice into the ground and pull out cylinders of dirt, just like how you’d cut the core out of an apple. You just put your foot on the metal bar in the middle, drive it into wet ground, and it’ll spring back up and the dirt core falls out.

The aerator can cut down up to six inches if the earth is saturated, though I found that if either side hit a rock or a tree root it would stop after two or three. Other than those snags, it’s pretty fast.

What we didn’t like about the Opmeiro hand aerator

The main issue is you’re only driving it down with your body weight, and it takes a lot of time.

In a half hour of work, I was only able to thoroughly aerate about 150 square feet—with about 900 square feet left to go for just one part of my lawn to be done.

The results were exactly the same as with the larger core aerator, leaving me with a nicely aerated lawn and lots of dirt plugs to rake up or break up into top dressing.

What to do after aerating your lawn

Most importantly, you’ll want to consider what else to add to your soil to prevent compaction.

Compost is the best choice, since it’ll clump up with your existing soil but still allow air and water through.

You can also use liquid aeration, which will further break up the compacted soil.

And, if the timing is right, you can add seed and fertilizer to start filling in those bare spots.

Aeration is a necessary step to keeping your lawn healthy year after year, and there are plenty of ways to go about it.

While a large core aerator is ideal for big areas, the Opmeiro hand aerator is an ideal complement. It doesn’t do anything different, and it takes time and effort, but it’s cheap and easy to transport when you just need to tackle a small area at a time.

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Prices were accurate at the time this article was published but may change over time.