Ditch Pricey Aerators: Home Depot's Manual Alternative Is Budget-Friendly

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If you go online and check the retail or rental prices for lawn aerators, you might end up rethinking your aeration plans. Purchasing a good motorized core aerator can set you back a few thousand dollars, and even renting one from your nearby home supplies store can cost hundreds of dollars for a week of usage. Thankfully, you can ditch these pricey aerators, because Home Depot has a manual alternative that is budget-friendly and will do the job just as well as those motorized aerators.

As of this writing, the Corona MAX YardBREATHER costs around $33. Standing a little over 3 feet tall, the steel-built Corona is constructed like a double-tined pitchfork. The difference is that the 3.5-inch tines on the Corona are hollow to remove soil plugs from your lawn. This is called core aeration, which works by removing small plugs of soil from the earth to break up compaction and create better access for air, water, and nutrients in the lawn.

A foot pad connects the tines, so all you need to do is press into the soil with your foot to dig out the plugs. And since the tines are hollow, they perform a kind of auto-eject function where the plugs are ejected with each round of aerating. For an aerator under $50, the Corona is a solid alternative to pricier models.

The primary reason you might want to think about purchasing a manual aerator like the Corona, aside from the affordable price, is the fact that you don't need to worry about running out of gasoline, charging a battery, or repairing a motor. The manual aerator is a simple tool designed to work without needing anything other than your own human power. Just press the tines into the earth, and you're good to go.

However, a manual aerator still needs to follow the same schedule as far as to how and when to aerate your lawn. General guidance is that the best time of year to aerate your lawn is in the fall for cool season grasses, like Kentucky bluegrass, and early summer for warm season grasses, like Bermuda grass. These timings take advantage of climate, soil temperature, and grass growth to allow the lawn plenty of time to recover.

That said, while the manual aerator will do the same job as the motorized one, they really work best for smaller properties with lawns under 1,000 square feet. Manually aerating a large lawn is a time-consuming, physically-demanding task. Therefore, using the Corona on a smaller yard, or the corners that a big aerator cannot reach, is ideal. Anyone with a larger lawn would be better served with that aerator rental. In this case, the price would be well worth the time efficiency.