I have many outdoor areas to sweep: patios, walkways, sidewalks, and bits of an alley and a street gutter. I need to gather leaves, pine needles, pine cones, \u201cberries\u201d from laurels, misc. junk, and light snow.<\/p>\n
I kept two wooden brooms outdoors to do this, but they had problems. The wide one\u2019s brush-head broke in half when I tossed it aside once, and its bristles gradually came out. The narrow one\u2019s threads deteriorated, and the thread-nub broke off in the socket. (I used a drill & a pair of slanting screws to attach the remainder of the pole to the other socket.)<\/p>\n
The construction of this wide push-broom from Libman<\/a> is very superior. It has a bank of bristles three inches deep, quite dense, and embedded in a tough-looking resin that is part of the brush-head. The pole and its socket are polypropylene, a stable artificial material. The pole is a single piece that is hollow and doesn\u2019t weigh much. It has reassuring side braces that are lacking in the competitive O-Cedar & Weiler models. It captures more debris in one sweep than my other brooms do in two. What it doesn\u2019t get on the push stroke, it mostly gets on the pull stroke. It looks sharp, and presumably, it won\u2019t \u201cweather\u201d the way my other brooms have. Its bristles are recycled. It\u2019s made in the U.S., And the price is right: only $27 (and free shipping).<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not perfect for everyone, as Amazon reviewers have noted. It\u2019s not meant for really rough surfaces. (Libman sells a $35 broom for that purpose<\/a>.) It\u2019s not meant to pick up fine sawdust as efficiently as brooms with softer bristles. It\u2019s not meant to push a lot of heavy, wet snow (its pole is not thick and has snapped under such stress). And it isn\u2019t as wide (and sturdy?) as Libman\u2019s high-priced, 36-inch \u201ccommercial\u201d model<\/a>. It\u2019s a compromise, but it hits my sweet spot.<\/p>\n Its Amazon rating is only 4 stars on 63 reviews. But many of the 4-star reviewers were enthusiastic in their comments \u2014 it may be that they felt shy about rating it higher because, as one of them said, \u201cit is hard to love a broom [so] unless it pushed itself I could not give it 5 stars.\u201d<\/p>\n I have many outdoor areas to sweep: patios, walkways, sidewalks, and bits of an alley and a street gutter. I …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29353"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29353"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38916,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29353\/revisions\/38916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}