EN 709, and the machine that pulls itself forward

What the standard pins down

EN 709 covers the pedestrian-controlled tractor and the rotary cultivator: the machine with a handlebar, an engine or motor between the wheels or above the tines, and an operator walking behind it.

Its concern is a machine that moves under its own power with a person immediately behind it, and much of the document follows from that. It fixes the arrangement of the handlebar and the position from which the machine must be controllable. It requires a control that stops the working element when it is released, and it sets out how the machine must behave while that control is released. It fixes guarding over and around the tines, including the rear shield that stands between the rotating element and the operator’s boots. It requires that a machine which can drive forward cannot be started in gear.

It also fixes the instructions and the markings — what must be said about starting, about transporting the machine with the tines fitted, and about what to do before touching a tine that has stopped.

What it does not promise

It does not promise working depth. The figure in a listing — commonly around twenty centimetres on a domestic machine — is the reach of the tine assembly at its setting, measured on the machine and not in your ground. Soil decides the rest.

It does not promise working width in any useful sense either. Most tillers in this class are sold with a width that changes: outer tine sets come off, and the listing then quotes a range. Which of the figures in that range you actually use depends on whether the machine has the traction to pull the full set through your soil.

It does not promise the machine will not walk. A tiller that climbs out of the ground on hard-packed clay is a tiller meeting conditions the test did not reproduce, and no amount of compliance changes it.

And it does not promise anything about the aerating tools that share this page’s appliesTo list. A hand spike aerator is under no machinery document at all, and it is listed here only because the site’s soil-tool families are read together.

The documents it sits next to

An electric tiller is an appliance as well as a machine, and carries the corresponding part of the household-appliance family. A petrol tiller’s engine falls under the non-road mobile machinery emission regulation, and its stage designation is what a listing prints beside the displacement.

Every powered tiller sold in the European Union carries a guaranteed sound power level from the outdoor noise directive, and a declared vibration value from whichever measurement document its manufacturer used. On this shelf the vibration value is the one worth finding: a tiller transmits more of it to the hands than anything else here.

Which shelves it reaches here

The tiller family cites it. The hand aerator family is listed alongside because the two shelves are read together by anyone preparing ground, not because a garden fork is subject to a machinery standard — it is not, and the aerator pages say so.

Where a tiller listing quotes a horsepower figure and a displacement but names no standard, the review prints both as the maker states them and notes the absence. The petrol end of this shelf is largely imported, and the absence is the norm.