It started with one dandelion
We moved into the house in 2022. The patio was the selling point — a big Indian sandstone square out the back, block paving running down to the garage, room for the table and the kids' football goal. My wife said it was the first garden she could actually imagine sitting in.
By the second spring, it looked like a car park behind a shut-down pub. One dandelion in March, then moss along the north edge, then that low creeping stuff that gets into every single joint and won't pull out without taking the sand with it. Anyone who owns paving in this country knows exactly what I'm describing.
What I tried first (and why it all failed)
Hand-weeding. I bought one of those L-shaped joint scrapers. It works, technically. It also took me two full Saturdays, wrecked my knees, and half the weeds were back within five weeks because you never get the root out of a 5mm gap.
Chemical weedkiller. This is the part I actually regret. We've got a Labrador and my youngest was three at the time. I'd spray on a Friday, then spend the weekend keeping everyone off the patio, and then it rained on the Sunday and I wasn't sure whether the whole thing had washed into the border where we grow strawberries. After the second bottle I looked at the label properly and thought: I don't want this on the surface my children sit on.
Pressure washer. Brilliant for about a fortnight. Then I realised I'd blasted all the kiln-dried sand out of the joints, which gave the weeds somewhere even better to root. Re-sanding cost me another weekend.
A quote from a landscaper. £680 to lift and re-lay a section, plus a recommendation to re-do the lot "eventually". That was the point I gave up and started reading forums at eleven o'clock at night.
The thing my neighbour was doing that I didn't understand
Trevor next door is retired and his driveway is immaculate. In May I finally asked him what he sprays on it. He laughed and said "I don't spray anything, I burn them."
He came round with a long black wand attached to a small gas canister and showed me. You hold the head a couple of centimetres above the weed for two or three seconds. You don't set fire to it — nothing goes up in flames. The heat bursts the cell walls in the leaf, the plant loses the ability to move water, and it dies over the next day or two. It's called thermal weeding, and apparently councils across Europe have been doing it for years on pavements where they're not allowed to use chemicals.
He was using a heavy trade one. When I looked online, the version most people in the UK seemed to be buying was the Esslyn™ WeedAway — same idea, but a lighter telescopic wand with a piezo trigger so you're not fiddling with matches on a windy day.
Ordering it, and what turned up
I ordered on a Tuesday evening. I'll be straight with you about two things, because I wish someone had told me: the checkout prices in US dollars, so my bank converted it and added a small foreign transaction fee; and the gas canister isn't included — you screw on a standard butane/propane cartridge, which I picked up from a hardware shop for a few pounds.
The box arrived just under two weeks later. Inside: the wand in two sections, the handle, a spare nozzle seal, and an instruction leaflet that's mostly safety warnings in six languages. Assembly took about ninety seconds — the sections screw together and the canister threads onto the top. It's lighter than I expected, and the length means you use it standing up, which after three years of kneeling on cold slabs felt like the main selling point on its own.
First go: the honest version
My first mistake was holding it on each weed far too long. You get a satisfying hiss and the leaf goes dark, and your instinct is to keep going until the thing is visibly destroyed. You don't need to. The instructions say two to three seconds and they're right — the weed will look almost untouched when you move on, then it's brown and shrivelled by the next morning.
My second mistake was starting at midday in June with everything bone dry. Don't do that. I now do it early evening after a bit of rain, with a hose reel unwound next to me, and I stay off anything near the fence panels and the decking entirely. It is an open flame. Treat it like one.
The whole patio and the driveway took me about forty minutes. Forty minutes, standing up, no gloves full of grit, nothing sprayed, dog on the patio again the same evening.
Three months on
The honest picture, not the advert version: it did not kill everything forever, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something. Annual weeds and moss died and stayed dead. The deep-rooted ones — I had a couple of dandelions with taproots down through the sub-base — needed doing twice, about ten days apart, before they gave up. That's apparently normal for thermal weeding: you're killing top growth and starving the root by repetition rather than poisoning it.
What actually changed is the maintenance. Instead of two lost weekends a year plus chemicals, it's ten minutes with a cup of tea every three weeks or so. My wife did it herself last month, which she would never have done with a bottle of glyphosate.
What I'd tell you before you buy
- It's a real flame. Not for dry grass, decking, fence bases, artificial turf, or anywhere near a fuel store. Keep water to hand and check the area afterwards.
- Buy the gas separately. Standard screw-thread cartridges. One lasted me roughly four full sessions.
- Expect repeat visits. Perennials need a second pass. Budget ten minutes a fortnight in spring rather than one heroic day.
- Timing matters. Damp ground, still air, evening. Never during a dry spell warning or if your council has fire restrictions in place.
- Prices are in dollars. Check what your card converts it to before confirming, and note delivery took about a fortnight to Yorkshire.
- Adults only. Mine lives on a high shelf in the garage with the canister removed.
Would I buy it again?
Yes — mostly because of the chemical thing. I didn't want to keep spraying a surface my kids eat their lunch on, and this solved that without costing me a weekend every month. It's not magic and it isn't a one-time fix. It's a tool that makes a horrible job into a short one.
If you've got paving, a gravel drive, a greenhouse path or block edging that defeats you every spring, it's the first thing in three years I'd actually recommend to a neighbour. The multi-packs work out considerably cheaper per unit — my brother-in-law took the second one off me before I'd even opened the box.
A note on this article. This is a paid promotional page published by HalalPoints Media Ltd. Daniel H. is a real customer whose account has been edited for length; his name has been shortened and some photographs are illustrative rather than of his own garden. We earn a commission if you buy through the links above, at no extra cost to you. Individual results vary. Please read the safety notice in the footer before using any gas-fuelled garden tool.