I've got some pretty bad areas with thick dead grass that need to be raked out to allow new growth to come through. This is mostly due to drought and water restrictions in my area. I'm going to also take a sample to the local nursery to double check there is nothing else wrong. My question is has anyone used one of those electric thatchers on Amazon? My back will suffer and I'd be happy to spend 150-200 bucks on one of these if they are worth it. St Augustine grass. Thanks.

would not think it would work well with St. Augustine. Rake and Till?

I have St. Augustine and I bought one a couple of years ago. The orange/black one.
Came with a spring loaded dethatching head and a scarifying head and it's been great so far. I dethatch at the beginning of the growing season. I just cut the grass a couple of notches lower than normal before I start.

Due to the size of my yard, I find that the bag it comes with is useless, so I just use it without the bag and then suck up the exposed thatch with a yard vacuum.

It does pull up some of the runners, but really only a minimal amount.

You can adjust the height of the heads based on how thick the thatch is or how deep you want to scarify.

Just did this to my sta front yard two weeks ago. Agree on all aspects, even used the same machine. The bag is useless.

I just did the bad section by hand. The thatching rake makes a huge difference and it wasn't bad. However, it pulls up a lot of healthy grass. Plus there is no way I could do the whole yard. I won't be resodding either because we are not allowed to water lawns in corpus right now. I had initially planned to leave it since we could t do much for the lawns but we had a little rain and thought I'd give it a chance.