I first bought a kit from Magnetar that came with everything I needed to get started, but that came with some things that I didn’t strictly need. Really you could start with just a magnet, rope and some safety gloves.

There’s a few types of magnets out there: single sided, double sided and 360° magnets. Single sided being magnetic on one side, double sided both, and 360° are magnetic all the way around. Personally I wouldn’t consider getting a single sided one because when you drag it in the magnetic face probably won’t be facing down. I bought a 360° one because it seemed like the “best” type, but double sided would have been a perfectly good option too. For reference I have the Magnetar Hardcore which is very good but fairly pricey as a magnet to start with, but I was fairly certain I’d enjoy it so I was happy to spend that much.

Really the important thing is to buy from a reputable online seller like Magnetar or Online Magnets. There are a lot of kits on Amazon that just straight up lie about the strength of the magnet or are of poor quality and lose magnetism pretty quickly.

Other useful items are a bucket, which you can use to carry gear, finds or use to wash away mud that you can end up getting all over the ground; a grappling hook which I find useful for bikes and shopping trolleys which are both large and often not particularly magnetic; and recently I ordered a cheap manual winch in case I get the magnet stuck again where I can’t use my car to pull it out. I also have a folding cart which you can see to the left of my car in the image, which I bought after my first trip out when I realised that carrying a load of metal down the towpath was a lot of work.

Another important thing to mention is that you should dispose of whatever you pull out and don’t want to keep. There are scrappers that will happily come and collect stuff if you leave it in a neat pile in an accessible place and give them a call, but I take everything home in my car intending to weigh it in for scrap later.