Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi there - wondered if you could help me - each year i end up burning a lot of cuttings & prunings (willow, rose & shrubs).... but wondered if I could make better use by composting them, as i never seem to have enough of the stuff.

But are cheapish shredders (under £100) any good, or a recipe for disaster & breakdowns? I can't justify spending more than that now.
Does the stuff that comes out of them rot ok?
Cheers

I have used both electric & petrol versions. Here is my opinion on both.

Electric, Black & decker.
On a lead so near the house, her indoors not impressed with bits flying around . Feeds out through a drop slot about 2' off the ground.
Can clog, both on input and output sides.
Feeding it is like trying to post your largest blackcurrent bush through your letterbox, so it can be a long job. Get a one foot thumbstick to help feed it. Noisy, moans/whines like a deep siren and hard bits rattle round the drum & blades. Yes more modern ones are quieter I believe.

Petrol, MTD 5hp.
Go anywhere you can drag it on its wheels. Feeds out at high speed into an air-loose (as opposed to air tight) sack or as a twenty foot ground stripping jet. Jammed it once, can't remember how and working out what to undo took four times as long as unblocking it. Much easier to feed as much bigger feed slot with a longer and gentler decrease in size. Although the top of the hopper is between 18" & 2' square it has a plastic cross across the top, which I keep thinking about removing. Will also deal with up to 2" diameter logs no problem. A thumb stick is still useful, but needs to be 2' to 3' long.

As for what comes out there is not much difference to the naked eye. It rots down fine, but is much much better incorporated with your usual "wet" compost material. One lot of hazel which I coppiced was done on its own and the amount of fungal spores that came out when shovelling the composted remains was very hazardous , the whole lot was grey-white. When mixed with lawn mowings it seems to be a good mix of opposites. Dry high-carbon wood plus leaves and wet sticky grass.

Whatever you go for take care, remember they are pretty puch like hand feeding a rotary mower, hence my comments about using thumbsticks to feed, you can loose loads of them, but god (or evolution) only gave you one set of hands.

Professional ones (tree surgeon types) tend to have gear-wheel like feeder jaws which pull the matter in and safety cut-out bars etc. But hese are loads-a-money.

Hope that helps.

I shipped my 5 hp Briggs & Stratton engine (gasoline) chipper-shredder from America. I'd used it for a year and moved here (I wasn't about to leave it behind!) It stayed in storage for three years until we moved. Then, put (now I call it) petrol in the tank and it started on the third pull...no kidding!

Yes, I agree with the '2-foot ground-stripping jet' of air if the bag isn't attached. In fact, when I unpacked it three years after putting it into storage I couldn't find the bag and still haven't found it! I had to buy another - which was easy, thank goodness!

Your post brought back another distant memory: some time ago I put too much wet stuff in (partially decomposed something mixed with too much soil) and it clogged. I wouldn't admit this to anyone, so I quietly and methodically took it apart at the back without any instructions or diagrams, cleared out the soil, and put it back together with no parts left over! -- and it worked as good as new. Whew! I was so proud that I could do that! (otherwise I would have a dead $700 machine on my hands!) Who says women are helpless and not mechanical?!

I should use it a lot more than I do, but it takes care of corn stalks and the like at the allotment ('like a hot knife through butter'), and hedge and shrub trimmings at home. It's one of my favourite 'tools'.

I also came to the UK with a petrol chainsaw - but that's another story!!!

We have had an AL-KO shredder for at least 20 years. It is a small electric model, with an extremely long cable. Bearing in mind we bought it when small shredders were first coming on the market, it is still going strong, and has been very useful. It is quite noisy, but we are not using it for very long each year. My husband has been using it for the past two days. It did jam once, but that was becuase he was trying to shred a piece of wire fencing!!

What shredder you buy depends very much on how much material you need to shred. We just have the normal prunings of a small garden. The machine takes this through the top and will take small branches, up to 1 1/2 inches in diameter through a side feeder. The exit is about 18ins above ground level.

I don't know if AL-KO are still in the market, but based on personal experience, I would thoroughly recommend them.

valmarg

Hello Skip
I have an early Al-Ko electric shredder probably very similar to Valmarg's. Its still going great guns and, touch wood, has never given any bother. It has an induction motor (no brushes to wear out) which drives the cutters directly (no gears or belts to konk out) so I think this is why its been so reliable. This type of spec might be something to look out for if you decide on an electric model. Whatever type you go for look for something with some weight behind it, really strong and well made as these machines have to do a lot of seriously hard work at high speed.
The petrol machines do have the advantage of being able to be used anywhere though but are pricey.

John

Hi Skip

I looked into this a couple of years ago and got a lot of help from the Forum. I ended up going for a Bosch electric shredder with a corksrew action (i.e. one of the more expensive ones - about £200). It has worked very well and certainly solves the problem of disposing of willow, rose and shrub prunings. Not so good for soft material on its own - you need to feed in woody stuff at the ame time. Rarely clogs up and if it does it's very easy to sort it out. It is also reasonable quiet and the corkscrew action means that the stuff is pulled in with little effort on your part. The output is slighly coarser then impact shredders but this is not a problem for either mulching or composting. I've no experience of the cheaper ones but feel I made a good decision.

Hope this helps