I got one for £60 from screwfix in the sale early lockdown after garden waste stopped being collected. It's £75 now. A year later, still going strong after shredding loads of branches. Gets clogged up quite often, especially with heavy leafy material attached to the branches. Not really suitable for shredding anything else like garden prunings - I just use an old rotary mower for those.
Depends how much material you need to shred and how well you can store/time when you have a lot of waste. I used to have a heap big enough to fill 2 pallet compost bays once it was all shredded, that's a lot of unshredded material. £70 for an annual event with no on going maintenance costs and the ability to shred absolutely anything my garden can produce makes it a sensible option (and my mower might last quite a lot longer too). I can't really remember why I stopped doing it.
When I'm using the shredder I try to put very green stuff through together with harder branches. I find that minimises jams caused by soft green stuff basically being turned to pulp. Problems do differ with different types of shredder. The one's I've had have all used a spinning disc with cutter blades in them. Others tend to crush and rip the branches more.
When I'm using the shredder I try to put very green stuff through together with harder branches. I find that minimises jams caused by soft green stuff basically being turned to pulp. Problems do differ with different types of shredder. The one's I've had have all used a spinning disc with cutter blades in them. Others tend to crush and rip the branches more.
Snap. I do exactly the same with a similar model most likely (mine is also an old Alko.) It's a matter of getting to know the shredder concerned really, as well as obvious things like keeping soil and stones from entering the input chute.
A trowel in the hand is worth a thousand lost under a bush.
I've an old (discontinued) Black & Decker shredder - the type that crushes rather than cuts. It's good for woody stuff up to maybe 1.5 inches diameter and for old dry stems of perennials. It's not much good for a lot of soft green stuff but I chop that up as I go rather than shredding, so no problem. I used to have a spinning disk type shredder and it was forever getting jammed (eventually the motor died). Anything too thick or with too many sticky-out bits to go through the shredder either gets sawn/lopped into lengths and stacked in a corner for a bug habitat (hopefully!) or put in the council bin.
Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Soil type: sandy, well-drained
My 'spinning disc' one (I can't get to the back of the shed to check the make at the moment) could cope with any branch which could fit in the feed chute as long as it was fed in slowly. With branches near to max size I would feed in and pull out repeatedly in order that the pieces which had been chopped of could be shredded before feeding more in.
You'll never look back @Albe. I have older Bosch models - 2000 & 2200. The latter is the spinning blade type that is the real workhorse for the compost heap but the old 2000 has a cylindrical blade that chops branches into chunks and is useful for compacting waste that is going into the green recycling bin. Don't know how we managed before buying them.
Clay soil - Cheshire/Derbyshire border. I play with plants and soil and sometimes it's successful
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Snap. I do exactly the same with a similar model most likely (mine is also an old Alko.) It's a matter of getting to know the shredder concerned really, as well as obvious things like keeping soil and stones from entering the input chute.
I play with plants and soil and sometimes it's successful
You will need to add one yourself. Presumably you have one already for the lawnmower or whatever, that will do.