ES1600 14-Amp Electric Chipper / Shredder / Mulcher

I've now used this shredder for a few different things. I am not a long-term user yet, but have enough experience to know how well it will work for me.I typically avoid things with as many bad reviews as this has, but there doesn't seem to be a good alternative. I don't want the trouble, cost, and noise of a gas chipper and there didn't seem to be anything else that would be better at processing things like bush trimmings, so I ordered this.So far, I've used it for leaves, vines, and a bush.- Leaves: It didn't do a lot to the leaves I put through it. From what I've seen, there are better tools for this. I think it'll be good enough for the compost heap, though. Next fall, I'll try this, but may also get a mulching blower/vac.- Vines: I posted before/after photos of this. It jammed a couple times on the vines and a lot of pieces were still 2"-3" long. I'll use it for mulch. It seems good enough for that.- Bush: It did this best. There were no jams and it made fairly small pieces.The good:- Cheap and low-maintenance compared to gas-powered alternatives.- Does a good job on small branches and bush clippings. Adequate job on leaves and vines.- Pretty quiet. I use ear protection, but I'd consider it optional.The bad:- It has a 1' cord. I am using it with a 14 ga 25' extension cord, which is barely adequate for my fairly small yard (0.2 acre lot). If you need to get a 50' cord or longer, you may end up spending quite a bit extra on that. Make sure your cord is a length/gauge that can handle 15 amps.- Clearing a jam is kind of a hassle. You have to remove 5 screws to separate the yellow and black parts and access the blades. You can see these screws in the photos. They're yellow. Fortunately, you don't need tools, but it takes longer than I'd like. In one session I had to take it apart 3 or 4 times and it got old.- It jams some, but it depends on what you're putting through it. I had the most jams on some really wet, fibrous plants. I ran a whole bush through with zero jams. Vines jammed some, but rarely.- It's heavy. The body is all metal, and fairly thick. According to Amazon, the shipping weight is 71 lbs. Take it out of the box and you're still looking at almost 70 lbs. It's a bit awkward to pick it up and move it (e.g. putting it in your trunk). Also, on bumpy terrain, you have to be careful to keep it from tipping over.- Input size is limited. Don't plan on putting a lot of branches through it. See the photo I posted showing branches it wouldn't take. Branches should be an occasional thing. If you're doing a lot of woody stuff, you probably need something else.- The 'clippings' slot is pretty small. For vines and bush trimmings, you have to cut them into pretty small pieces for them to fit and do a lot of jamming them in with the pusher.Final notes:- Sometimes, I use it with a concrete mixing bin. The bin is maybe 1.5'x2' and 6 or 8 inches deep. I put the bin under the machine so I can put the shredder right next to the bush or whatever and the shredder fills up the bin which I can then take to wherever I want to put the shredded plant parts. This seems to be easier than hauling branches to the shredder.- I took out a bush which was about 3'x3'x6' tall. It took about 30 minutes of cutting and stuffing into the shredder. I posted a picture of what it looked like after it went through the shredder as well as a few pieces that wouldn't go through it.

I studied the reviews on this and other sites, and came to the conclusion that you cannot expect a machine that costs around $200 to perform as well as one costing three times as much. We needed a machine that would shred trimmings from a large area of sword ferns. These ferns produce fronds that can be over three feet long with a stem of around 1/4" diameter. The nylon line leaf shredders obviously would have problems handling this work, so we took a close look at the Eco-Shredder. Sufficent to say that we have been shredding successfully over several weeks, and produced enough mulch to fill six 42 gallon contractor bags weighing up to 50lbs each. The results have been excellent. The mulch is not particularly fine, but ideal for our use. As the instructions suggest, if you want a finer mulch, just feed it through again. We tried this on a small quanitity just to see what happened, and it does just that.The assembly instructions are quite well illustrated, but a bit light in just where all the various supplied bolts and washers actually go. Once you have it worked out, not really too difficult, everything fits remarkably well, with no misaligned holes or threads. The inclusion of the lock washers shows good thinking on the part of the manufactureres, and seem to have done their job holding the bolts in place up to this point.The unit is relatively quiet in operation, and not likely to disturb the neighbors, unless you use it in the middle of the night. I'd still recommend using some sort of hearing protection, but I don't know that it is really essential. I guess it depends just how long the have things running.When using the machine, one needs to bear in mind that there are two sets of cutting blades. The top blades are set almost vertically and are ideal for the lighter shredding that takes place when feeding leaves and clippings through the top of the unit. If you try doing this with anything heavier it is not surprising that there could be problems, since these blades are not designed to take the shock that pushing a small branch into them would produce.The second set of blades are set horizontally below the first set and are designed to slice small branches fed in through the feeder tube set about halfway down the body of the unit. This makes sense when you think about it, and this is where you need to do your chipping. I have to confess that we have not done any serious chipping, but my thinking here is that one needs to bear in mind the cababilities of the machine, and not push it beyond reasonable limits. I would suggest that the size of any branches be kept below the limits stated in the instructions, and that you only try to chip wood that has been recently cut. Old wood that has become dry and hard would probably overstress the unit. Gentle experimentation it probably the watchword here.We've not had any problems with the discharge chute getting blocked. The machine does produce mulch very efficiently, and one does need to keep an eye on the pile as it builds up, and make sure to move it out of the way. I don't know that directing the chute directly into a collection bag would be a good idea, since you can't really see what's happening, and backing up into the chute would be the inevitable result. I would also expect some issues if you were shredding leaves that had been allowed to get wet, where there might be some tendency for things to get plugged up. Again, a little common sense in when and how to use the machine would prevent this from happening.We have probably as many ferns again to deal with, so will be shredding away into the summer. I'll update this review if my opinions change.