Features:

  • Powerful 15-amp motor, and safe for the environment
  • 10:1 mulch ratio. Not intended for bamboo
  • 8-inch wheels for mobility. Includes collection bag
  • The maximum branch thickness that can be chipped is dependent on the type of wood and the quality of the goods being cut, but never thicker than 1-1/2 inch in diameter. For hard wood (e.g. oak/beech branches), the maximum branch thickness that can be chipped is less than for soft wood (e.g. pine/spruce wood)
  • For dry or knotted wood, the cutting thickness may also be less.
Durable and Effective for Small Branch Clean-up

Fortunately, I believed the positive reviews during the month's research prior to buying a chipper. The electric motor was powerful enough to work continually for a four hour clean-up. When the machine did jam, clearing the jam was simplistic and safe. True, as some reviews claimed, that twigs sometimes came out as small versions of themselves, however, you can't get chips from twigs and the machine does not claim to make sawdust. I really wanted to buy a chipper that could handle a three inch diameter branch. I compared the prices, read the reviews, and factored in the duties in maintaining a gasoline powered engine and some negative experiences with lawn mowers. When the larger-sized Patriot electric models were out of my price range, I decided to give the Lawnmaster model a try. For $150, what did I have to lose? Shipping was free and an extra blade was included. Lawnmaster should come out with a larger version of this efficient machine at a consumer-friendly price. The 1.5 inch diameter maximum did not allow me to finish the clean-up. That is my only negative. Based upon my experience with the machine, I'm sure it will be used over and over with the same positive results.

FANTASTIC so far

My saga begins 25 years ago. My first electric yard waste shredder was built like a tank and would have worked longer except the safety features were beginning to break down. So I got a replacement which stopped working after a year. Got 3 more brands which would die after a few sessions of shredding. I'd accumulated quite a pile of branches and yard debris when I got this unit. Gingerly feeding it in case it too would conk out, I gradually fed more and more. Although I hadn't intended to, I kept going until the pile was almost gone. I set aside some of the thicker branches for further curing/drying before feeding them through. I thought the + shaped opening might be difficult to work with, but had no problems with bendy branches. I hope this unit lasts....

Good investment.

I don't know what all the negative publicity about this shredder is about. It does what it says it can do just fine for a none commercial product. I am a female and I bought it for my garden waste. When it arrived I decided to get rid of over grown hedge in my front yard. I cut it down first at the stump with a reciprocating saw that I bought on sale for $19.00 at Harbor Freight. It was a lot of labor in cutting the branches to size. It was seven bushes total. It did the job with ease. Months later I used it for my garden waste. Worked like a charm. I got my moneys worth from the first application plus.

Second time's the charm

The first one we ordered didn't work, but Amazon's return service took care of it quickly and #2 was exactly what I wanted. It does exactly what we needed it to do: chip the leftovers when I pruned the butterfly bushes, dogwood bushes, lilacs and roses in an overgrown yard. It chips rose canes and woody branches from an eighth inch up to an inch in diameter. Although I don't think it is supposed to be for green wood, it does a good job on fresh as well as dried branches. It has the hardest time with dried wood an inch or more in diameter and I would not recommend doing a lot of that. Downsides: It doesn't do much "shredding" with leaves or thin twigs; you'll end up with partially chewed-up leaves and twig pieces about two-three inches long. This design has a few downsides - the plastic frame is a little flimsy, the wheels are hard to mount and not that robust. It's also quite loud, especially on the larger branches. And do wear goggles because sometimes pieces fly out of the top, especially if you are doing thicker branches. But overall, I think it's great for the price and it's lovely to have the simplicity of electric instead of gas. It is very easy to use, even for an older relative who is not too steady on her feet. It chipped easily 15+ contractor bags of prunings, sat over the winter outside (with a cover on it - I used a $5 clearance gas BBQ cover, as the chipper doesn't come with one), and it went right back to chipping this spring with no need for maintenance or anything. Very satisfied.

LOVE THIS CHIPPER SHREDDER!

I am sure all chipper shredders in this price range are about the same, but I do really like this product. I bought it to chop of Palm leaves from my royal palms around the property. I wasn't sure if it would work, but IT DID! this machine chops up entire huge palm frawns even if they are still green or if they are old and dried out too! I even toss in my kitchen compost (like lemon rinds or vegetables that are didn't get eaten before they went a little soft) and this machine chops up carrots and everything very well into small chucks for composting! ***YOU DO NEED A FLAT FILE TO SHARPEN THE BLADES REGULARLY. But it is very easy to unscrew the housing and take out the blade inside. I have already sharpened mine 3 times and reassembled it just fine! I do not think this is a good product IF you are trying to chip and shred large thick wood branches. If you have thick hard wood cuttings that you want to chip and shred you should buy a huge gas powered chipper shredder. If the branch is wider than your two thumbs put together then it wont go through this electric chipper shredder. But if you have leaves and small sticks and LOTS of palm frawns this is THE PERFECT machine! So it works for me! Love it!

Great chipper for the backyard wood trimmings

Great item. Surprisingly much quieter than I had expected. I used it for up to 1" diameter branches and lots of little twigs / branches. It reduced a 90 gallon recycling bin of trimmings down to 2 cubic feet of small chips and chopped twigs. Only had it one afternoon and I love it. I used the green pusher to get all the branches and twigs into the chipper. As with all chippers, you need to wear ANSI rated safety glasses and a good set of leather gloves. Branches can really jolt and rattle around in the feed slot when the chipper is working on them and you don't want to get hurt from flying debris if any worked its way out. None flew out of mine, but this little chipper has some power. If you're holding on to a 1" stick that is dry it can really jump when you feed it in the chipper and a sharp end on the stick would really give a bad poke if you you were holding on to the wood didn't have good gloves on.

Add to that the fact that my topsoil is poor and has probably been eroding for years due to ...

After some researching and reading reviews, I purchased this shredder to solve my massive leaf problem. I have a wooded property of mainly oaks that drop a few tons of leaves. Bagging all of them for collection by the township would probably cost me the same as this leaf shredder, but at least with the shredder I don't have to shell out every season! Add to that the fact that my topsoil is poor and has probably been eroding for years due to its slope at the apex of a hill, it was much more sensible to purchase a shredder and leave the shredded leaves as mulch to help my garden and return some of the lost topsoil. I finally got around to setting it up today and I'm satisfied with the performance thus far. I also chose this shredder over others because the internal mechanism uses a real blade that I can sharpen when the need arises, over the models that use plastic. I shredded leaves for an hour or two and I have plenty more to do yet, but it only jammed up once, and due to a large amount of wet leaves. The drier the leaves are, the better the performance. I managed to accidentally put a plastic wrapper from a cigarette pack and an acorn through the hopper, and none of these posed a problem. The leaves in my area are notorious for being thick and leather and hard to break down, due to their evolutionary traits for fire resistance, so in some cases, I picked up the leaves I had just shredded and "re-shredded" them to get them down to a finer mulch. The machine shredded 80-90% of the leaves, while some spewed out in larger than expected chunks, but I expect that people in areas of the country where the trees are less fire-resistant will enjoy a better rate of shredding. For the money, I'm satisfied with this product and expect to be using it quite frequently.

Great chipper!

Chipper has done an excellent job for me. I had cut down several trees and done some serious trimming on several others so I decided to purchase a chipper so that I could start mulching such yard trimmings. With all I had already cut up and ready I ran this chipper for three 12 hour days with minimal stops, running it almost constantly and putting anything that would fit through the slot in it. It did bog down a couple of times on some bigger branches (those that barely fit in the slot) but thanks to the overload feature it was simply a matter of backing the branch up a bit and starting up again. I had to sharpen the blade a couple of times, no more than I'd expect from normal use and was happy to see it had a thick one piece two sided blade that seems to be very heavy duty. I will say that it seemed to chip better after my sharpening that it had with the factory edge. As with any such chipper, small twigs come out as they go in and while leaves may get torn up a bit the unit isn't really designed to shred them. I was very pleased with this purchase and would definitely recommend this unit.

Good first impression (and continues to perform well three years later)

I ordered this chipper shredder after studying the reviews, thinking it would serve my purposes reasonably well. After the first use, I am quite pleased. I have six trees in my back yard that litter my lawn with sticks and small branches every winter, and spring cleanup has always been quite a chore. Collecting the mid size branches (many of which are about one inch thick) that fall to the ground every year is one thing; packing them up for the trash pickup is the real chore. In the past that has meant cutting them up and packing them into lawn and leaf bags so the trash service will take them. Ugh... time consuming and generally a job that is no fun at all. I was hoping the chipper shredder would save the the trouble of cutting them up with my loping shears and pruning shears, and bagging them. This unit did quite a nice job for me; I was very pleased. Assembly: not too much to do here except assemble the wheel frame and wheels, which went smoothly and quickly. I am a bit concerned that the screws that attach the wheel frame to the unit did not snug up as I normally would expect them to; they behaved almost as if they were stripped. Since this happened with both screws, I wondered if this was intentional, part of the design, for some reason. We'll see if I have any problems with the wheel frame remaining secured to the unit. I did not experience any problem along these lines during today's first use--the wheel frame seemed to be secured in place as I wheeled it around the lawn. Usage: I collected branches and twigs, both medium and small, and put the unit through its paces. It performed well. All the branches laying out on the lawn were dry from sitting there over the winter. The branches that were reasonably straight went right through the shredder with no problem, and were reduced to very small chips; an excellent result, just what I was hoping for. The small twigs were reduced to smaller twigs--maybe three to four inches in length--which is entirely acceptable to me, for my purpose, which is to get all this lawn waste substantially reduced in size and comfortably into trash bags. The twigs that were irregular in shape would not flow through the chipper readily, as did the straight branches. This is where the paddle/pusher comes in handy. I found I could take a small handful of twigs, position them at the intake, and push them through with the paddle. Once I got some confidence with the paddle, this process of pushing the twigs through became quite easy and quick. You can indeed push the paddle with confidence, the design of the unit is such that the paddle, even when pushed to its maximum extent, will not contact the spinning cutter. Once I starting using the paddle with some reasonable effort, the irregular shaped twigs went through with ease. I found I used the paddle quite a bit during this first usage; it became an important part of the routine of using the machine for me. A few notes: the unit does nearly everything I need it to. I do wish it could handle branches of a bit larger diameter, but in all fairness, it does seem to handle the branches for which it is rated -- that is, up to 1 1/2 inches in diameter. The unit does the job for which it is designed. The paddle is a real plus: as an experiment, I trimmed a couple branches from one of my bushes--branches that were very irregular in shape. Getting on those with the paddle and pushing them through the intake with some reasonable effort, that did the trick, the machine shredded them right up. The unit is not any louder than any other lawn care equipment I own. Only once did it jam today, and the processes of freeing up the jam is quick and easy: unscrew a knob, push back the shield/cover, and it's easy to clear it. No problem at all. It ran just fine on my heavy duty extension cord, and the large wheels make it easy to cart around the yard to the various branch piles I had made. I wore my safety goggles, and I do recommend this, for sure: the machine is designed such that the chips do reliably feed down through the unit, but all the same, wear the goggles. Basic safety rules call for goggles when using a piece of equipment like this, so why not take this simple precaution? If the unit holds up and keeps performing like it did on this first use, I will change my rating to five stars. It had a five star performance today, but I need to see a few more of those five star performances before I give it a five star rating overall. I also want to see if the wheel frame holds up over time and stays securely attached to the unit. For the price, I'm quite happy with this piece of equipment after this first use. I think I would have to spend about three times the money to get something more substantial in terms of capacity, and for the most part, I just don't need more capacity than this unit will accommodate. I did have a few ends of branches that I judged to be greater than the diameter for which this is rated (1 1/2 inches). When I got to those thicker ends, I opted to just toss them into the trash instead of fussing with them and stressing the unit beyond its rated capacity. No big deal at all to toss a few 8 inch long, thicker end pieces into the trash can. And speaking of the trash can--I like the flexible collection bag supplied with this unit. It sits under the discharge chute and collects the chips and small twigs, and when it gets full (it has a good capacity, by the way), since it is flexible, it is easy to pick it up by the handles and empty it into a large trash container. Overall, without this shedder/chipper, I estimate I would have had 10 to 12 large lawn/leaf bags full of cut-up branches and twigs. Having shredded them, I had only two small bags of wood chips and very small twigs (the twigs that passed through the cutter were still reduced in size, to about 3-4 inches in length)...instead of 10-12 bags, I had two small bags, just as I had hoped. Again: 4 stars for a nice first outing with this machine, and if it repeats this performance a few more times during the season, I will up the review to five stars.

boy does it work good, churns them up without hardly trying

I bought this for shredding my dried corn stalks, boy does it work good, churns them up without hardly trying. I have two self-made compost tumblers that require quite a bit of dried material (carbon) to balance the mixture and keep them from becoming too wet. I mineralize the soil for my garden and want to recapture this back in the organic form from the stalks. Before I was having a hard time with the corn stalks just letting them lay in a pile for too long a period and they would deteriorate badly. Now it looks like dried tree limbs and the leaves can be used also, another source of minerals and carbon. It is relatively quiet, no ear muffs. Putting it together was a breeze. I didn't get a manual but still managed. The roller assembly is all there is. The only weakness could be the blade, does not appear to hardened steel, I might be mistaken. I plan on flipping it periodically and taking a file to it, might even take it to a "knife sharpener" at the local farmers market. Might be a good idea to get a second blade here as a backup. It "blows" out the bottom into a 5 gal. bucket to keep things tidy. A productive tool for the avid Gardner. Definitely recommend.

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