Strong and secure budget shredder for small spaces
Written: Aug 25 '03 (Updated Sep 22 '03)
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Pros: Small, powerful, small shreddings' size
Cons: Narrow opening. Optical auto-on sensor would be better than a mechanical switch
The Bottom Line: If small shreddings size (secure!) is important, shredding just a few pages a day, and don't mind folding first - get it! But check for defects!
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| kocho's Full Review: Fellowes Powershred® Shredmate Shredder |
UPDATE: 9/18/03: It Broke :( I fed 4 sheets to it, they went slightly sideways and this time it jammed. Hit "reverse" and then the gears started slipping and this was it. I opened it up to see the damage and found out that the motor has a metal gear turning a plastic one. The metal teeth eate away a couple of the plastic gear's teeth, thus damaging it completely. I retuned the unit to Walmart, and ended-up buying it's bigger cousin the 5-sheet Fellowes I had originally, but at half-price (on sale for $19 at Microcenter). And I'm not going to feed this one with more than 3 sheets at a time :)
The other reviewers did a good job describing this unit so I won't repeat this info.
I got the Shredmate about a week ago at Wal-Mart so my observations are based on about 40 pages of shredding so far.
The reasons I chose it over the other units:
- small size of the shredder
- small size of the shreddings that it produces - roughly half of what most other shredders cut to
- high power rating (3.0 Amps, compared to less than 2 Amps for most other units under $40)
First of all – all shredders I saw are made in China – poor assembly and reliability is to be expected for the cheaper models.
I bought my first Shredmate and it turned out that it would not work all the time due to poor assembly - the unit was not able to fit flat on top of the collection bin, thus causing the safety switch to turn it on and off sporadically. I had to hold it in place with one hand to make it work. One of the screws did not hold the bottom part of the shredder motor housing tightly in place causing it to warp enough to prevent good fitment on the collection bin.
Nevertheless, I liked the shredder and went to pick a replacement. This time I went through the trouble to open the box at the store to check for proper fitment and assembly. The next one I opened was poorly assembled too - the two parts of the motor housing were not tightly screwed together, thus having some movement/play relative to each other. I thought this was not good and opened another box. This time (on my third unit) everything seemed fine and I got it. It turned out that this unit worked fine indeed so I kept it.
A few more observations:
- I’ll repeat, because this is important - the shreddings size is among the smallest available (less than an inch long compared to almost 2” for most other shredders)
- 3Amperes current rating means this has enough power for what it is designed to do (out of the 5-6 that I considered in the sub $50 price range – most have 1.5 to 2 amps rating, one had 3.0 as well and one 10-page shredder had 3.6 Amps rating but it was twice the size and weight)
- The speed of this shredder is good for light tasks. Basically, I barely have time to pick the next few sheets and the previous have already been shredded. Even if I have folded them all before hand. It is as fast (if not faster than its larger cousins from Fellowes, the xxx701xxx model that cross-shreds up to 7 pages at a time) This is good enough for me.
- It is not very quiet, but certainly not very noisy either. It is comparable to the other sub-$40 models I tried (bout 4-5 of them in the stores). Only some of the large models for 15-20 pages at a time were quieter.
- The shredder can shred anything from thin news paper or credit card receipts to thin cardboard packaging. It is supposed to be able to do staples, but I have not tried this – couldn’t be very good for the blades. It is not designed for credit cards shredding, but I suspect it will handle them if you are willing to take the risk of a possible premature failure.
- The shredder has an auto-on feature, meaning it won't run until a paper is inserted. There is a mechanical switch that activates it when the paper presses it inside the opening. This means that a single credit card receipt or another thin piece of paper may have problems activating the switch. Just combine thin receipts with another thicker piece of paper and this issue is solved. A single sheet of regular printer paper usually is sufficient to activate the shredder
- The opening has an internal edge that sometimes gets in the way of the paper - just insert the paper at a slight angle (tilted a bit to the back, instead of vertically) to avoid this
- Due to the fact that you need to fold larger pieces of paper in two to fit through the narrow opening, you will need more time to finish the same job, compared to larger shredders with a "full-size" opening.
- The bin has enough capacity to shred the sensitive part of my weekly junk mail. But if you need to do more than a few CC offers and bank statements at a time, consider a larger model if you do not feel like stopping to empty the bin mid-way.
- The opening is just wide enough to take a sheet of Letter-sized paper folded in half along the long edge. This means that you need to position the paper fairly well, and that you need to fold it fairly precisely in the middle, or it won’t fit or if it tilts sideways, it may jam the unit. A 1/4 wider opening would have been better to let you feed the pages less carefully. On the other hand, the unit is powerful, so for up to 3-4 folded pages it has no issues even if they get in not perfectly straight. The shredder manages with some additional effort (the edge of sheets that were not fed vertically gets folded from going down and being pressed to the
side)
Recommended:
Yes
Purchase Price (if leased, monthly payment): 18.95
Machine age (Months in use): Less than one month
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Epinions.com ID:
kocho
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Member: Kocho Chestimenski
Location: Maryland, USA
Reviews written: 15
Trusted by: 3 members
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