Testimonials shredders

Did what was advertised. Very satisfied with end result. Read more Perfect mulch. Easy to use and easy to move around. All good!

I bought an Ellet Major used from Home Depot. They used it as a rental unit but it was in very good condition. Read more Before I bought it, Home Depot installed a new set of blades. I used it initially to chip up debris from shaping seven large oak trees. The project went on for more than a month. I would like to point out some features that are unique in the residential chipper/shredder market. First and most important is the very large input feed. This allows you to feed branches that are crooked and that have small branches still attached. Most other brands of machines have a long small diameter feed in tubes that is good only for clean, straight branches causing you to spend much more time cleaning up the branches before you can shred them. Second, the Major has large pneumatic wheels that allows the machine to be easily moved over uneven ground. Third, the Major comes with the great Honda Motor which runs quietly and starts easily every time. Forth, the output chips are small and perfect for use as mulch. The only down side to this machine is the blade system that provide all these great features requires a significant amount of maintenance. There are 20 blades mounted to a heavy rotor. Each blade has two bolts for a total of 40 bolts. Instruction tell you to check the torque of these 40 bolts after the first 5 hours and before each use. Some of the bolts have very small clearances which force use of small box wrenches and low profile socket wrenches. I own two torque wrenches and neither is small enough to fit any of the bolts or nuts. Another nice feature of these blades is that there are two cutting edges so that each blade can be rotated to use the other edge giving twice the service life to each blade. The process of rotating these blades to use the second cutting edge is complex. All blade must be removed and reinstalled in a different location on the rotor. All in all, this is a very good machine and I am very pleased with its performance. I rated the "Reliability" as a "3" not because of any failure that I have experienced but because of the need for blade bolt tightening. I had to change blades recently and received great support from Ellet USA getting the parts that I needed. I was unable to find local dealers that could sell me parts but Ellet supply every thing that I needed by an email of Phone order. They also supplied instructions and exploded parts views to help me in the process of changing blades.

I’m writing to comment on a Superprof shredder that I recently rented. I had 2 huge piles of tree debris that I had no idea how I was going to get rid of, other than burning. Read more Living in the woods, that was not the best option. I rented a Superprof shredder and it worked like a charm! It was super easy to operate, best of all easy to get out in to the woods to access the piles. Both piles were gone within about 3 hours. There were some big branches….many I’d say 25 feet long and at max 4-5 inches thick. The shredder chopped them up NO ISSUE. I was also able to use the mulch for beds around the house! I’d highly recommend renting this machine to anyone! Sincerely, Scott Drabert Scott Drabert Sr Account Executive - Lucky Brand Jewelry (USA)

I have only used the machine once and believe its robustness make it well suited to the rather large task ahead. Thank you Muriel for your quick reply to my query on replacement blades for an Eliet major shredder. Read more (Australia)

Ive had a major 4S for 2 years now and its a very handy well built machine. I use it a lot for awkward access tree pruning and hedge cutting jobs saves time, money and effort and produces great quality chips. Read more

The Eliet Super Prof is one of the best buys I ever made. I used to have to drag pruning waste around, take it with me and store it. Read more But with the Super Prof, I can get to pruning waste in almost all gardens, even the smallest, and shred it on the spot. It saves me time and reduces the amount of heavy lifting. Customers are happy too, not only because my work gets done more quickly, but because they usually like to scatter the chips between their plants. Even if we do have to take the chips away with us, they take up less space than unshredded pruning waste. The Super Prof is really convenient, and it can handle large diameters and different types of pruning waste. It rarely lets me down, and it’s a brilliant asset during the pruning season.

Over the last couple of years our garden has produced more material than I have had the time to shred. I have been routinely having to spend most of a week-end shredding to keep up and getting grumpier about it by the month, but I was unwilling to throw away the organic material and our garden needed all the compost we could make, and more besides. Read more We set up a rough bin (1.5m3) to hold unshredded material, but after six months that too was full. We needed an alternative solution, short of covering the garden in bins. The photo below shows what I needed to deal with – the bin is about 1m high, and experience told me that it would take several days to shred most of it with the Lonos (assuming the patience of Job to actually stand there and do it), leaving much of the contents of the rough bin to rot down in its own time. Just after Christmas I was watching a commercial shredder dealing with all comers’ Christmas trees – it was taking about 10 seconds a time, whereas I had just spent half an hour dealing with ours. I thought that there must be a mid-ground between my Lonos and the commercial one. Initially I looked at renting one, but found the range available very small and limited, and the organisation and reliance on long range weather forecasts needed to plan to hire for a weekend (at between £150-£200 a time) too much. Also the ones for rent seemed most suited to tree chipping rather than the dealing with the range of stuff that I needed to deal with in our garden – from soft and mushy prunings to woody branches. No one could tell me whether theirs could manage the soft stuff I needed to shred. I investigated further to see what it would cost to buy what I wanted, or to find out whether it even existed. First I looked for reviews etc… and found next to nothing. All I found was a Daily Telegraph review from 1999 of a Globe Garden Master, which at least said the extra money was worth it, but none for other similar types of machine. I found nothing useful on the web. Looking around dealers I did not come up with many options, but one was all I needed. The most prevalent options seemed to be from a Belgium company I had not heard of before; Eliet (some dealers pronounced it “Elliot” and some “Elite”) along with Viking. The smallest petrol driven Eliet, the Primo, has just received a good review in the Daily Telegraph (January 2008). There were others available on-line, such as Woodsman, Ardisam, Lawnflite, Masport and Echo Bear Cat, but no dealers seemed to stock them and I could not find any reviews. Nor were any of them available for test or hire. Globe Organic Services offered their Garden Master range along with a 10 minute DVD. Their design, however, looked archaic and they were only available from Globe direct. They did, however, explicitly say that it would cope with anything I was likely to put through it, came with a lifetime warranty and would do on-site demonstrations. They were, however, very big and heavy, and out of my price range to buy, with none for hire. I realised that anything like this was going to be petrol driven so my quietness criteria for previous shredders was going to have to be dropped. Since I planned to use this machine well away from neighbours and for limited periods of time (or why else get a higher capacity machine at all?) I reasoned that the noise level could be managed and treated the same as using a petrol driven lawnmower – with consideration. My rental/purchase criteria became: •Able to shred soft as well as hard material •Large input throat •High throughput per hour – at least 5x the Lonos 2 •>40mm diameter shredding capacity •Possible for me alone to move around the garden I was not particularly interested in a massive solid wood shredding capacity as I cut anything much over an inch in diameter to use as firewood. I failed to find anything suitable to rent, but as luck would have it I managed to borrow a nearly new Eliet Minor (follow this link for details) equipped with a 6.5hp Briggs & Stratton Intek petrol 4 stroke engine (see photo above) – this uses unleaded petrol and being a 4 stroke it does not need any oil added to the fuel. The cheapest advertised price I have seen for one is £1,179 inc VAT & delivery (Feb 2008) + £68 for the multi purpose screen. The Minor is part of a shredder/chipper range that is mostly focussed on the professional market, with the Minor slotting above the Chrono (a small electric shredder), Primo and Maestro, with four larger machines above it. It shows its professional heritage as there is no plastic to be seen on it apart from the odd knob and cover on the engine, and it is generally solidly engineered. This review is my experience of using the Minor over about two weeks to shred woody cuttings, soft and hard prunings and most tricky of all the contents of our rough compost bin – which I discovered had started to compost down, but had a long way to go, and was wet, very fibrous and mostly chopped to about 30cm lengths. My estimate was that it would take several days and lots of blue language to get through it all with the Lonos 2 – which was never going to happen. Eliet use a unique shredding design – their “Hatchet Principle™”. This means that all the material goes into a single wide mouthed inlet and is fed through a fearsome set of rapidly rotating angled blades – in the Minor’s case 12 blades rotating at 2,000rpm – and out through a screen onto the ground (see diagram below). Eliet claim that their machines can handle pretty much any type of organic material within the machine’s capacity – needing an optional multi-purpose screen if you are going to shred much “mushy” material. So although the max diameter of the Minor is 45mm the inlet is 220 x 300mm so that it is easy to feed bunches of prunings into it all at once as well as crooked and knotty material – so the pre-shredding preparation is absolutely minimal. The throughput was quoted as 16 wheelbarrows per hour, or about 1.6m3 per hour. What was it like to use? The picture below shows the first lot of shredding I did. It was all the material in the picture at the top of the blog except that actually in the bin. It took 30 mins and I measured it out at 10x 40l tubs worth, which makes it about 7x quicker than the Lonos 2. In reality, though, it was quicker than that. It would have taken much longer with the Lonos as I would have had to prepare nearly all of this material much more carefully - taking much longer and making it much more tedious. The time test I ran with the Lonos (1 tub in 20 mins) was using ideal material for it – this batch was far from that. I found that the actual throughput with this machine was governed by the rate at which I could get material to it rather than the rate at which it could shred it – hence the discrepancy between the rated throughput of 1.6m3 per hour against my measured rate of half that at 0.8m3 per hour. This was exactly the state that I was trying to achieve. It made light work of whole lavender bushes, including roots, Buddleia prunings, Phormium leaves (which nearly all shredders hate), climbing rose branches, dry ornamental grass stems, holly – mostly woody material with some soft things like bulbs and dahlia tubers mixed in. I tried all sorts of things, including a rotting mango with its large seed and it essentially disappeared – I could find no trace of it in the pile of shreddings; normally with the Lonos the seed chunks are quite identifiable in the compost months later. Next I tried putting through the much wetter material from the bin. This did rapidly block up the 20mm exit holes of the standard screen, forming a thick paste on the inside of the screen. While this was quick and easy to clear (just lift the outlet guard, pull out a pin and the screen drops for cleaning) it would have been quite tedious to keep having to do it and I did not have enough woody material to make it unnecessary by mixing the two types. Luckily the machine came with the optional screen designed for these circumstances… You can see it sitting on the top of the machine in the picture at the top of the posting. Changing the screens over the first time, however, was not a quick process. I was initially convinced that it was the wrong one as it took some persuading to get into place. Once in place I explored the boundaries of use of the shredder and I did manage to block it up by feeding too much of some really wet and mucky, fibrous material into the shredder– not really the sort of thing I would normally try. I found that with a judicious mix of really wet (from the middle of the rough compost bin) and quite dry (from the edges of the bin) material I could just put it in the hopper and prod it down the chute with a pushing stick. The photo below shows the output – it is pretty course, but much better than I would get any other way. I also put through armfuls of Periwinkle with their (small) root balls, which it chewed up quite happily. All-in-all a pretty good performance, but I would not want to be swapping between screens too often, although I am sure it would become easier with familiarity. The photos below compare the shreddings from the Minor, with the 20mm standard screen in place, and the Lonos 2 – as you can see the Minor ones are generally finer, but with more coarse woody material in it. The bigger chunks from the Minor are mostly cut along the stem, thus maximising the area exposed to biological breakdown mechanisms. I did, however, feel the need to pull out the larger bits for re-shredding as I went along. The Lonos produces evenly sized chunks, pretty much whatever the input. I’m not sure which is best for compost construction, but I think that the Minor shreddings should compost down more quickly than the courser Lonos material. Both of these photos compare the output from the Scheppach Lonos 2 (left hand photos) and the Eliet Minor (right hand photos) shredders The Minor’s output with the multi-purpose screen in place is much coarser and any woody material in it ends up much less reduced. I expect to remove plenty of woody bits from the resulting compost – but the material I put in was abnormally woody for a “mushy” mix, so this is only to be expected. I would never have tried shredding this material with the Lonos as life is simply too short! All-in-all I was very happy with the results and the time savings. Ergonomically the shredder was as easy to start with the pull cord as a mower and the feed height was comfortable (I’m 5” 8’ tall) at 830mm above the ground - the company literature says it is 750mm, but I measured it and with the input hopper cowl in place it rises to 830mm. The Minor weighs 65kg, but it is well balanced and runs on a pair of pneumatic tyres. I found it easy to move around on the flat, on both hard and gravelled surfaces. I managed it OK up and down a short set of steps, but a slope would be much better. This was not easy, but doable (I am not particularly strong; just a reasonably fit and active 49 year old), although at the end of a long day in the garden it was hard work. The Minor is rated at 110db (on a sticker on the side of the machine), but in terms of real world noise levels it sounds like a big’ish petrol driven lawnmower – noisy, but not uncomfortably so. It gets nosier when actually shredding, but not uncomfortably. I was quite happy using it with care for the neighbours’ sensibilities. I am not sure what the fuel consumption was, but it was in the order of a 0.75 litres per hour over the few hours I used it. What else did I learn? •Well you can’t just stuff in as much material as possible as the inlet throat capacity is much bigger than the machine’s capacity – you just have to listen to the engine note and slow down the feed if it drops; it takes no time to become second nature. •If you want to clear up easily afterwards I suggest you use a tarpaulin or two. •With dry material the shredder produces quite lot of dust and I would recommend using a dust mask. •The safety cut outs work – in fact when I first tried to start the engine it would not go. A bit of a search found that the top safety handle’s micro-switch was not quite engaging, stopping the engine from starting. Easily solved. •Shredding can be fun again… Conclusion Would I buy one? In a word – yes. I was very impressed with the Minor’s whole performance, although I would buy the multi-purpose screen as well. It was quick and would give me back my weekends from shredding, and I have no doubt the shreddings will produce great compost. This is clearly a machine for someone who has quite a large garden to service and wants an efficient way to reduce large quantities of organic waste to compost. If, however, you want to munch through 3"/75mm branches then this is not the machine for you - anything below 45mm it will quite happily deal with. While I am well aware that this is the performance of a nearly new machine and my experience with shredders says it will degrade but, unlike the other shredders I have bought, this machine is designed to be maintained. The blades are both re-sharpenable and reversible so it should be relatively easy to bring the machine’s performance back to as new. New blades are available and don’t seem to cost a fortune. Like all petrol driven machinery the engine will need servicing, but I have never found this a problem with lawnmowers. I did look at the engine and the spark plug looks like a bit of a challenge to reach, but I did not try it as it was not mine… Churchill Photographer (USA) view the entire report on http://churchillphotographer.blogspot.com/2008/03/eliet-minor-garden-shredder-review.html

So far it has been performing well. There are some things that it does better than others and we have been educating customers accordingly. Read more 95% of customers absolutely love it and can't say enough nice things about it.

Hello, I have a Eliet Minor for 5/6 years and I lose the owner manual. Could you send me the owner manual by email o tell me where can I find one?. Read more Thank you and congratulations for your great products.

We are a small lawn care business, 2 Clowns Mowing. We found that grass was usually wet until 10 or 11 a. Read morem. and we were looking for a way to keep the crew working on those slow morning hours when it was too wet to mow. We purchased a small shredder, found it took us a while to break down the limbs to feed through this machine. We upgraded to a bigger shredder, but still had a problem with the size of the limbs. We looked into Vermeer chippers, but we needed a machine we could drive into back yards and mulch up limb piles. Our town is rich in trees, so there is a lot of trimming work here, resulting in lots of limb piles. We were at the Kentucky Lawn Expo and were introduced to Eliet. It was just what we were looking for. We bought the SuperProf wheel drive unit thinking it would be better at not leaving tracks in our customers' yards. We added a conveyor so we could load wheelbarrows or dump into our dump truck. The Eliet shredder has been a god-send. It is a great machine with almost no problems with breakdowns, only some adjustments and teeth sharpening or replacement. With over 300 hours on the Super Prof we have only had to replace teeth once. Jean-Alain has been available and easy to contact with questions. He always has the answers and can tell us what to do to adjust for minor problems. He has also traveled to us to help in person. We will surely purchase another one when this one dies; the way it looks, that should be never.

Dear Jean Alain, Many thanks for the follow up! the shredder has been for want of a better word awesome, arrived in good time in one piece and was very easy to get up and running, I can not thank you enough for your friendly and expert customer service in this purchase. Regards Paul C. Read more Global PTF Technical Director Electronic Materials Group Spraylat Mount Vernon NY 10550

I had the opportunity to try a simple Eliet Neo shredder. I was really surprised to see how easily it shreds all kinds of branches. Read more You can be proud of such a product, knowing that this was only the entry-level model. For a smoother operation and a larger feed hopper, I would, however, consider using a Neo 2 or 3. If I could make one tiny suggestion, it would be to replace the collection unit by a unit with a metal and nylon frame, which you also find on mowers (which is likely to be more durable over time.) And I would also replace the window by a window with metal frame. Thank you so much for your professionalism!

I had the opportunity to try a simple Eliet Neo shredder. I was really surprised to see how easily it shreds all kinds of branches. Read more You can be proud of such a product, knowing that this was only the entry-level model. For a smoother operation and a larger feed hopper, I would, however, consider using a Neo 2 or 3. If I could make one tiny suggestion, it would be to replace the collection unit by a unit with a metal and nylon frame, which you also find on mowers (which is likely to be more durable over time.) And I would also replace the window by a window with metal frame. Thank you so much for your professionalism!