Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The product does a fine job of mulching leaves and even very small twigs. Anything big enough to be called a stick will greatly reduce the life of the trimmer string, so be very careful about what goes in. To its credit, it is easy to change the trimmer string, but you can go through them quickly if you're not careful, and they are 0.90 diameter, which I have found is relatively hard to find , 0.8 and 0.95 being much more common. If you stand in the obvious place to feed leaves into it, you'll quickly clog the very small air intake from dropped leaves and bits of flying mulch, so it pays t stand off to the side half way between the air intake and exhaust, but you still have to pay attention to whether it has become blocked. The noise level is not too bad, but you are only a few inches away and you'll be there for probably an hour or more if you have any significant amount of leaves. If you don't use earplugs or some other hearing protection, you will definitely regret it someday fairly soon, and in any case your ears will fill with leaf dust right away, so be smart and use something to plug and/or cover your ears. I use a couple of those large plastic leaf scoops on my hands to pick up fairly large gobs of leaves for feeding the mulcher. It works very well and you can process a lot of leaves fairly quickly, but a really big pile still takes 20 - 30 minutes to mulch. However, it is MUCH faster to mulch them than it is to try to pack them tightly into trash bags or barrels, and far, far less effort. The worst part is the hundreds and hundreds of times you have to bend over to grab the leaves. It helps to rake them often into as high a pile as possible. A foot makes a big difference when you're bending over. If the leaves are dry, there will be a LOT of leaf dust in the air, and you REALLY need to wear a filter mask and goggles. If the leaves are a bit damp, it still mulches them without a problem and keeps the dust down pretty well. There does not appear to be any way to clean or replace anything like an air filter, unlike other similar machines The motor is strong and does not slow much when mulching even a large wad of dry or damp leaves, so you can feed it fairly quickly - about as fast as you can check the leaves for sticks. The supporting legs are well made and easy to assemble, but are quite short and it seems to me that they would hold only a small lawn bag, which would fill very quickly. I was unable to stuff a collapsible fabric lawn bag (approx 30 gal.) inside the legs at at all and it's way too short for all but the smallest trash can. In my town, we cannot use lawn bags for our leaves, so I have a number of larger rectangular trash barrels like the BlueHawk 32-Gallon Black Plastic Wheeled Trash Can from Lowes and the Blue Hawk 45-Gallon Black Plastic Wheeled Trash Can from Lowes for the leaves and mulch. Filling trash bags with mulch only to lift and empty them into the cans was not an appealing proposition. I was able to make a jig to go on top of the trash cans which holds the mulcher securely and lets me mulch directly into the trash cans. I used a 2'x2' piece of plywood with a large circle cut from it (using the mulcher's legs to get the size of the circle right) and a couple more smaller venting holes , with a few small pieces of wood screwed into it to keep it from sliding around on the top of the cans. I have found that by stopping the mulcher every 25-30 scoops and tamping the mulch down just a bit with a length of 2x2 just to get the air out and de-fluff the mulch, I can get easily twice as much mulch into a barrel. It also gives me a chance to clear the air intake and breath some cleaner air for 30 seconds or so. I can tamp through the vent holes to a useful degree, but it works better to lift the mulcher out of its hole and slide it off to the side a few inches to get better access for tamping down the whole barrel. The 11:1 mulch ratio is either a marketing dream, or refers to crispy dry leaves which have never been stepped on, raked, piled, or stuffed into a bag or barrel. Unless you have an unlimited number of barrels or bags to hold your leaves, without a mulcher you naturally stuff, stomp, and crush your raked leaves as you fill barrels or bags with your raked leaves. There's no way that you'll mulch 11 of those bags into 1 bag of mulch, but you might get 5:1 on a good day. I have kept careful track (partly because I want to stop at a regular interval for tamping) and the amount of leaves that can be packed (not dropped) unmulched into the smaller 32 gallon can equals 25 decent scoops of leaves (that is, it takes 25 scoops to empty a packed can into the mulcher). Four of those packed cans , or 100 scoops from a pile can be mulched into the same 32 gallon can, so that is a 4:1 ratio of packed leaves to mulched leaves. It may not sound like it, but that is a LOT of leaves. Quite a large pile will fit into a single barrel. Surprisingly, with some extra tamping, I can get 200 scoops ( or 2 32 gallon barrels) mulched into the larger 45 gallon barrel, which makes no sense if the sizes are at all accurate, but I've done it many times. At the end of the season, it does quickly snap apart and re-nest into a very small space so I like that I don't have yet another huge machine to store. So, it's dustier than I would like it to be, noisier than I would like it to be, and I had to make my own jig in order to reasonably process the mountains of leaves that I deal with in a season, but it does work well and I don't see how it could be done much better. I am well satisfied.