Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This review is for the 51621 Ultra Plus model. I spent several hours researching leaf blower/ mulchers and was reasonably certain this top of the line model would do the job. It took less than 5 minutes of hands-on experience to discover that it is a complete waste of time. I live in a suburban neighborhood with four large maple trees in my yard. Leaf waste must be bagged and set by the curb for pickup. In the past I have raked leaves by hand and run them over with my lawn mower to reduce the volume. I thought this gizmo from Toro would be a better way of mulching. Boy, was I wrong. Going through one small pile of leaves took maybe 10x longer than I could have done with the mower. The Toro clogged constantly. Any small stick or a single piece of bark mulch made it clog up. A complete waste of time. The only way I see this working is if you were to go through by hand and remove any small stick >1" long. See photo for practical experience. This was after less than 30 seconds of mulching a pile of leaves I had already removed the visible sticks from. If you have leaves then you definitely have sticks and the mulcher will clog. It works fine for blowing leaves but that's not what I bought it for. It is advertised as a mulcher also and for that purpose it is absolutely terrible and ineffective. I even spent the extra thirty bucks for the fancy model with the shredding ring. No idea what that's supposed to do, but it is very good at catching sticks and clogging the unit. If you want a blower get one of the cheaper models. If you want a mulcher, this is not it and I doubt any other similar unit will do the job either. It's just not an effective design (i.e. hand held, electric powered) for taking care of leaves in any quantity.