Eliet Minor shredder – 1 year on report

Around a year ago I published a couple of reviews on the Eliet Minor garden shredder. I thought that it would be useful to post my experiences with the shredder over the last year or so.

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A year ago I bought an Eliet Minor garden shredder and concluded that I was happy with its performance – go here to read my previous reviews.

Am I still happy with it?
After a full year of use I am still very happy with the shredder and do not regret buying it at all. It gets through a prodigious amount of material in an hour or two so I have not had to use it too often, which was one of the reasons I bought it in the first place.

Does it produce good compost?
Yes – the shreddings compost down quickly and while some long’ish (about 6”) woody bits do find their way through the multi-purpose screen these are either easy to pick out and feed back through the standard screen or can be left in – they are quite heavily abraded as they pass through the blades and I have found that they tend to rot down more quickly than if they were simply cut to the same length and put on the compost heap.

I have, however, learnt a few things about the Minor in the last year:

Using the screens
I have found it necessary to swap between screens quite regularly as the standard screen does not like much in the way of wet and mushy material going through it – it quickly clogs up. It is not entirely obvious, but the multi purpose screen only fits in one way round and the as supplied standard screen fits more easily one way round than the other. To help swap them over quickly I have found it helpful to mark the top of the screens so that I put them in the right way round – as in the photo below.


Both screens are robust, being made from solid steel and tight fitting. I have thus found it helpful to have a small lump hammer and a crow bar to hand to speed up the removal and fitting process with gentle taps and tugs here and there to facilitate the changeover.

I have mislaid the screen securing pins a couple of times when changing over screens – on the last occasion I found one in the compost heap…

Really, really mushy material
On a couple of occasions I have wanted to shred the wet and mushy contents at the bottom of the pile. These even blocked up the multi purpose screen, so I simply take out the screen and push it through the blades without any screen in place. Since the area is protected by the micro-switched grill I can not see that this is dangerous. In any case I have only had to put a very small amount of material through this way.

Safety switches
I can confirm that the micro-switches on the grid protecting the outlet and the lever near the inlet both work. On occasion I have accidentally knocked the lever near the inlet and it immediately cuts off the engine. A couple of times the engine has been reluctant to start because one of the micro-switch’s contacts are not made properly. Just popping them back into place by re-closing the lever or grid sorts out the problem.

Is there anything not to put into the shredder?
Apart from the obvious things like stones the only plant material that I have found to avoid are Phormiums’ tough, sword-shaped leaves. These long fibrous leaves have properties a bit like flax (hence their colloquial name of New Zealand flax) and you could probably make rope from them. In any case in large quantities (we have several in the garden and they produce armfuls of prunings at this time of year) they tend to act like rope around a propeller, so I either feed them in very sparingly with a large amount of really woody material or use my old Scheppach Lonos 2 to crush them up enough for the compost heap.

Otherwise it takes everything in its stride.

Be a bit careful about what you shred…
With the low material flow rates through my older shredders I never found any fumes coming off shredded material to be a problem. With the Minor, however, with its large flow rates combined with its truly shredding action I found that shredding a large old Ivy plant caused some fumes to avoid. The shredder cuts finely and exposes a large surface area of material for composting, but this can also release a lot of fume if the material is prone to produce it – the Ivy clearly did. A bit of research indicated that shredding fresh Laurel leaves can also produce an unpleasant fume, so I now let Laurel cuttings go brown before shredding them.

Health and safety
Through long years of working in engineering environments I automatically wear safety glasses when using anything like this. I also wear ear defenders, along with a dust mask when shredding dry material. I double glove (eg a pair of thin nitrile coated inner gloves and a large pair of heavy duty outers) as I find that to keep up with the machine’s appetite for material it is impractical to check what you are picking up too closely and we have a lot of seriously thorny material in our garden. This solution keeps pretty much everything out.

Starting the engine
My Minor is fitted with the Briggs & Stratton engine option. This is started with a pull cord and as with all my petrol engined garden machinery it can be a bit reluctant to start after a long lay off. I don’t find this machine to be any better or worse than others in its ease of starting. When hot it restarts easily with a single pull of the cord.

Also…
Remember that this is a petrol driven engine and that it produces exhaust fumes. Standing by it while it is running for a long time can be a bit unpleasant, so I take regular breaks and work in a well ventilated (draughty even) area.

Conclusion
I am very happy with my choice and anticipate many years of service from it. Read more...

Eliet Minor shredder review follow up

Two months ago I posted a review of the Eliet Minor garden shredder. Two months later I have had a chance to review the composting results from the resulting shreddings and to test the courage of my convictions following the test results to decide on whether I would buy one or not.

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Composting results
When I trialed the Eliet Minor two months ago I had basically two types of material to deal with. The first was general woody garden prunings and trimmings etc; the second was the contents of a rough mixed open composting bin that had a mix of semi-rotted down woody and soft material gathered over about a year.

Two thirds of the first lot of shreddings was mixed into a 1m³ wooden composting bin along with what was already there and the general composting material over the next couple of months, including the first lots of lawn mowings. The rest was put into a bin with the product from the second type of shreddings. In the two months that have passed since the shred-fest this material has essentially rotted down into usable compost. It has been turned into a 0.5m³ (500 litre) bin where it is maturing and being used as needed. The Head Gardener is very happy with it.

My experience (about a decade of competent composting) tells me that this is pretty quick for the time of year. Since we have had a cold couple of months and I have not done anything exceptional to make this material rot down quickly I am impressed and can only conclude that the claim from Eliet that its “Hatchet Principle™”, which cuts the woody stems lengthwise, does indeed work and produces material that composts quickly.

The Minor dealt with the second lot of material with the optional general purpose screen. At the time I picked out the largest unshredded bits (the screen is pretty course) and re-shredded them. The rest filled a second 0.5m³ bin along with the remainder of the first type of shreddings, where it was watered occasionally and turned once in the two months it was in it. After about two months it was pretty much completely rotted down and it was then spread onto the borders as a mulch. The Head Gardener was pretty happy with the quality of it.

So my conclusion from observing the composted shreddings for the Eliet is that it produces shreddings that rot down quickly and easily.

So did I buy one?
Recently I realized that we had built up a mound of woody material needing shredding as big as the one at the end of February. So presented with the choice I had to decide whether to spend days (literally) with my old Scheppach Lonos, hire or buy.

It was really a very easy decision– I bought the Eliet Minor, along with the optional general purpose screen.

I looked around for the best price and delivery option and decided to buy it from the on-line UK retailer Gardenlines (who often appear in Google AdSense listings). They were helpful and courteous on the phone, both before and after the purchase, and it arrived exactly when they said it would.

I have just spent most of a day shredding the mountain of mixed woody and mushy material, producing about a cubic metre of shreddings which is now in my compost bins steaming as I write. The time consuming bit was not the shredding itself, but getting the material to the shredder and carting the shreddings away from it. The actual shredding was as easy as I remembered it.

So I am happy and I expect this lot to rot down in record time.

In case you think that I have any commercial relationship with either Eliet or Gardenlines, then I can categorically say that I have never had any dealings with Eliet and my only dealings with Gardenlines were for this one transaction. I am just a happy customer. Read more...

Eliet Minor garden shredder review

This is the final of the four reviews in this series on my experience with garden shredders and is a review of the semi-professional petrol driven Eliet Minor shredder.

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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. 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…

Postscript
Two months later I have had a chance to review the results from this trial and decide on whether I should buy one or not. I have written them up here...
Read more...