Pulling weeds and chipping small branches. I bought a small electric chipper. It works well for what it is. It even works on big weeds like pigweed and button weed. Compost material.
About 4 years ago, I bought the SunJoe electric chipper...
My idea was to chips lots of small branches and stuff to make faster compost. I have mixed feelings about that purchase. Although I was really excited at first with this machine, that enthusiasm faded away in a relatively short period of time. Consider this a long term review, mostly negative, and a warning about how much you can expect out of this and other small electric chippers like it.
Bottom line, I would not recommend these machines.
If you want, here is the longer review...
First of all, you can only chip up small branches about 1 inch round, or less. When the blades are new and sharp, they work great. However, after an hour or so of chipping wood, the blades dull and will not pull through the small branches anymore. That means I have to feed and force the branches through the chipper. More work, more time.
You cannot toss much grass like organics into this chipper. It will gum it up and stop working in no time. It really is a wood chipper for small branches, not pulled weeds from the garden. Don't think you will be able to cut up all kinds of compost material. It just does not work for that.
After my blades went dull, and they had been flipped over for the other side, it was getting really tough to feed through the small branches. I tried to order some new blades but they were out of stock for over 6 months - and this was prior to COVID-19 and supply shortages. I never understood how they could sell new chippers when they had no inventory of reusable blades.
I attempted to get the blades sharpened by a service through our local Acme store. I was quoted a price of $2.00 per blade, which was OK to me. When the blades came back from the service, they wanted to charge me something like $15.00 per blade! I refused to pay, of course. I demanded to talk to the manager, showed him that I had agreed to pay $2.00 per blade, that a new blade cost $10.00 to order, but that the sharpening service was now trying to charge me $15.00 per blade.
Long story short, the manager agreed with me that it doesn't make any sense to pay more for a sharpening service then ordering brand new blades, so he gave me the sharpened blades back free, no charge. Although I was thankful for getting my blades sharpened and returned for free, I was really looking for a long-term solution and was hoping their service would fill that ticket. It did not.
Maybe someone knows how to sharpen these small chipper blades at home, but I spent hours on YouTube looking for some help and found nothing. There are many videos on sharpening wood chipper blades for the big machines, but not on these small electric chipper blades.
I do attempt to sharpen my chipper blades at home, but my skills are not that great. Although they are better after I sharpen them, they don't stay nearly sharp as long as a new blade. So, I don't know if I would call that a partial success or mostly a failure?
You can't get much chipping done in the four hours (two hours each side) of the chipper blades useful life. It's really a slow going process, even when the blades are new and sharp, and it slows down considerably after they become dull. Yes, you can force branches down the chute and chip wood, but it's a lot of hard work at that point.
After my last pair of new blades went dull, I basically put the chipper in the shed and there it sits for the past two years. If I ever use it again and it breaks, there is no way I would replace it with a new chipper of the same design or function. It's just not worth it to me. Four hours of life out of a $20 set of blades is not worth it to me. You cannot chip up much wood in four hours with this machine. And I don't like working with dull blades.
But let me end up on a positive note. With the perfect small branches, you can chip up some really nice wood into a quality that I used for the nest boxes for the chickens. The chipped wood from this chipper is much finer than my big gas chipper with the much larger chute. If I were to start all over again with this chipper, I would only use it for that - making nesting bedding for the chickens. Then the blades would last longer, and I think I would have gotten more value out of this electric chipper.
I had not considered that. The plastic ammo box I got smells like plastic, not ammo, but metal ammo boxes have a smell to them as well. I had not considered that the plastic smell would affect the seeds themselves. I mean, some gardeners with serious storage systems use plastic container cases with individual plastic boxes. I don't know if that plastic smells any different that the plastic used in the ammo box I bought.
My chickens reminded me why I put a wire screen around my vegetables. They ate all the leaves off my newly planted round eggplant. The last time I grew them, I got tired of eating them, so I sowed only 4 seeds and two of them sprouted. I took good care and babied them to 6 inches. I hope this one grows back; it still looks kind of strong.
. It's insane. I took my granddaughter and OMG, when I got home I had spent almost 100. $
