YardForce 12-Inch 13-Amp Leaf Shredder

**Item: **YardForce 12-Inch 13-Amp Leaf Shredder
Price: $89.99
Shipping Options: $5 Standard OR $25 Two-Day OR $28 One-Day
Condition: New

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Previous Similar Sales (May not be exact model)
10/11/2013 - $99.99 - 46 comment(s)

Two very happy customers (4.5 out of 5.0) over at homedepot.com

[youtube=LRJ4P8svGBk][/youtube]

This device seems pretty stupid, rake up your leaves, lift into shredder, try to catch the mulched leaves in another bag. Too many extra steps, too much work!

Get this Toro Leaf Blower/Vacuum from Amazon for $70 shipped, it is awesome, sucks up leaves, shreds leaves up to 10 to 1 ratio directly into shoulder bag, when full, empty into waste bag. Actually makes gathering leaves kind of fun. For the last 2 years, while I was using this people walking by stopped and asked me about it.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007POATV4/

Check out the reviews at the link above, they are all true!

I can vouch for this. I bought one for my wife’s uncle via Amazon, and he raves about it. So I bought one recently at my local orange big box, and… I gotta say… it’s one of my favorite yard tools. The blower works very well. The vacuum, however, is the freaking bees knees. It can’t pick up giant clumps of leaves intertwined with a bunch of sticks very well, but past that, I love it. It has a metal impeller, so it actually does a decent job of shredding small twigs and the occasional larger stick or pine cone that it might suck up. And, unlike this giant leaf shredder thing, it absolutely pulverizes the leaves and such into a very, very fine particulate, which is perfect for our mulch bins.

I was surprised to see that this leaf shredder was basically an upside down string trimmer. I can’t imagine that it handles sticks and such very well. In fact, what she dumped out of the bag didn’t look all that shredded. Just my humble opinion, but… it looks more like a leaf halver.

Anyway. Another vote for the Toro device listed above.

I have one of these…used to use it for that purpose, but it really depends on the size of leaves and how we their are.

I have a big oak tree…big leaves, the shoulder setup can’t suck up the leaves very quickly without jamming. The birch tree leaves are too small/many to pickup so I have to rake them into lines, but even then many are left on the ground.

I just get out the old rake, make piles, then put them into yard waste bins. Takes me 1/4 the time than messing with the blower/mulcher setup.

If it hasn’t been raining recently, I just whip out my mower…it’ll much n’ bag well.

Nice, thanks! Took your advice and bought the blower/vac, was dreading having to deal with my lawn, now I’m mildly excited.

I also have a vacuum/leaf blower and it’s a nice machine. But I also own one of these leaf shredders…and I own both of them for a very good reason. The shredder is a lot easier to use and it deposits the shredded leaves directly into the bags the township provides for us. The leaves (as shredded by the shredder) are far more compact than the leaves shredded by the vacuum.

The problem with the vacuum is this…

If you own one of these machines and you want to use it exclusively to shred leaves, you better make sure you purchased the machine with the STEEL impeller…and this is important. If not, the machine will clog very easily and will eventually break the impeller blade. With a plastic blade it will be next to impossible to vacuum or shred any leaves when they are wet. You will need to stop at regular short intervals to hand clean all the wet leaf muck off of the blade…a lot of extra work.

The machine for the leaf shredder job is a leaf shredder. The other machine is good for it’s intended job, and that is to vacuum.

Gotta ask (again), but any idea how this would work as a heavy duty paper shredder?

I am no expert but that seems like it wouldn’t work the way you’d hope. This model at least is probably not heavy-duty enough to be able to take out a large amount of paper goods.

Wow, I came here to laugh at potential buyers and crow about my Toro blower/vac, but not only have I been beaten to the punch, clearly I must be deluded, because my *older model * Toro 51591 is black, and has a plastic impeller, and was bought used from a co-worker’s moving sale after one season, so therefore I must somehow be deluded about how it has worked great for me for FIVE years! Chopping leaves (including woody magnolia leaves) near-dust finely for my compost pile. Even though the the bamboo twigs (sometimes up to a quarter inch) will jam it once in a while, I just stop and shake them out.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-PclEEoncCL4/UoU1D75KVcI/AAAAAAAAQ9s/n5o81h-GfFw/s640/IMG_20131114_123837.jpg

It must really be worn away to a nub and my overactive imagination just won’t let me see the truth.

I am enlightened!
Or, at least, if anything fails now I’ll just buy a new metal-impeller Toro.

I have the Toro blower/vac. The problem that I’ve encountered, in recent weeks, is that when you live in a wet climate (Washington, Oregon) that it really jams very easily on wet maple leaves (not a failure of the Toro, a failure of any of these). It is true, these rock for dry leaves, but that isn’t an option once the rains hit (and the leaves keep falling). I’ve tried the “string trimmer in a trash can” but it makes a giant mess and is difficult to deal with. I wonder if this would be any better.

-Pete

I have this blower/vac, too. My trees are sweet gums (and I rent, so I can’t get rid of them). Occasionally it jams, but I can stick my arm down in it and break the jam (I can’t reach far enough to be in danger).

I chews up the sweet gum balls, too. I can hear them rattle around until they don’t.

We have to use plastic bags for the city to pick up leaves, and I can’t fill the bags up. They just get too heavy. It’s still a lot better than raking.

I can tell when the catcher bag is full when it starts blowing little leaf fragments back at me. I can tell when I forget to zip it back up when it blows a lot of them all over me.

If it doesn’t rain I’m going to spend a few hours in the yard with it Saturday. I’ve got a couple of inches of leaves completely covering my yard right now. If it rains then I’ll put it off again.

When I bought my vacuum with a steel impeller, the salesman at the home center told me the following and this made enough sense to me to opt for the twice as expensive vacuum with the steel impeller…

He showed me both the plastic impeller machine and the steel impeller machine and there was a big difference. The steel impeller had thinner edges than the plastic impeller where they contact the leaves. This makes the steel impeller better able to cut the leaves than the plastic impeller with very thick edges. The edges of the plastic impeller must necessarily be thicker otherwise they would break, as they are not nearly as strong as steel. This all seems very plausible to me.

So your impeller has not gone south yet, and for your sake I hope it never does. However, it doesn’t look too sharp either ( sharp meaning able to cut and mulch leaves).

Anyone else buy Polywood tables or chairs from a previous Woot sale and not receive them? I was shorted 2 chairs and a table and this is message they sends me.“Sorry that your order is missing pieces. Unfortunately, we no longer have any of what you’re missing. I have issued a refund for the missing unit(s). This refund should post in a few days. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused”. Needless to say I’m not real happy and don’t plan to make any future WOOT purchases.

I actually bought this leaf shredder a few weeks ago when Woot offered it, and I actually used it over the last weekend on my front lawn of leaves.

I also have the Toro blower/vacuum mentioned and have used it over the past few years to rake/chop leaves, so have the experience using both.

In my opinion, this leaf shredder is by far much faster and better at leaf shredding than the Toro vacuum. The Toro took entirely too long, the bag was too small and required frequent emptying, and it had issues with varying leaf sizes (like getting jammed with my neighbor’s giant thick oak tree leaves). It is also only a one person job.

With the YardForce shredder, it munches through leaves very quickly, and does actually chop them down to a fine grain. It doesn’t handle sticks necessarily as well as the Toro, but for me what would have been likely 40 bags of leaves only required 5 bags using the Yardforce. Yes, it is loud and quite messy with all of the leaf dust it creates, but the Toro was equally messy on emptying the bag. I would definitely recommend the Yardforce, it worked well for me, and I have the back yard to tackle next weekend.

For multiple person use, it was great too, as I used the Toro to blow all of my leaves into a huge pile, then had the whole family picking up handfuls to drop into the Yardforce, cutting the time to complete the leaves by at least one third. You do need to have someone designated to move the leaves around in the bin to force them into the chopper for faster chopping with many people feeding, but it worked great!

Consider that he was a salesman, and he sold you a product that cost twice as much, when you weigh his opinion against that of someone who posted his actual experience.

Sorry about your experience. It sounds like you should be receiving further correspondence from Woot Member Services. Please keep the community updated on how things turn out. Again, apologies. :frowning:

I’ll second this - though you can occasionally find them on sale for ~$10 less. Mine will chew up anything…leaves, twigs etc. It works so well I get Frances McDormand asking where the neighbors went. No, seriously - metal impeller/grinder, variable speed…good stuff.