I just bought one of these:

It’s a McCullough Electric Chipper Shredder. Now, I have to say that I fully expected it to fail. I made a point of asking the customer service person at Fred Meyer if I could return it dirty if it turned out not to work. (They said “sure.”)

I cleared the North 40 (probaby 3000 sq. ft. or so) of my land using a 10 year old Sears Craftsman gas chipper, and it was hellish. It was loud, jammed a lot, burned gas, and parts fell off mid-chip. My bad for not buying a deluxe new one, but I didn’t want to spend that much on something I didn’t think I’d need afterwards.

Anyway, having also owned both an electric chainsaw and a gas one, I assumed that this would turn out like that comparison (i.e., the electric chainsaw was worse than useless). That meant, this would first suck worse than the Craftsman at grinding and then break.

However, I am here to tell you that a couple of weeks into it, I’m pretty stoked. Sure, it plugs up now and then when you feed it wet stuff, but that’s relatively easily corrected by turning it off and jamming a stick up the shoot to clear it out. It can’t chip more than about a 3/4″ stick, but anything larger than that really requires a hefty machine and so goes out in my yard waste can or becomes firewood.

What it’s good at is grinding up bolted beets, weedy bulbs, fruit tree prunings, eggshells, etc. into a nice uniform mulch. I know this exposes what a compost dork I am, but, to me, that’s a beautiful thing.

I’ve been trying to get my compost process to move along a bit faster (we generate an amazing amount of compostable waste), and one key to that is increasing the surface area of the material (i.e., chopping it up). That gives more wettable surface for the thermophilic critters to do their thing, and bingo-bango, hotter pile faster.

The day I got it, I took out a bunch of stuff from the old– basically cold– pile, ran it through this thing, and piled it back up. Two days later, it was steaming. It’s amazing how fast a pile will shrink when it gets hot like that. You can get a load of compost to a usable stage in a fraction of the cold compost time if you can get it to heat up for a couple of days– not to mention that you kill weed seeds and pathogens, which makes the stuff much nicer to use on the surface without all the germinating and sporulating and what not.

I’ve always had trouble with getting a spent sunflower stalk or brussels sprout stem to breakdown in less than a year. With this jiggy pre-chewing the material, I expect the whole load to finish in a couple of months– maybe less.

I’ll report back as I get some more hours logged on this thing, but for less than $200, at this point, it seems like a good tool.

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