What's a rough comparison of the amount of space taken up by branches, twigs etc before/after shredding?
For example, if I fill my car boot up with branches and other cuttings, how much boot space would that same amount of stuff fill, if I shredded it first?
Depending on the size of your boot, you'd probably get it down to a bucketful or two. Mine ends up in the garden borders, but it soon disappears. I like to think it's doing some good in the soil.
Great fun, too.
On Friday 24 May 2013 20:22 Mentalguy2k8 wrote in uk.d-i-y:
Bloody loads.
I have a front garden bit of lawn about 80m2.
When a neighbour helped me chainsaw a 12' hawthorn hedge down to 4', we filled the entire area to 1.5m high on average with branches.
One solid week (5 days) with an industrial hired chipper with powerfeed trurned it into approx 15cm chippings over 25m2 so about 3.75m3 (by a path where nothing grew and thge ground was low.
Needless to say a couple of years later the volume has halved.
My advice would be to either pile it in the garden and dig it in from time to time, or leave a pile by the front with bags and a donation pot - get a few quid and have a curry :)
I have a shredder. Probably reduces it to 10% or less of initial volume. Too valuable to throw away. Use for compost or mulch under shrubs. Any keen gardener would take it away for you.
But very very noisy.. Pardon?
Brian
Indeed it is :-)
Make sure you get one of the "silent" type of shredder, the ones with a blade whizzing round at high speed are prone to clogging, which get's quite tedious after a while.
Chris
The one I borrowed has a pair of blades spinning round. It's never clogged and seems very powerful. It is quite loud though.
Some tips: Make sure the blades are sharp[1] - then it cuts fast and self-feeds. Let the cuttings dry out a bit first. They shred best when part way between newly cut and completely dried out.
Ask yourself how long it would take you to feed it all through the shredder.
I sold my shredder because although it did what it said - reduced everything including small branches to a mulch - it took so long that it wasn't worth the time spent.
Over time, a trailer might be a wiser investment.
A big trailer may be OTT but our 2 ton twin axle trailer (roughly 8' by 4' bed) can shift an enormous amount of garden prunings per trip and generally you don't even have to spend time chopping it down to fit in bags which will fit in the boot.
Big branches go straight in. Smaller stuff goes into the builders bags you get sand and stuff delivered in.
It is quite satisfying to load up the recycling skip with loads of stuff whilst other people are trailing up black bin bags from the back of hatch backs.
Depends on how often you need to shift stuff, but a small Indispension trailer which can sit on its' back and store with the tow hitch straight up in the air doesn't take much space and can shift quite a bit - one that takes the aforementioned builders' bags is about the right size.
Cheers
Dave R
at our Council "recycling site" you can't bring in a trailer without putting it on the weighbridge first - and then paying.
In my honest opinion the same ... as I have a shredder and always give up and take it down tip as is.
Shredding just too slow.
Ditto. Gave it up long ago. Preferred methods:
(1) Bonfire. Once going properly, will reduce anything and everything to a pile of ash about 0.01% volume of the original. But not always possible so...
(2) Tarpaulin. (I bought a pair from Aldi some time ago.) Make large pile in centre, roll up, and crush, ram in the back of the car. At the tip lift to edge of the skip and let go one edge: all unloaded in 2 seconds.
- Don't make the mistake of making the pile so big that you can't carry the roll-up.
- Never, never use black bags: bad enough to empty, but murder, and sooooo time consuming, to fill.
- Never, never use a builder's dumpy bag (unless you have a big strong mate with you in which case: great.
John p.s. anyone want to buy a Bosch shredder?
+1
And, since I use the shreddings for our composting toilet, doubly useful.
I disagree. I have just got rid of the 'silent' one I bought a year ago as it spent more time crushing the wood than shredding it, needed frequent adjustment to keep it even doing than and, whilst relatively quiet, was 32Kg heavy and lop-sided. I'm much happier with the spinning-blade type which, whilst noisy, is easier to move around and at least shreds as I expect it to. Clogging only tends to happen IME if you try and push too much and/or too wet material through too fast.
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