Sun JoeSDJ616 Electric Leaf Mulcher/Shredder 13-Amp 16:1 Reduction Ratio, 8,000-RPM, Mulch up to 55-Gallons per Minute, Adjustable Control Dial, Green

I had a whole bunch of weeds come up after the rains in the areas that were mulched. With intermittent rain, I could not get to them till last week, by which time they were all about 1½ feet tall! After pulling them out by the roots, I decided to use my Patriot Shredder to grind up this stuff. I have had the Patriot for several years, and it has been great for chipping and shredding broken branches and after pruning the hedges. It gets through dry and wet branches with ease, as long as I don't "choke" the machine with too much stuff at one go.Well, I put the fresh, long weeds through the top hopper, and it just would not suck the stuff down. I then used the chipper opening, and there was nothing coming out of the discharge chute. The machine bogged down and stopped. I found the entire flywheel, hammers, and chipper blade coated with wet green "mush". The machine just could not handle this stuff. It took me about an hour just to clean out the Patriot.I was looking for an alternative, so read some reviews, and decided to go with the SunJoe Shredder. Most reviews were negative regarding "wet" stuff, but I was willing to give it a try, especially with the price being less than $100.00.I used the cloth bag from my Patriot Chipper and it was a perfect fit! I would strongly recommend you use some sort of "cloth" bag. Plastic bags tend to get ripped if there are stems or twigs. Paper bags tend to rip when you are trying to secure them, and it is hard to get the right size. The elastic cord is very tight, and in the process of pulling the bags to fit around the bottom flange you will end up ripping the bag.The Patriot bag is a heavy gauge synthetic material and is "breathable" so as the bag fills up, air can be pushed out. The bag can also be reused for many years. The bag is expensive, about ½ the price of the shredder, but I think it would be worth the price if you are planning on doing a lot of shredding. It is available here on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Products-888000100-Shredder-Collection/dp/B004W5YKBE/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1437233760&sr=8-3&keywords=Patriot+Shredder.The bag has a cord which cinches the opening of the bag. The bag is an almost an exact fit for the bottom of this shredder. I hook one edge under the bungee cord, and then work my way around the bottom rim with the bag. Then I just cinch up the bag with the built in tie. The bag works well with dry or wet material. I already had the bag, so it wasn't an issue. This bag has held up for several years, chipping branches so should hold up with shredding leaves. If cost is an issue, I would suggest you look for other re-useable "cloth" bags. It makes it a lot easier to use this machine.Back to the review of this machine: I was apprehensive about how this would perform, but with care, and slow feeding, it ground up all the fresh weeds and stems without an issue. It does get clogged up after about 10 minutes. It is easy enough to stop the machine, and reach in from the top and scrape off the accumulated "mush" and push it down through the opening into the bag. It never tripped the circuit breaker, but I was careful about how much I put in. I filled up 4 bags of this mushy green ground up weeds, and all of it went straight into my composter!I changed the "string" on one side because it was becoming short. I wish they had put the blade that cuts the string our further, so that the string could reach a little wider in the hopper. As it is, there is about a ¾ inch gap between the end of the string and the sides of the hopper, and this is where stuff builds up. Not a big deal, but an annoyance.I am very pleased with the way this made short work of grinding up this wet stuff. As a bonus, it was ready for the compost! If you work within it's limitations, it is a great machine. I cannot vouch for it's longevity, but it has already been worth it. My only advise is to get a cloth bag, unless you really need to put stuff in paper bags for disposal. If you have a composter, you would not need to worry about disposal either.Guide to images (for some reason the order of the images changed after it was posted and I can't change the order, so follow the numbers to the right image):5. Weeds growing in front of hedging - looks like tall grass3. Sun Joe Shredder with Patriot cloth bag attached1. Shredder, cart with weeds to be shredded. Please note the gloves, goggles, and ear protection - makes quite a bit of noise2. String and internal blade that cuts string to length. The gap between the outside of the blade and the hopper is where stuff builds up4. Size of shredded material. Note: one or two long stems get through unscathed6. Composter with material from three cart loads of weeds (please refer to picture #3 for "one" cart load). Nice reduction in volume.

Excellent shredder! This is the second SunJoe purchased - wore the first one out! Does a great job

I was torn over whether to order this mulcher/shredder after reading previous reviews. I am happy to say that any reservations were quickly dispelled after using it the first time.PROS-- Easy to set-up and use- Effectively and efficiently chopped dry leaves to a small size. Will be great for mulch in gardens or compacting large leaf piles into easily disposable size.CONS -- Fairly loud- Creates a lot of very fine dust with dry leaves. Strongly suggest wearing a mask. I looked like I had cinnamon coating all over me after an hour of use.- Need to replace cutting strings after 2 hours of useThis fall I had a huge pile of leaves collected in the backyard from my raking efforts. In pained me to see all this great organic material and think that it could be carted off to a landfill. Meanwhile the rock hard soil in our vegetable garden was screaming for some nice mulch. The Sun Joe SDJ616 was the perfect answer. I found the best bet was to move the unit into the vegetable garden and just let the mulch fall to the ground for raking out and then tilling into the dirt. I am convinced that it will be a great start for spring planting as well as give us the satisfaction of a “green” approach to gardening.

*My individual model was not defective. I received a replacement model and it was just as bad and within a few hours of use the engine just died completely. Yes, died.Where to start, where to start. Let me get the very worst out of the way first. There's not much good to say at all but varying degrees ofhorror dealing with this disaster of a product. After 2 days of use, which was ultimately maybe 10 minutes of the product actually working as near expected and hours of cleaning, repositioning, rechecking the manual, adjusting settings, dealing with the horrible locking feature on the legs, replacing the weed whacker plastic strips after about every 4 handfuls of leaves, the thing died. Completely died.1. Leg locking features is awful. For a product this expensive they could've had the push button and adjust to height locking system you see on a variety of products unfortunately there is a twist locking system which continued to come unlocked during use and nearly caused the system to collapse with the motor running. I checked the locks many times before use, nothing was moving, they were locked in place following exact steps of manual. Unloosening the locks and adjusting to the desired height is a tiresome ongoing process as after you adjust to a certain height you then just see small measurements painted on to go off. Good luck wasting time if you want to even adjust the leg slightly.2. Not sure who this product is for. I have a significant amount of leaves in my yard. I'm seeding in the spring and rather than buy straw I'd prefer to have the shredded leaves over the seed to keep it wet while adding a layer of protection against birds. If you have a small amount of leaves then don't even consider this. Its not worth the time or money. Like everyone else my leaves fall from the branches of trees. Sometimes branches or pieces of branches fall onto the ground as well and unless you are going to handpick every tiny branch out of massive leaf piles you've bought yourself a disastrous product. This thing becomes jammed so easily its mindboggling how this product got approved for wide release manufacture and distribution. I did small handfuls of leaves as the manual states and even this resulted in constant clogging. After about every 5 handfuls I had to make sure it was turned off and reach in and clean out. Don't bother taking the plastic top off because it is not shaped exactly as needed to align easily and when removing as well as attempting to put this back on the experience was 10 times more difficult because the legs kept unlocking.3. You are given a bag of the weed whacker type ties that are used to shred. In the manual it states you should only buy their specially manufactured ties for this product. How nice of them, you think when you realize you've been given 20 extra replacement lines included in your purchase. HA! Small twigs and wet leaves destroy these things easily. Had to replace the ties about every 10 small handfuls. Once again don't bother taking off the plastic tub. Unplug the product and have a screwdriver or small knife handy to remove the ties and replace them. Get used to this process which will waste about 5 mins each time (if you're lucky and the legs don't unlock and adjust while you are attempting to do so.4. The manual says the product requires minimal maintenance. There are several settings, one especially for wet leaves. Only put in 1 handful of wet leaves at a time vs the two handfuls at a time for dry leaves. Even following these instructions it constantly clogged. Unplug the machine, reach your gloved hand in and remove all the dirt, mud and other residue that has built up and once again rendered your machine worthless in a matter of minutes. This debris builds up quickly because for reasons unbeknownst to logic the bottom of this machine doesn't have large openings for material to fall through into the bag. There are four small openings within the plastic piece which cause residue to build up quickly, more easily breaks the plastic ties and takes far longer for the machine to clear and have the leaves placed in the bag. After about 4 attempts of the bag filling up slightly, rubbing the plastic legs and causing them to unlock and add about 10 more minutes off maintenance I said no more bags thinking things would work far better. After not having a bag there you will also realize rather quickly that it doesn't shred the leaves very finely. This would've required me doing about 3 runs of processing on each handful of leaves. More wasted time.5. How valuable is your time??? As said before you probably only need this if you have a lot of leaves. I had cleared about 20 contractor bags of leaves out of the yard before I said, no more trips to the landfill and theres still probably 15-20 contractor bags worth left over. The irony here is if you have minimal leaves you don't need this and if you have a lot of leaves, well this machine is not well built enough, reliable or powerful enough to get the job done. If you have a small amount then just rake them into a bag lined trash can, tie it up and call it a day or mow them and shred in a matter of minutes. You'd even be better off buying a large tub or bucket, dropping the leaves by hand in there and then placing a weed whacker in it . Then repeat that process. That would save you a tremendous amount of time and effort. Oh yeah put in headphones or earplugs because this piece of work is incredibly loud, which was hilarious given how ineffective it was at doing its job and the lack of power it seemed to have. Loud bark and no bite and your neighbors will despise you quickly. The vacuum feature to suck the leaves downward to shred is not as strong as you would think given how loud this baby is and so when you feed leaves be prepared to put your gloved hand or the end of a rake, shovel etc to move the leaves to feed it. This wastes even more time of an already bad process. So the process is this. You'd already need to have leaves raked into piles or maybe in a garbage can. You really cant dump the can into the machine because it will clog. So after you've got your pile ready now you need to grab a handful or two at a time. Wait to see that each handful clears the machine completely and then drop your next handful or two into the plastic tub portion. Make sure that as you wait to drop the next handful you pick out any and all small twigs, debris, roots, etc otherwise its going to get jammed in a matter of minutes. Also, unless your yard is completely flat this is not a real mobile machine. It's light and easy to move but you'll need to go through the cumbersome process of adjusting and readjusting which means bring all your leaves to one large pile or separate into multiple piles throughout but prepare to deal with the adjustment process so the machine will avoid falling over while running.From a value perspective, assuming things worked near as expected this thing is overpriced $120-$150? Should be about $75 tops which you'll realize once you see and feel the material especially with the legs which are of bad material and undersized which makes this a top heavy machine. Expect to spend time and money replacing the shredder lines, prepare to be disappointed about its effectiveness, the waste of your time for a product that was supposed to save you time and be fully aware of your refund deadline.*I decided to let Amazon send a replacement shredder in and effort to determine if mine was defective. I have not used it yet since I received it in the evening however as I am putting it together I am noticing significant scuffs on the funnel/feeder cover portion as well as various yellow discolorations showing on the green plastic. This replacement has clearly been used and then sold and shipped as "New". I will update the review regarding its performance after I test it tomorrow but to have a shoddy product replaced by a refurbished/used model is such a low blow.