Dave—February 14, 2012✓ Verified purchase
I have been using this shredder for 2 weeks now and find it a great performer. The size is perfect along side my desk as its height matches my desk height. It it amazingly fast and all features work as advertised. It was a lot of money, but I feel worth every penny and the price at Amazon was as cheap as I could find anywhere. I am the only one using this shredder and I fill the bin every 4 or so days. One reviewer complained it was messy, and yes, there is a small amount of shredded paper that doesn't make the bin, but what do you expect! The way I handle the waste is I empty the bin into a paper leaf collection bag which works well and is the perfect package for hauling to the recycle center. Update: It's been a month now and I can say this shredder has out performed all my expectations. It works flawlessly and I once tried to stuff too much paper in and it stalled, then automatically backed up and then automatically went forward and finished the job. I love this shredder! Update: It's been 6 months now and I am still very impressed with this shredder. Absolutely no problems or issues. Dare I say it's almost "fun" to use? At any rate, I remain very happy and would recommend this shredder to everyone who wants a high quality well built machine. Thank you Fellows! Update: It's been 3 1/2 years now, my shredder is used many times a day and continues to work flawlessly. I have never had a jam that it didn't automatically work itself out of, all jams clearly my fault for over-stuffing the feeder. Update: It's now been 8 years .... how did that happen :) This shredder is used quite a bit every day, 7 days a week and it has never ever given me one single problem .... it just sits next to me desk and eats paper and an occasional CD flawlessly. I will note that I am good about oiling it when i change a bag, which is once a week, sometimes I can go 10 days. Great product and worth every penny. Read more
J—February 8, 2014✓ Verified purchase
I am an intelligence professional and have been using level 6 high security shredders for many, many years. I have been wanting a home shredder for a long time. I was looking at the 79i at OfficeMax and they wanted nearly twice the price than what amazon was selling it for. Although this item was marked professional grade, I clearly did not look at the product dimensions closely enough and was a little shocked when i received this 63 pound behemoth. Maybe I should have stuck with the residential model? The instructions were pretty simple, plug it in and turn it on. Mine already had the casters installed, so the only thing I had to do was unscrew the shipping wingnuts. It looked like it came pre-oiled, but I gave it a round of lube just in case and hit the forward button to get the gears going. First impression. it's relatively quiet. Granted, it's a level 4 cross cut shredder, but it certainly performs better than a lot of the $5,000 shredders that I deal with every day. The touch sensor was something I have never seen before in a commercial shredder. I can't imagine getting a finger or anything caught in this shredder, but it is comforting to know that it's there, although i did accidentally hit it a time or two when feeding paper. I kind of thought the jam proof slogan was a gimmick until I jammed it up a couple times and it automatically reversed itself and then shredded the material. Never seen that before in the big industrial models. The shred speed was typical, and when I threw a CD and a micro-chipped credit card into it, it had no problem. I see that the max nonstop run time listed is 45 minutes, but there is no way you can shred in this thing for 45 minutes without having to stop to empty the shred basket. If I had one complaint, it would be that the shred basket doesn't have a good keeper system for the bags. Even my $50 simplehuman trash can has grips to hold the trash bag in place. The shredder also has an auto-off feature after about a minute, but you do not need to turn it back on if you want to feed paper into it; it automatically turns back on from powersaver mode. Awesome! Just for kicks, I plugged it into my Belkin Insight power monitor, and it looks like in on mode (when not operating), the shredder uses 1.2 watts. When it automatically powers down, it's still using .9 watts, but even with Hawaii's ridiculous power cost of 28 cents a kilowatt hour, you're only talking about $2.40 a year. When feeding the shredder, the wattage jumped up to over 400 watts while it did it's thing. Overall, this is a great shredder and I hope to have it for many years. It definitely needs to earn it's keep. I can't say I would recommend this to the average person since this doesn't exactly fit under a desk, nor can it be easily concealed. If you want people to think you're a paranoid conspiracy theorist and shred anything that has your name on it, this will certainly support your reputation. For a small business, this would probably be all you needed. I emptied a trash bag full of documents on it's first run and it was almost as easy as the big commercial models. the only limitation being the feed slot, but even then it took on stacks of paper with no problem. The waste bin could use an upgrade, and I'll probably just use regular tall kitchen bags after I run out of the included Fellowes bags. I also should mention that this shredder comes with a 4 oz. bottle of oil. I didn't know that and had already purchased a bottle for use. Read more
