Review: Black & Decker 10 Piece Cross Cutter Shredder
Price: $78.00 - Target
Hi! My name is Kerrie and I'm anal retentive.
I'm either anal retentive or in a constant state of fear that the IRS is going to come knocking on my door. I've never given them REASON to come knocking on my door - but never the less - the fear is still there.
So therefore, I keep everything. I mean EVERYTHING.
I found a file the other day that was marked 1993 Tax Return. I was 19 in 1993. I had a summer job as a waitress. I made about $347 dollars all summer long. The only thing in that file was a W-2 and a 1040 EZ Form.
I have MILES of papers in my house - and I needed to finally get down to it and get rid of them.
I've burned out and killed three shredders over the last couple of weeks (yes, that's where I've been. Not writing here....but shredding 10 years of our lives away).
I ended up with the Black and Decker 10 Piece Cross Cutter.
All in all a good machine. Honestly, I don't think that anything you can buy in a store is going to be as powerful as you need if you are looking to shred the National Archives - but it still worked well for me.
I will say this - 10 piece shredder my ass. If I got four pieces in it sounded like it was dying, so I just got into a good rhythm with three pieces at a time. Took me about 3 days to shred everything I had, it filled about 2 of those large brown paper grass bags.
It has an over heating option, which although a pain in the butt, keeps you from actually killing the machine. I would unplug it and wait about a half an hour and it was fine again.
If you are really going to town on shredding, the plastic bucket the shredder comes in fills up fast. I would say about every 50 pages or so, I had to dump it.
It's also very loud. Don't shred with sleeping babies.
Tips: Cross Cutting is the best way to go. I made the mistake of using a smaller, less efficient shredder with all of my old returned checks and I ended up shredding them so perfectly that the account number was still intact on each check. HEY COME STEAL MY IDENTITY! VICTIM HERE!
Last Thoughts: Good machine to have for big jobs. If you are already up to date with your shredding needs, you probably don't need something this big and can get by with a smaller and cheaper model.
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5 comments:
B&D Identity Theft Buster shredder is a POS! And their on line customer service is about as useless as this shredder with a full bin!
Short of breaking the bin or the case, does anyone know how to get the jammed bin out? Either I break it or its going in the trash whole!
I bought this same shredder and maintained it with the oil sheets and always shredded about half the sheets the instructions said it could handle.
I called Black and Decker to get the warranty service. They gave me an incomplete return address to ship the shredder ($25) at my own expense. I got the item returned. When I called them again they just said sorry, pay the money to resend it.
Needless to say, I bought another brand.
I'm not really surprised by this review and comments. Virtually every shredder seems to encounter the exact same problems of jamming, or the bin fills up too quickly or does not shred as much as it declares. That's why I now use a professional Shredding service for my small business and also personally.
Hi! How big is this shredder? I was wondering if you could post the specs here because I wanted to replace my old shredder. Thanks.
OC Shredding
I just purchased one an hour ago and have shredded about 80 pages and it is red-light stopped! This is the 8th time it has red-light stopped and I am PsdOF
I too have a national archive to shred and at this rate it will take me as long to shred (and stop and clear the cross cut blades) as it did to accumulate the paper.
No, I have not been shredding glues or envelopes, just 12 yr old 401K files (which were worth more then than now by the way).
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