Fellowes Powershred M-8C 8 Sheet Cross Cut Personal Shredder With Safety Lock, Black

Short version: a terrific shredder that powers through the pages with no trouble, and can even shred your credit card. I paid just £39.95 and it is an absolute bargain which will save me untold thousands compared with my previous reckless behaviour. I had around 800 sheets to shred and this shredder powered through them.Longer version:I have files and files at home - bank statements, insurance, tax returns - plus lots of work crap from the endless cycle of meetings. Every couple of years I have a major tidy up, filing new stuff and clearing out anything old. That creates a big pile of paper which I used to throw in the recycling. Yes, I was one of THOSE people, who can't understand how their identity got stolen and wants to blame the bank for their own incompetence. In short, I was a bell-end.Thankfully, it never happened. I got away with it and it's time to shut the stable door with the horse still inside.Shred everything. Don't worry about deciding whether or not something contains personal information, just shred the lot.Just before I stopped being a bell-end, I though 'I bet a proper shredder is going to cost quite a bit, maybe I shouldn't bother.' What a pillock.I paid £39.95 for a highly rated shredder, and the other customers are spot on - it does a proper job and is a true bargain. It is basically a shredder unit sat on its own bin, although it looks a lot nice than that description suggests.It claims to take up to 8 pages or 70gsm paper. As a keen reviewer I couldn't resist testing it to the limit. I got to 10 paper of 80gsm with no trouble. It really struggled on 11 pages and I had to jig backwards and forwards a bit to get it all down.After 5 minutes of action it will give itself a 30 minute break to cool down. Five minutes will get you through several hundred sheets, so it is plenty of time. Also, it is sensing the temperature, so the 5 and 30 minutes are approximate - it will stop when it is too hot, however long it has been going, and restart when it thinks it is ready.My 11-page test made it need a rest, which seemed only reasonable.Safety-wise it covers all the bases - master on/off switch, a lock switch, and then a forward / neutral / reverse switch. So to get it going from scratch that is three switches. HOWEVER, you can then leave them all on and it will sit there waiting to detect paper. Or your cat's tail.So don't do that. Move it into neutral then use the lock switch.It has one more safety feature: if you lift the head off the bin, it will cut out. It has a recessed pressure switch so that it knows if it is on the bin. Obviously you'd put it in neutral first before lifting the head off. Probably.Pricing:The Amazon price for this shredder has ranged between £39.99 and £70.04 in the past 12 months, with about 60% of the time at £39.99. If it is higher than that as you read this, add it to your wish list and check back regularly.It is delivered in its branded box with no Amazon over-box, so bear that in mind if you are buying it as a gift. Wait, why would this ever be a gift?Anyway, top notch, 5-stars, would buy again in a heartbeat, etc.

My new shredder arrived yesterday, and as we had a huge pile of shredding to be done, of course I had to get it set up and working as soon as possible!The first thing I noticed (once it was unpacked and plugged in) was the noise - the low level of the noise! Our previous shredder had been quite loud, especially towards the end of its life. This one has a hum to it, and I was amazed how little the noise changed even when shredding staples and credit cards. We had both of these in the pile of shredding to be done, just by coincidence, and it was a great way to test out the unit. I wondered how it would handle the staples, even though it was designed to shred them, but it didn't even blink! The noise was literally no different with just the paper to the stapled paper. The thicker the wedge of paper added to the slot, the deeper the noise became, but that is just because the motor was working that bit harder. Nothing to worry about, though.The shredder worked beautifully, and it happily shredded through all of the paperwork which had piled up since our last one gave up! I did the shredding in two sessions, simply due to the amount there was to be done, and I did not want to burn it out in the first evening. The temperature control light flickered a few times when shredding the thicker piles of paper, but nothing to cause any concern, and it merrily chomped its way through all that I fed into it.I emptied the shredder bin twice, and oiled the blades each time, as recommended. The oil was a bit messy, but that is not a review of the shredder, more the oil bottle. The window in the front of the bin is more of a smoked plastic than clear, so it is more difficult to see the paper level than perhaps it needed to be, but it was clear enough when it needed emptying, I think. Just being aware of how much paper you have shredded will help to not overload the bin. We noticed with our previous unit that if the bin was not emptied when it was getting full, the shredder blades clogged with paper if shredding continued,and I can see that this would be the case with this item as well. Therefore, little and often emptying would be advisable, even if the bin is only half full, and then you could oil the blades every other time it was emptied.For the price (I paid £42), this is an excellent bit of kit. I looked long and hard at the various options, and seriously considered spending half as much again for the 22l bin of the next model up, but I am glad I went with this unit. The bin is not massive, but for general everyday shredding which has not been piling up for a month (and had hubby's business chequebook added to the pile with who knows how many pages in it!!), it will be more than adequate. The noise level is perfectly acceptable, and feels to me like it is on the quiet side, which is great. I would currently agree with the "powershred" label, as it certainly seemed to power through everything fed into it.I am very pleased with my purchase, and would highly recommend it to anyone looking to buy or replace a home shredder, especially if you do not wish to pay lots of money for one.