"Joe Jamies" wrote
I am thinking about buying an shredder mulcher (possibly AL-KO silent
shredder SP-4000 or SP-5000). If anyone has an AL-KO silent shredder,
I would be glad to hear some comments on how it works.
snip

Works brilliantly, afaic. I have a 4000 model bought last year and I'm very
pleased with it. I've now got a couple of large wooden bins full of lovely
dark stuff that looks about ready for mulching this spring. When I think of
all that useful material that used to be hauled off to the dump...!

I haven't had to deal with any ash branches, but I don't see why they
couldn't go through as long as you don't go overboard with anything too
thick. We've put two year seasoned sycamore branches through, probably a
bit more than 4cm if I'd measured them, and it didn't miss a beat. The
machine seems very robust.

Leaves and twiggy pieces are no problem. I find if you feed stuff like that
in along with longer woodier branches to give the machine something to bite
on, they will pull the leafy stuff through just fine. We've put conifer
hedge clippings, sappy euonymus prunings and all that sort of thing in
alongside bigger branches without a hitch. It's very satisfying to start
with a huge pile of pruning taking up so much space and quickly reducing it
all to a shredded up mulch. The resulting mix of crushed woody chunks and
chopped greenery seems to heat up really quickly. The first lot we tried,
which was left in a heap in the open temporarily, had got really hot and
had signs of ash forming in the centre when we moved it after only a few
days!

Will the shredder accept pieces of bark? The pieces I end up
with are about 10 cm in diameter, but I would like to shred them to
create a finer mulch. Does the 4 cm (for example) limit for branches
mean that anything going into the shredder cannot be wider than that?

The Al-ko shredders work with a rotating roller and cog-wheel type
mechanism which crunches and chops the material, so whatever you feed in
does need to physically fit through that. Without checking, the width is
actually a few cm more but not an awful lot. Pieces of bark wouldn't be a
problem if you could split them down to fit.

Sue