Feed It Green: Five Owners, Two Very Different Results

Five of the eight deal with green leafy material, and they do not agree.

Mark Griffin, five stars, bought this to replace a much more powerful Stihl whose motor had finally given up: “I've given this Hyundai a good hammering since I took delivery with a large volume of hedge clippings and fresh green matter. It blocked once because I put too much in.” Opening it up and clearing the blockage was quick and easy, they say. The rule that follows is the useful part: “Just feed in small amounts at a time. If you have to force it in with the feeder tool its too much.” (sic)

rdenni, three stars, titled their review “No good if a lot of green leaves” and meant it. Small branches carrying a few leaves were fine. Bushes were not: “green leaves clog it up ... I gave up with my bushes after 45 mins as had alot of leaves” (sic). Chopping the same material up with secateurs and filling the council garden waste bin was quicker.

Thidwick found the supplied push tool helps the leafier bits through. The buyer posting as Amazon Customer put a heavily trimmed bay tree, lots of leaves and all, through alongside dry beech and reports no blockage at all on anything up to 25-30mm. Gordon B, four stars, names the variable none of the others quite pins down: how long the material has been off the plant.

Two Weeks in a Heap Changes What Goes Through

Gordon B has owned a long line of shredders and opens with a summary: “TL:DR - It works well, if you keep the blades sharp and allow the material to dry before processing.” For hedge work the detail is in the brackets further down. Let the waste dry out first, they write, “especially if it contains green stalks and leaves - leave it for a couple of weeks to dry out.” Same machine, same hedge, different fortnight.

rdenni, who lost the argument with their bushes, arrived at the same answer from the other end: “It will be better in the autumn when leaves are browning.” Two owners, one broadly satisfied and one not, agreeing on the fix.

That is worth acting on this week rather than next spring. Cut a hedge now and what comes off is soft green growth, which is the state rdenni describes struggling with. Stack the cuttings loosely where air can move through them instead of compressing them into a bin, give them the fortnight Gordon B suggests, and the pile starts to resemble the brown material in Hyundai's own product photographs. When the leaves themselves come down they are better kept separate: our guide to making leaf mould from autumn leaves covers that route.

One caution on what you stack. Gordon B warns that long whippy rose branches can flail around as they are drawn in, so those need care going in. And if the reason you are cutting late is that the hedge got away from you, our review of telescopic hedge shears covers the reach problem.

4.5cm on the Listing, and the One Star That Got 37 Votes

The listing bullet says the 4200rpm cutter shreds wood up to 4.5cm in diameter, driven by a 2400W motor. Two owners describe a comfortable working range some way below that. Thidwick reports woody bits up to about 1.5cm in diameter disappearing quickly, and a big heap of prunings reducing to roughly half a bag of fine shreddings, fine enough to spread as mulch. Amazon Customer went further, clearing everything up to 25-30mm without a single block while deliberately leaving the thicker branches alone, and both they and Gordon B describe the machine drawing material in on its own.

Andrew T. Finney, five stars, cleared branch cuttings up to 5ft (>1.5m) long and hit one jam that tripped the overload cut-out. Their recovery took a few minutes: isolate the machine, lift the top cover off, pull out the wedge of wood that had refused to shred, reassemble, press reset. That reset button sits beside the power switch under a clear waterproof cover, with a plate between the two telling you to switch the power off, pull the plug, press the overload reset and restart, and the on/off rocker has a clear cover of its own.

Then there is the one star. Paul D wrote it on 28 August 2022 and it has collected 37 helpful votes, more than the other seven reviews on the page put together. After about an hour on soft branches of 2cm or less, they report, the rubber protection flap inside the machine started to tear; on slightly thicker material a piece of wood came flying out. A replacement unit began ripping within 20 minutes. Their account also flags a discrepancy we cannot check from here, that “the manual says 40mm and the sticker on the machine says 45mm”, and their reading of the cause is blunt: “The fact that it has happened on 2 of them suggests this is a design fault”.

Read that for what it is. It is four years old, and none of the six 2026 reviews in this sample repeats it. But eight cards cannot tell you what the remaining 601 ratings say, so nothing here confirms the part was changed. The workable conclusion: treat 4.5cm as a ceiling rather than a working figure and plan around 25 to 30mm.

Loud Enough That One Buyer's Daughter Got Earplugs

There is a yellow label on the front of the body carrying the number 106 next to the L(WA) sound symbol. Sound power is not the same measurement as the level at your ear. It is still a big number for a machine you stand directly over.

Four of the eight reviews mention the noise and three of them call it loud. rdenni is the most direct: the shredder is “f@@ing noisy” (sic) and their daughter had to get earplugs because she could not stand the noise. AJB describes it as quite noisy to operate up close, and Thidwick accepts it on the grounds that the job is over quickly.

The dissent comes from Amazon Customer, who found that “the noise isn't excessive although noisier with the thicker pieces”.

Two practical consequences. Ear defenders belong with the gloves and glasses rdenni recommends, and a Sunday morning is the wrong time to start. The 10m cable helps more than it sounds like it should: three of the eight singled the lead out for praise, and it is what lets the machine sit at the bottom of the garden rather than up against a party wall.

The Nut, the Bag and the Blade Argument

Assembly is not the hurdle. Four of the eight call it straightforward, and AJB supplies the one tip worth having in advance: “insert the axle in the legs before putting them into place on the body.” Amazon Customer assembled it with the spanner provided.

At 10.3kg the built machine is light enough to drag around on its two wheels, though Andrew T. Finney notes the axle is narrow, so it tends to tip on rough ground when towed. They still declined to mark it down for it.

The collection bag divides the room. Four of the eight mention it: two are happy with it, one of them calling it easy to handle, Mark Griffin rates it useful but finds a plastic trug under the outlet works very well too, and Gordon B tells you not to bother and uses a gorilla tub. Their reasoning is worth borrowing whichever container you end up with: a rigid tub empties faster, and you can watch the chippings pile up, which Gordon B names as another common source of blockages.

Cleaning is the weakest bit of the design. Getting into the cutter means undoing one large plastic nut on the hopper, and rdenni counts the cost: it “requires dozens of twists to unscrew”, and doing it back up means manipulating the hinged lid into line with the hole first. On a machine whose owners tell you to keep the blades sharp, that is friction in precisely the wrong place.

Which brings up the blades, where two reviews flatly contradict each other. Mark Griffin says a replacement set costs a fraction of what they were paying on their old machine. Gordon B says “Hyundai doesn't seem to offer replacement blades at the moment”. We cannot settle that from here, and you should not buy on either version. What both agree on is the thing that makes it moot: the blades can be sharpened rather than replaced.

Who This Suits, and Who Should Buy Bags Instead

Our score is 3.9 out of 5. The working, since this sample is small enough to show in full: four five-star reviews, two fours, one three and one one, averaging 4.00 against the lifetime 4.0 badge on the current listing and its 609 ratings. Those two figures matching is a coincidence of which cards Amazon chose to show, not proof the eight represent the rest. We have not scored above the badge because almost every piece of praise here arrives with a condition attached, and the noise, the hopper nut and the unresolved 2022 flap report pull it slightly under.

Buy it if you have a hedge, somewhere to stack what comes off it, and the patience to shred it a fortnight later. Buy it if your garden produces mostly prunings and small woody growth up to about 25 to 30mm and you want the result as mulch or compost feedstock, which is what Thidwick got out of a big heap of prunings and what Gordon B calls excellent for the compost bin. For 2400W, 10.3kg and a 10m lead, it does that job well, and half of this sample rates it five stars.

Skip it if what you are looking at is a barrow of fresh green clippings you want gone this weekend. rdenni's fallback was the sensible one: cut it small and bin it. If that is your situation, buy Singwow's 500L heavy duty garden waste bags instead, though our review of those is worth reading first, because a full one weighs more than the litre figure suggests. Skip the shredder too if you cannot make that kind of noise where you live, because there is no quiet setting on this thing.