Earthwise GS70015 15-Amp Garden Corded Electric Chipper, Collection Bin

I was weary of purchasing this because of the bad reviews but I saw a cheaper version of this had quite good reviews so I figured this could be a price point expectation? I've only spent 1 day with it, but chipped for about 4 hours straight and my initial impression is that this thing is pretty capable. I jammed it up so that I needed to actually unscrew the unit 3 times -- once within the first 5 minutes because I didn't know what I was doing, once because I was trying to be way too greedy with the branch I was putting through, and once unexpectedly. In all cases, I probably could have cleared the jam by using some channel locks or pliars and just pulling the branch out from the top feed / hopper and this is preferable as a first step if only because it takes like 40 turns to unscrew the bolt that allows you to access the blades. To me, three jams, 2 of them definitely my fault, over 4 hours is totally acceptable. Also to be clear, I mostly chipped dryer softwood, but did do a fair amount of hardwood and fresher, greener, wetter stuff. But here lies a few tips.1. Use safety protection!! Full eye protection is a must. Branches will whip side to side unexpectedly. Use ear protection! It's loud and you only have one set of ears. Even gloves are recommended because sometimes when the branch whips and it's big enough it can hit you pretty hard.2. Do not be afraid to use some violence! Many "jams" were avoided by just smashing the branch through the hopper using the provided hopper tool. Also whatever you can fit through the feeder will chip! I was worried in the beginning about not feeding anything too big, but it's really about how well you can guide it through the feeder, not so much the size of the branch (at least with softer woods). And this guiding process is a bit of an art (see more below)3. Use a 12AWG/20A extension cord. Otherwise the voltage drop when this thing pulls full amps chewing through a big stick will result in big power loss! At least I assume that's the case and is the recommendation in the manual!4. Hardwood is definitely.. harder. So use some restraint in combo with my violence recommendation depending on the wood. Violence on soft wood works pretty well. Violence with hardwood will likely jam the machine. Thus --5. Have patience and do some prep. The biggest problem is with wood that has sharp bends or big knots that you can't turn through the hopper feeding guide. If you or whoever you are working with prep the pieces for success, you will definitely have more fun feeding the beast.6. RTFM! "Read the ___ manual". It has advice on alternating easier feeding wood between harder feeds ones to help keep the chipper clear and recommends wet wood in between dry pieces. I personally didn't have any trouble with the limited wet / fresh wood but I chipped 95% older, dryer, soft wood (which it absolutely massacres).7. You will definitely improve with time! The amount of violence I used definitely decreased over the day as I learned how to find the best rotation technique to get the branches to feed more smoothly into the chipper.My only "critique" is that it does chip into fairly small mulch (which is called out in the item description). This is totally fine and expected but I am kind of curious what the larger mulcher is like as I think I would probably prefer that end product, but not sure.I had pretty low expectation but it met them, definitely. And by the end of day 1 with the thing, I feel it has already paid itself off for the price. In the beginning of the day I thought okay maybe this is about a 4 star, but once *I* learned how to use the thing more properly, I feel it is probably a 5 star product. I mean for the price this thing is a beast!! I'm sure there are use cases where this thing just doesn't keep up but for me, this thing cleans up! Too bad it will soon cost 2.5x as much with tariffs as it's made in China. Thank you to our wise King for lowering the prices of products for those of us that actually work for a living. I don't know about the cheaper chippers on Amazon but (electrical) safety wise this thing is also ETL listed and has overload protection. It claims it is "built to last". We will see! Recommended!

I did my research and this seemed like the best chipper for me. I wanted to reduce the amount of baggage and was tired of branches and sticks poking through even heavy-duty contractor bags. There are some issues though:1) The hopper on top is a marketing gimmick. It gives off the illusion that you can feed leaves or fill it up and have it go in, but that's not the case. This is like most other residential chippers: it works best with straight branches. It doesn't do leaves very well.2) The collection bin on the bottom is nice, and one of the reasons why I choose this over the competitors. But the machine fills the bin very unevenly. Ever so often you have to tilt the whole machine to the back so the pile of chips on one side equalizes within it. If you don't the chips quickly get plug the output.3) It doesn't do stringy wood very well.. like bamboo.4) I wish the pushing stick provided with the chipper had a different design. Like a cup shape at the end, or at least two-cylinder to match the hole on top. It's very hard to push branches in with it.5) Like most residential chippers, it handles very straight branches. I recommend you get another tool like a pruner, a power cutoff or oscillating tool with a wood blade to help reduce the work of cutting off sub branches to make it straight. This machine ADDs more work to cleanup, for the benefit of having to use fewer bags. A good option if you are limited on the amount of foilage you are trying to get rid of in a set period of time (e.g. your weekly green bin). If you are unlimited, or if you have an insane amount of foilage, you are better off mass hauling it away, because it would be too much work to process everything into straight sticks.

I don't have a truck and these days trying to find someone to show up and haul off brush where I live is a pain. So I decided to give this a try.I felt it was well made, I am 5' tall 100lbs and I was able to carry the box when it arrive, and once assembled I was able to maneuver it ok. So its lightweight but sturdy, seems pretty well made to me. Assembly was straight forward, had it done in about 15-20 min.The manual recommends safety gear, and so did other reviews and I definitely 2nd that. It is louder then a lawnmower for sure, so I wore hearing protection. It can sometimes kick back small pieces as the branch sometimes "shatters" as its going on so eye protection is a must. I'm also very glad I read the reviews about wearing gloves, when it grabs the branch into the blades the branch can suddenly turn before you have time to remove your hand, and that twisting motion of the branch can certainly give you "road rash" lol if you aren't wearing gloves.It does have tons of safety features as far as the blades are concerned, I was never at any time worried that my hand would be in danger, tho when you clean out any clogs your hand is by the blade to to prevent any accidents (just like working on any power tool such as a lawn mower, its very important to cut the power to the unit (unplug it, don't just turn it off).When I used it on the very first branch I was AMAZED at how it just gobbled up the branch, the power this thing had was truly amazing for such a small unit. I had a decent size brush pile that had accumulated, I found as I went along the blades did dull and it wasn't quite the "beast" it had been after about an hour of work, but it still did its job and I got through the pile without having to worry about rotating the blades (in the manual you can flip the blades they are reversable but I didn't have to mess with that yet).This unit does great on branches, and it mulches stuff down really well. At first it nearly turned branches into a powder, as time went on with use it produced small "chip" type mulch as the blades dulled some. My dogs have ruined the grass in my yard (3 big dogs, med size yard lol) so I wanted to use the mulch back in my yard and just dump it in the ruts the dogs had made, and I didn't want bigger chunks where I was gonna run into that with the lawn mower. This worked GREAT for that. If your expecting "store bought" quality landscaping wood chips from this, your probably going to be disappointed. But if your wanting to grind up branches to get them out of the way and reuse the mulch for practical purposes this does the trick.It WILL for sure clog if you start feeding it smaller twigs, or anything still 'green". Most of my pile was dried out, but I had some more recent fresh cut stuff in there. Its easy to pop the cover and clean out any clogs tho. Just remember to unplug unit first for safety. Its also recommended to keep back a few branches to use later on if you have alot of twiggy stuff. The branches help clean the blades, twiggy stuff tends to turn into mush and can start to cake on and stick to the blades, feeding it a branch periodically clears that away.For really small twigs, anything that resembles a vine, or leaves....this isn't gonna work for that. I knew thats not what it was intended for when I bought it, but I thought maybe I could see if it would work for that but I soon found it does NOT work well at all for stuff like that, its a royal pain to feed stuff like that into the unit, it clogs the unit, and it doesn't do a good job at mulching that type of thing anyway. But again thats not what this was intended for anyway, so its not a strike against the unit.I have alot of trees, and this is so much easier then trying to hunt someone down all the time to haul stuff off. I'm really happy with my purchase.