Awesome little shredder

After one of my friends had her identity stolen, I decided that my wish to have a shredder was not born out of paranoia, but dire reality. However, I didn’t want a cheap POS strip-cut shredder that would break after a couple of months and still allow my personal information to be read with only a little effort on the part of the bad guys.

After some brief research, I decided on the Fellowes PS80C-2. I have not been disappointed. With the PS80C-2, going to the mailbox for my daily dose of junk mail is soon followed by the satisfying munching sound from those sharp 4 mm (just over ¼”) wide teeth. Because of the large sheet capacity, it becomes unnecessary to even open my junk mail!

As far as I know, the PS80C-2 is the biggest, baddest cross-cut shredder you can get at OfficeMax, which is why I bought it. It will shred up to 10 sheets of letter-size paper at once, including staples and small paperclips. Although it will shred small paperclips, I remove paperclips from the paper to try to keep the teeth sharp as long as possible. It will also shred credit cards and CDs.

I don’t, however, think that the PS80C-2 was designed to shred CDs. The motor is strong enough, but the CDs are made of much harder plastic than credit cards and tend to dance around quite a bit in the throat of the shredder. As a result, although shredding CDs is possible, and produces very satisfying results, I would recommend wearing (safety) glasses for this operation. This is probably true of all cross-cut shredders.

The large control button has 3 settings: off, automatic and reverse. In automatic mode, a LED and photosensitive diode sense the presence of a new piece of paper and automatically start the blades. The built-in wastebasket has a transparent window so you can see if it needs to be emptied. A built-in wastebasket is definitely more convenient and safer than placing the cutting head on top of a freestanding wastebasket. The wastebasket is even equipped with an interlock switch that prevents the shredder from being used while the basket is not in place.

Finally, the shredder comes with a bottle of oil to keep the blades greased. However, given the monthly amount of oil prescribed by the manual, this bottle will not last for more than two months. When it runs out, you can use some regular vegetable-based oil.

The only thing I don’t like about this shredder is the cut size of the confetti it produces. Normally, the cuts are about ¼” by 1”, and I had hoped – perhaps unrealistically – that they would be smaller. That being said, this is still a lot less likely to be reconstructed by any would-be identity thief than the products of a strip-cut shredder.

In summary, I like this shredder, expect that it will last me a long time, and be well worth the $199 plus tax I paid for it.

Update added on 7/11/04: the plastic dividers mentioned in other reviews are indeed present in the shredder head and do indeed get clogged with errant bits of confetti over time. However, the plastic dividers are not nearly as flimsy as might have been expected from reading these other reviews, and I expect that cleaning out these errant bits every month before lubricating the cutting head will limit the severity of this problem.