Personal Shredders: Three Things To Look For
If you are shopping for a personal shredder for home or office use
, here are a few things you may want to consider.Type of Cut
Just like steaks and dresses, the cut makes all the difference when it comes to shredders. In the case of your paper shredder, you will be considering one of two choices: Cross cut or strip cut. A strip cut shredder does exactly what you might think; it shreds your documents into long strips. While these types of shredders are better than nothing, and tend to work a little bit faster than their strip cut cousins, as far as real document security goes, they leave a little bit to be desired. In the grand scheme of things, strip cut documents are relatively easy to piece back together, so any information that those documents contain can still be read with a little bit of work from the criminally minded.
Cross cut, on the other hand, creates confetti-like shreds that range from extremely difficult to impossible to piece back together. There was a time that strip cut shredders vastly outperformed cross cut machines in other ways such as speed and sheet capacity, but recognizing the superior security of the cross cut method, manufacturers have essentially closed that performance gap to the point where it makes much more sense in almost every way for consumers to go with a cross cut machine.
Capacity
Even when it comes to personal shredders, capacity matters. First there's sheet capacity, which in the case of a smaller deskside or home-use machine should probably be in the 6-8 range (meaning that your shredder can easily handle that many sheets at a time.) If you are doing small amounts of shredding daily, a machine that can theoretically handle up to 100 sheets per day is fine. You can usually find these numbers at the manufacturer's websites.
The thing to keep in mind with a personal shredder is that it takes a lot of power and energy to shred paper, and that smaller shredders have smaller motors that are designed to only be run for so long (usually in the 15-20 minute range for the better personal machines) before they shut themselves off to prevent overheating. In practical terms, this means that you should probably make a habit of shredding documents as you discard them, rather than letting them pile up and trying to shred a month's worth of documents in one sitting. It's both safer, and easier on your shredder.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect that your personal shredder should shred paper clips, staples, and perhaps even credit cards. If the model you are looking at does not, you might want to see if there's one in your price range that can handle these items.
Safety
If your shredder is going to be in a home with small children, you will have to take some safety measures. A lot of machines come with guards at the feed opening that keep fingers out, and one manufacturer even has a body-heat detector that shuts the machine off when hands get too close. These features, along with keeping the machine out of reach, should be enough to keep kids safe.
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