What is the difference between a chipper and a mulcher

Never feed wood with any metal fragments found on it into a chipper. Manure and other animal waste can smear and get stuck in crevices making equipment hard to clean and maintain.

Chainsaws and hedge trimmers can fast-track pruning hedges and lopping branches from trees. Leaf blowers offer a quick and easy way to tidy up remaining piles of leaves and small debris. Mini loaders and earth movers like bobcats, mini excavators and mini dumpers can also be helpful for moving garden waste around, and for tackling larger landscaping jobs.

Talk to us about all of your landscaping needs, or find your local branch. These tools happen to be similar in appearance and purpose, and may even be easily confused if one is not careful. Do you want to know the difference between these two? Do you wish to know which of them is better for you? The rest of this article will describe the major differences between these two tools, their unique functions, and which is better.

A wood chipper is a large outdoor power tool whose main purpose is to reduce wood material such as tree branches, trunks, stumps or sticks, into smaller and manageable wood chips. These tools are usually quite portable, mounted on wheels and frames that are suitable for towing behind a truck or van. Their features include a large hopper where the wood is fed into, a long chute which serves as a disposal part to eject the chips, and their major source of power which is a gas engine.

Located on the inside of this machine is a large flywheel that has a blade or blades attached to one side. This wheel spins at a high speed and cuts the wood into smaller chips. Those chips are then ejected from the machine through the chute. The main purpose of wood chippers as a machine is simply to chip wood, or more eloquently put, to convert large chunks of wood into smaller, refined wood chips.

It may be hard for some to believe but this machine is not filled with tiny lumberjacks, in fact, the internal region of the machine is stacked with more sophisticated technology. This equipment is basically formed by several parts and features which include the hopper, the chipper, the collar, the chute, and the collection bin.

Just like any standard high powered tools like the chainsaw or snow blower , this piece of equipment has an engine that is powered either by electricity or fossil-fuels and is connected to the blades through pulleys and v-belts often controlled by a gearbox.

All these systems operate together to pull the blades together with the pulley at a speed set by the internal gears. The blades located inside the chipper work either on separate shafts or on intermesh, both providing different speeds and chipping precision.

The chunks of wood are then spread between two chutes, one shredding them into chips and off into the collection bucket, and the other, equipped with additional tools, mulching other alternative materials such as leaves.

The mulching chute is usually the larger one between the two. There are also certain industrial wood chippers that have layers of curtain chains that are attached internally to the machine that strips the bark off of the wood passing through. At first glance, wood shredders may look like the smaller version of wood chippers only with a few physical differences.

Wood shredders have a chute through which the wood materials are fed in and an opening where the material is to be ejected out. Internally, wood shredders have slightly blunt blades that are called flails, which are used to break down or reduce small chunks of organic material. There are some apparent things that you will notice in wood shredders, one of which is that they have two hoppers instead of one and they do not have that long ejection chute like the wood chipper.

Wood shredders operate in ways similar to that of a weed whacker, only that the strings are placed vertically and are attached to a central drum. This is because they cannot handle any hard material of any kind, hence they are not considered wood shredders.

For contractors and larger commercial applications Eliet and TS Industrie are experts developing innovative solutions in the field of shredding green waste and wood and collectively offer solutions capable of processing material with diameters up to 23cm.

As the requirement to cut larger material increases so does the power required to drive the machines. For small private garden use machines powered by an electric motor can produce great results on smaller diameter material such as the Eliet Neo or Maestro. But for larger diameter materials larger engine driven machines are required with much larger horsepower to process larger volumes of material. This is an easy question to answer — In the garden where the material is cut down.

Sometimes this is not possible however and traditional commercial machines are generally towed behind a small truck with a tipper body for the waste material meaning all the material has to be dragged to the roadside for processing. The best option is to take the shredder into the garden and process the material where it is cut.

Shredders for example the Eliet Prof 6 and Super Prof have now been developed as hydrostatically driven wheeled machines or for rough terrain tracked machines allowing the landscaper to get right to the job and so minimise the manual handling of the waste material.

Can I buy a machine to process decomposing wood heaps and leaves? Yes, a green waste shredder should, if designed and correctly operated, easily be able to cope with the efficient disposal of leaves and moist material where standard chippers would struggle or even fail. For large commercial applications where whole trees are being processed it is unlikely that there will be sufficient space on site to simply shred the material and leave it to decompose.

Shredders such as the Eliet Mega Prof and the range of machines form the TS Industrie 'Green Series' all of which are trailed, have been developed to process these large volumes of material. These are most certainly high volume, high capacity machines. For the processing of wood rather than green waste the traditional wood chipper is still very often the choice of many, its simple cutting mechanism of blades mounted on a flywheel cut against a fixed block provides quick and efficient processing of wood.

However as wood burning stoves and fires have increased in popularity, many would consider simply chipping this material a waste of a valuable potential fuel source. That being said there is still very much a requirement for commercial woodchippers and high performing chippers such as the comprehensive range of 'Wood Series' Commercial Woodchippers from TS Industrie which ensures a solution for almost any task.

The extensive offering includes a wide range of commercial woodchippers that can chip branches up to a maximum diameter of 23cm, into clean fine wood chips. These commercial wood chippers bring versatility, efficiency, and flexibility in all cutting and pruning activities.

These machines are mobile with purpose-built trailers for using on the road or as PTO models to fit on tractors. Commercial woodchippers, feature the simple yet tried and tested cutting disc system that can create perfectly sized wood chips, which can be used as ground cover or if stored appropriately burned and used as Biofuel.

Commercial chippers should have systems so the chipper blades can easily be adjusted to the counter edge, so increasing the time between blades and maximizing efficiency.