Tesco Value Strip Cut Shredder > Reviews (8)

I got fed up with having to always tear up bills and other documents that contained personal information so decided to purchase a shredder to make this task much simpler and less time consuming. Having looked around at different shops and online I ended up purchasing this one from Tesco as it was a good price at less than £10 and with this item having a 7litre capacity I thought this would be adequate as it would just be myself who was using it.

It comes in a box that has the familiar Tesco value brand logo on it. It was well packaged and easy to remove from the box. The product is black with 2 sections - the electronic shredding lid and the plastic bin. Fitting the lid on to the bin section was very straightforward and it sat very neatly on top. The lid section has the cable attached which is of adequate length so this gives some freedom as to where it can be used around the home depending on your plug sockets. It's fitted with a 40 watt plug.

When I first tried it out I just put one piece of paper in it. This shredded without any trouble. It shreds the paper into 7mm strips. This machine is only suitable for normal thickness paper and definitely not good for shredding anything such as cardboard, bank cards, etc.

It's recommended to put no more than 5 pieces of normal thickness paper through at a time. Although probably like most people I got a little impatient and put more through and ended up choking the machine. Thankfully this was easily resolved as this product has a reverse button on it and pressing this sorted the problem out and got the paper jam fixed.

Obviously since then I haven't attempted to put through more than a few sheets of paper at a same time. You must place the paper in very straight as if it becomes uneven whilst being fed through it will almost certainly jam the machine and you'll need to use the reverse function to sort this out. It is quite noisy when shredding and makes an awful noise if it becomes chocked up.

I was quite surprised by how quickly the bin fills up and requires emptying otherwise the machine could become chocked if there isn't enough space in the bin for the shredded paper. The buttons on the lid section are clear and easy to understand. There are 8 icons such as warning signs about not putting fingers, water, young children and babies near the shredder. There is also an Auto On, Off and Reverse which works with a slide bar.

Overall I've been pleased with this purchase. Although it can get jammed up from time to time I think this is a problem with many of these types of products no matter what the price of them is. This one does the job extremely well as long as it's not overloaded and the paper is fed into the machine correctly.