( 3 reviews )
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Posted: Jul 10 2008
This is a fantastic heavy duty shredder. We use it in my office every single day shredding more than 500 pages per day plus CD's, DVD's. Not a single problem so far since we bought it about a year ago. The only problem is the price. Very high but you get what you pay for. I bought before several cheaper machines and now I don't have any of those. So it is worth it.
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Posted: Mar 31 2008
Though obviously targeted for an office, light commercial setting, I sought a new, beefier shredder to replace my personal-size Fellowes cross-cutting shredder at home. The latter is still chugging along just fine -- kudos to Fellowes -- but I grew annoyed with its relatively small basket which seemed to require emptying all the time and which was cumbersome (lifting the whole heavy cutting unit out, little pieces of confetti flying all over, etc.). Besides, the personal-size unit wasn't rated for chewing up CDs and credit-cards and wouldn't keep up with the demands for my end-of-year shredding frenzy without rest periods. The significantly discounted C-320C available through Amazon proved too tempting for my OCD-ness and so I bought one. First, one should take note of the weight -- well over 100 pounds. Note as of this review, the Amazon site states a shipping weight of 50 pounds which is obviously in error. This *is* a heavy beast. I'm very grateful it's on casters which makes moving it a breeze. The large capacity and separately removable basket is easily accessed through the front panel. No more lifting of the actual cutting unit like my personal-size unit and no more pieces of shredded material ending up all over the place. A pleasant and unexpected surprise, for me, was the relative noise-level as compared to my personal-size unit. Because the cutting unit is more "contained" within the C-320C, it's actually quieter than my personal-size shredder -- a real bonus. The C-320C doesn't hint at straining with larger volumes of paper or even credit-cards. I love it save for one issue which prevents my giving it a 5-star rating: the smell. Particularly when arriving brand new, the C-320C has a strong metal and oil odor which I was able to smell throughout the entire first floor of my house. While I recognized, and still do, that this unit is targeted for commercial applications, the odor in even a large office would not go unnoticed. Thankfully, it seems to be dissipating (or I'm just getting accustomed to it), ;-). Nevertheless, I have absolutely no regrets. This shredder more quietly and expediently devours the avalanche of those pesky credit-card offers mailed to me in volume on a daily basis. There's no hint of strain or complaint when I shred numerous confidential material I occasionally bring home from my office or print locally which I now no longer need to cart to my office for shredding. My relative light use of this shredder compared to the target users has not required yet for me to perform the oil-maintenance. I'm hopeful it won't be messy nor re-infuse the unit with that odor.
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( 3 of 3 found this review helpful ) Posted: Feb 22 2007
Our office needed a replacement for a shredder that we had overused and mistreated for about seven years. Shredding, routinely, between 500 -3,000 sheets of paper per day with the curve rising quickly, we needed to find a machine that would 1) deal easily with a seemingly ever increasing volume of paper. 2) shred it into confetti-cut to assure complete destruction of confidential data and 3) had the capacity to shred not only paper, but plastic cards, CDs and to not be easily jammed by commonplace staples and the paper clips that people routinely fail to remove before shredding documents. After a goodly amount of research and discussion, we settled on this Fellows C-320C and, after several months of operation are pleased to report that it is meeting our needs and expectations in all ways. Fellows is probably one of the better known brands of shredders. I own one at home that I purchased at COSTCO and am delighted with it's reliable performance after almost two years. I shall expect nothing less than that from this one at work. Not only does it 'handle' plastic credit cards, CDs, staples and paper clips - it has a separate slot into which cards and CDs can be inserted for destruction. The confetti-cut setting yields pieces 5/32" X 1 - 1/8"; small enough to ensure the security we require. It offers a choice of strip or confetti-cut settings. This may be important to you because the settings differ in their shredding capacities. Set on Confetti, it lists itself as having the capacity to shred 7,000 pages per day, and being able to shred 14-16 pages at one pass. Set on Strip-cut (7/32"), a simpler, somewhat less secure, but good for most common usages, it's daily capacity is upped to 14,000 and the number of pages that can be handled in a single pass (entry) to 26 - 28. The width of paper is limited to 10" and the card shredding capacity is far more limited to one per pass or a total of ten per day on either setting. Regular maintenance is limited to, as with most machines of this type, a biweekly lubing of the cutting element while running in Reverse for a minute. Hopefully, that's all it takes. It is all other Fellows machines have taken. The lubricant can be had from Fellows (their own brand) or, as I have discovered at home, good quality vegetable oil will accomplish the same thing. The controls are simple, few and easily intuitive. There are only three warning lights: Door not closed, Paper jam and Need to empty the bin, and only four buttons: Off, Forward, Reverse and a Turbo Jam Release... just in case! The shredding feature itself is, of course, automatically activated as one would expect when material is inserted. There are certainly other medium-heavy duty office shredders to consider, but we chose this Fellows and have had no regrets!
