Can Paper Shredders That Automatically Feed Cause Congestion?

Over the past 15 years, some paper shredder manufacturers have invested significantly in automation by adding automatically feeding machines to their ranges. This time saving way of shredding has been embraced enormously, particularly since they have become more affordable and ranges have been expanded.

Now days the vast ranges of sizes, security levels and capabilities available vary greatly to suit those WFH and at Offices of all sizes be it Government or Private Enterprise.

With many returning back to the office since the pandemic, could an auto feed shredder cause congestion when more than one person needs to shred? Potentially this can be the case for some shredder brands but why? Some auto feed shredders cannot shred automatically and manually at the same time.

Here’s where congestion can happen.
With more than one user needing to use the shredder, if auto feeding is in progress, manual feeding is not possible however the pages can be added to the stack for auto feeding. Where congestion cannot be avoided is when automatically shredding is in progress with the automatic shredding lid locked, preventing paper being added to the stack.

How to avoid congestion at the shredder?
The simple answer is to have more than one shredder, however you need to assess is this a common or infrequent situation? If this happens often, probably a buying second shredder would be of benefit saving time however if the need is infrequent, perhaps waiting for when the shredder is next available could be workable. For those considering a second shredder, the questions needs to be asked do you have enough floor space? For offices in buildings covering entire floors, having more than one shredder may also be more practical, particularly if there is more than one resource printing room per floor.

Where else can an automatic feeding paper shredder be the cause of congestion?

1. Due to the speed an auto feeding a stack, this is not completed in an instant and manually feeding is always a much faster way to shred the same amount of paper even with smaller sized manual shredders. However, we are mostly time poor and when auto feed shredding, there is no human element of time required to feed the stack. Although time shredding takes longer when automatically feeding, ultimately time saved auto shredding adds up to incredible amounts of time savings over the life of the machine, easily justifying the investment automating this otherwise tedious task.
   
   
2. Large Clean Outs to shred can be very time consuming even when using auto feed paper shredders. 20 archive boxes of paper for example could contain 200,000 sheets. Put into perspective and based on using a 400 sheet auto feed shredder, at best completing this process would involve:

• • Reloading the auto feed tray 500 times
    - Actual Time Loading (30 seconds) = 4 Hours
    - Actual Time Auto Feeding = 125 Hours
    - TOTAL TIME = 129 Hours
  • Emptying the shredder 300 times
  • Waiting for cool down if machine does not have a continuous operation.

In comparison, a heavy-duty hand feed commercial paper shredder with continuous operation will complete the same task much faster. And although hand feed shredding is required, the pure time savings from start to finish is about a 125 hour faster result. Here’s the difference:

• Time shredding 200,000 sheets using a 40xpage per pass machine = 4 hours
• Emptying 100 times
• Continuous operation with no waiting for cool down

For bulk shredding purposes, commercial grade heavy duty paper shredders are clearly the best solution, enabling completion of the same task in a fraction of the time.