How to cleanup leaves and what to do with them. Leaf mulching Worx leaf mulcher vs sunjoe shredder

next two Testament judges today we're gonna go over wall cleanup leaf control now obviously Movember fell upon my face but fall is growing up all over the place in my house right now so what do we do with all these leaves now if you're being honest with yourself most of us is just gonna throw it in the trash and we're gonna throw our kids in the trash to jump on the leaves to make as much room as possible but what if I told you there's a better way now trees are pretty much miners they're taking trace minerals out of the soil and they push them through the leaves well all those minerals and nutrients are still in the leaves and it's important we get them back down to the soil now these trace elements are derived from nitrogen phosphorus potassium calcium and magnesium now these leaves in their current state are gonna end up matting together and they're gonna form a pretty thick weed barrier so we have to make a couple of choices we need to break down the leaves if we want to take advantage of all these trace minerals and we need to figure out where we want to put supporter remember there's a couple of problems that we have to solve number one leaves need to be broken down in order for the soil to grab those trace nutrients so you got a couple of options you can shred them you can Whittle them down as small as they'll go or you can make a compost and put it back on the lawn as a top dressing now in either case I find that the initial thing to do is to start by leaf mulching now this video will be comparing the WORX leaf mulcher against the Sun Joe leaf mulcher now we're putting these two a head-to-head because they were the top two in their category now the ratings are great they have a space saver design both of them are virtually the same size they're about 22 inches in diameter and when you're only using this once or twice a year space-saving is a big deal now the WORX leaf mulcher they spent some time engineering this thing getting in the box and you can see the way that the legs are tucking into the cylinder they designed this for space-saving now right off the bat you can tell the Sun Joe it's also tight in its packaging but the obvious difference is there's nowhere to put the legs so on a design aspect in storage aspect I to give point number one to the WORX leaf mulcher now as far as setup goes the setup was pretty painless neither one of these units require any tools now the worst leaf mulcher was pretty painless to set up I got to be honest with you the design aspect of it is really simple it took me about one minute and eight seconds from start to finish the Sun Joe leaf mulcher took me 2 minutes and 19 seconds so you're probably wondering why it took so long well it's got some additional pieces in the legs on the Sun Joe which is a positive thing our adjustable wear on the works they are not adjustable now I did run into a problem with the main cylinder or hopper the Leafs go into was a little misshapen from the factory and I had to wrench on it just a little bit to get it to fit now once I got the proper fit on it I really don't have any problems with it and it looks great now first glance the Sun Joe is about an inch and a half taller once the legs are fully extended out by comparison to the works now both of them just have a cylinder hopper where the leaves feed in and it's a glorified string trimmer both these units are exactly the same when it comes to the design aspect of being a string tray now the work system is a fairly simple unit it's got one speed and one speed alone and an on and off button now it's for the Sun Joe one of the primary differences is it's got the shield that goes into the hopper that reduces the diameter of the area that allows the leaves to feed into the hopper now frankly I'm not sure if this is a positive or a negative at this point but the Sun Joe definitely wins when it comes to customizations and options the Sun Joe does let you adjust the legs where the work system does not now this will come in handy if you've got a slight decline or incline and you need to create a flat surface thing you're not gonna be able to do that with the works but with the Sun Joe you can now the biggest difference between the Sun Joe and the works is the ability that the Sun Joe has to speed up or slow down the string trimmer it's got several options you can use one setting for wet leaves grass and thatch dry leaves medium speed for dry leaves and then for dry leaves a fine speed now my opinion the only difference this made was how fast the string trimmer was running now with either one of these units there's a couple of additional items that you're gonna need to have or purchase now one is an extension cord they're both run through electricity you're gonna have to have some gloves and some eye gear to protect your eyes from the debris coming out and you're gonna need some sort of bag to catch all the leaves coming out of the machine either leaf mulcher will use plastic bags like the Husky 32 gallon bags that I have here there's a couple of key differences you'll notice the works machine has that cylinder at the top the bag tucks in really really nice now the Sun Joe has these elastic holders on the outer edges of the motor and I found they were a huge inconvenience now the elastics made it very difficult to get the bag centered underneath the unit but they were also hard to use like it was not as easy as it seems and I could have been making it more difficult than it should have been but I wasn't super confident that it was gonna hold the bags to their full capacity without causing problem now I'm all about the convenience factor and I didn't want to deal with the billion plastic bags everywhere so I bought these Pro garden leaf bags and they came with a bonus leaf scooper in it now these bags are pretty legit I was kind of surprised now there are thirty gallon equivalent but they're also made out of canvas and they're really sturdy now the biggest thing about these pop ups is most of them they just kind of wobble to and fro and these kind of stay in place and they came with the bonus leaf scooper hands which is really nice because I didn't have to buy them separate and it makes picking up leaves a breeze now these garden bags work perfect for the WORX system I mean they fit really really snug now as for the Sun Joe system it didn't fit as snug I was able to just kind of play with a little bit and I got it down to like a quarter of an inch gap around the entire thing but the legs just kind of got in the way a little bit now the only other thing to mention is you will need a heavier age extension cable for the son Joe where you don't need that for the work she need a 14 gauge or a 12 gauge depending on the length now about the only other thing we're missing is leaves where can I get some leaves now luckily for us they're just fallen from the sky and I ended up with about 23 bags to drive me crazy no these are basically glorified strange members but I tell you what man this is spinning like nobody's business it's from a different planet shocked me a little bit now according to the Box the Sun Joe is supposed to do a better job it's got a cutting ratio or a clipping ratio of 16 to 1 and it also supposed to do 55 gallons of Leafs per minute where the works has an 11 to 1 ratio and it has a 53 gallons per minute cutting as well so there's a couple of differences on the box son Joe say hey we're better let's get to it let's see what's going on but I think I'm gonna recruit some hell for this [Music] see I make it a massive mess because my workers here don't get paid enough but million-dollar question is is how well does it shred so let's look at the Sun Joe and you can see I mean it's it's doing a good job it's uh it's pretty fine there's a lot of finer pieces in here pretty happy with this on a mulch standard as it gets wet it's really gonna decompose and then on the work side man guys I gotta say the works is chopping it a lot better what do you guys think don't seem like there is fine okay so round one I'm gonna give to the works and I'll tell you why number one most importantly it grinds everything up a lot better than the actual Sun Joe the problem that we're having with the Sun Joe is that top plate it makes it so much slower I mean I'm grinding twice as fast with it works too now if I were to guess the Sun Joe did that top plate to slow down so you can kind of feed it in to get a better cut but with the worx machine you can see how quick and easy this is and it makes it a lot faster now I spent some time and burn the midnight oil dropping bag after bag after bag now I did about ten bags in the Sun Joe leaf-mulcher in about ten bags in the works leaf mulcher now I learned a couple of lessons number one these are glorified string trimmers breaking the line is part of the deal it's going to happen it's not a matter of if it's not a matter of when the lines are just going to break now the good news is they were really easy to change out unlike a traditional string trimmer for your yard these took about 30 seconds to swap out both sides and you don't necessarily have to have a proprietary line sanyo or through works but i do recommend getting the same diameter line that came with machines now the other lesson that I learned is the son Joe is a lot slower in the process than the work system it's that top plate and there's really nothing you can do about it except for just grin and bear it you have to constantly push your hand into the feeder and feed the leaves in where the works machine until the string on the string trimmer breaks your going and it is a lot faster now I would dare say that the specs on the box for the works at 53 gallons per minute are about right if you feed it correctly now to feed the son Joe correctly there's really no way that you're getting the specified I think it's 53 or 56 gallons per minute it's a lot slower than X you have to consistently feed the hopper with your hands now because these are string trimmers I hit my gloves on the strings a couple of times I thought it was gonna hurt it didn't hurt there was really not a lot of risk in putting my hand in there now don't don't just do it to prove me wrong and cut your hand off but I still have all my finger now after we're done mulching the leaves we had to put them somewhere and I wanted to put them directly underneath my tree I want to watch the whole decomposing process happening and now we started out with 20 32 gallon bags for a total of 640 gallons of just dry leaves now we mulch them into these garden pro bags that I have now these bags are 30 gallons and we reduce the size down to 8 bags full now mathematically that equals 240 gallons so we had a total of a 62 percent reduction in the amount of total space that these leaves were taking up after we mulch them now the ratios on the Box say 11 to 1 and a 13 to 1 ratio I found it was more more or less about a seven point five to one ratio one of the questions I had for myself is will the works and the Sanjo leaf-mulcher x' do a better job than as if I just use my mower what if I just raked all the leaves into my lawn and modem up who wins the battle I have an old Honda it's probably twelve years old however it's a commercial grade Honda with the quad cut system on it so I'm really interested to seeing what's gonna do a better job will be the leaf mulcher or will it be this let's just do some comparisons so I got that power right there and you can see a lot of big chunks and then I'm just gonna take some of this stuff that we've melted up with the leaf mulcher and I got a few seeds in in the leaf mulcher pile I really think that these probably just came off to the tree recently however you can see in my mow pile here a lot of big chunks and the other thing I don't like is I got grass in here as well Winnie mow and I've mowed recently too which just goes to show that the grass is still growing you can see pretty big chunks when we get in here it's about half the size so I give it to the leaf vultures it works better alright so I sat long and hard trying to figure out how to level the playing field between these two devices and I started thinking about it and the strings inside each one of these are different quality is different so what I did is I grabbed some of the extras that I had just lying around with my Ryobi string trimmer and I'm gonna swap these out now luckily for me these things are so easy to swap out so if that's a concern don't let it be a concern the strings on it takes literally about five seconds each and then voila I'm done and off to the races so let's go see the results okay so dump the pile out on the left for the works on the right we have the Sun Joe and the results are kind of shocking I was not ready for this we had the same exact diameter line you can see on the works file it's a little chunky and it didn't chew it up quite as nicely as it did before but the son Joe performed amazing with that other line now with the works the the line is thinner in diameter and the son Joe by default is a thicker diameter wire but man I mean this looks fantastic and then if we just grab a little bit of the stuff that we've been grinding up just to do a third comparison just by default [Music] you can see that the the OEM wires do better overall but that green Ryobi wire well it's not even a Ryobi wire I just got it that fits the ryobi but with the son Joe I mean it it shredded up brilliantly so kind of shocked now all things considered at the end of the day I'm going to be using the works over the son Joe now the reason being is number one overall it just worked it saved me a ton of time number two the real winner of this video were those lawn bags that I have are amazing now they'd pick up the debris dies but they tuck into the works unit well and I found that the son Joe unit it was throwing out leaves side to side now you could easily say okay well I'm not gonna use those bags so I'll go the other route but the bottom line is around the cylinder the son Joe actually has rubber bands to hold the bag in where the works does not now the works does not have a leveling device like the son Joe does but again ease of use breaking the units down storage everything goes to the works over the son Joe but if you guys have any questions or comments hit me up let me know I'd love to help you guys out till the next time guys with the pestle on digit later [Music]

Channel: Pest and Lawn Ginja

Views: 227,569

Rating: 4.8584852 out of 5

Keywords: how to cleanup leaves in yard, how to cleaup leaves in yard, how to bag leaves, leaf clean up with lawn mower, yard cleanup, leaf rake, leaf cleanup made easy, how to do a leaf clean up job, tips for cleaning up leaves, worx leaf mulcher, sun joe electric leaf shredder, leaf mulcher, mulching leaves, leaf cleanup, leaf clean up, leaf clean up tips, leaf vacuum, pest and lawn ginja, how to do a leaf clean up, fall leaf clean up tips, leaf blower

Id: zbNrr1w5cQk

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/LifeBasedDiet]

An old lawn mower also does a great job breaking leaves down. Could be a good alternative!

[u/Winkie1]

Cool vid. I love my hammer mill echo though. Comes out like sawdust;)

[u/wlai]

Just saw this and while Worx does work better, it's almost twice the price of a Sun Joe. Wonder if the speed advantage really is worth it