Troy-Bilt CSV 206 Chipper Shredder Vacuum - A Review

One of my favorite companies to work with is Troy-Bilt. Not because I get to try out new garden "toys" (although I do love that!), but because they truly want to know what I think of their products. They urge me to be very honest in my assessment of whatever I'm reviewing, so that they can make improvements on them, based on a real gardener's point of view and experience.

This spring, they allowed me my choice of an item to test and I chose the CSV 206 Chipper Shredder Vacuum.  We live on a property that has many old oak trees, several of which are an estimated 150-200 years old, and they are constantly losing twigs and small branches.  Just bits and pieces of dead ones will fall from the sky, and following a storm, there's an abundance of them. We often thought it would be nice if we could shred them to use for mulch around our trees and shrubs.

We also have several young trees that need pruning from time to time and we thought it would be nice if we could somehow use the cuttings in a productive way, rather than having to burn them all the time.

Troy-Bilt to the rescue!

Right from the start, both Romie and I were impressed with the way the shredder ground up the wood. Wait.  Let's back that up a little - back to that starting business.  When Romie first started it the day it arrived, the first thing he said to me was, "You're never going to be able to start this. It's a pull start and it pulls too hard for you."

Hmph. Let me be the judge of that.  All the digging in the garden and hauling of mulch counts for something, doesn't it?  And I've been a dental hygienist for 33 years now.  Did he think removing tartar from teeth all that time didn't help keep my arms in pretty darn good shape?

Let it be known that I was able to start the CSV on my first pull.  No, it wasn't a cold start, and I'll admit, it was a very hard pull, but I was able to do it. So there.  My pride intact, we went on to see how it would handle stuffing tree branches down its throat.

It did just fine, thankyouverymuch, as you will see in this video we made:




The CSV 206 chopped the branches and leaves into a fine grade suitable for mulching:




The second task we put upon the CSV was the vacuum end of things.  No problem there, either.  While we don't have the volume of leaves right now that we'll have this fall, it sucked them right up.  I'm not sure why Romie ran it so slowly in this video, because he did it much faster when I wasn't filming him and it picked the leaves up just as well.




This is really going to come in handy for keeping our compost bin full and not only that, by chopping things up as finely as it does, this will help things decompose more quickly, giving us compost more quickly, too.

The verdict?  Win-Win, with one demerit for the pull start being a little hard to pull.

Thank you, Troy-Bilt, for giving us the opportunity to put the CSV 206 through its paces, where it came through with flying colors, and for making our lives a little easier here at Our Little Acre.

For a really great review of Troy-Bilt 's Chipper/Shredder without the vacuum, head over to read Snarky Vegan's review.

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The product or merchandise being reviewed in this blog post was the sole compensation for testing and reviewing the product. All opinions expressed here are mine, with no suggestions whatsoever by the manufacturer or distributor. If I like it, I'll say so. If I don't, I'll say that, too.