Jeff McRitchie

Dahle 20506 Office Strip - Cut Paper Shredder Review

Designed for centralized use within a busy office, the Dahle 20506 is meant to be placed in a copy or fax area for quick and easy use. In this review that follows, we will take a closer look at the 20506 and give you a list of what we consider to be its strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths:

1. The paper feed width of the 20506 is nice and wide at 10.25 inches, which will see you through the vast majority of the shredding jobs of a typical office. Letter and legal sized sheets will fit easily through this opening as will other slightly larger documents.
2. With a capacity of up to 30 sheets at a time, the 20506 is a machine that can handle most jobs. This shredder can process somewhere between 400 and 2,000 sheets per day, meaning that it can likely meet the needs of most busy offices. The 20506 would be ideal for placement in the copy and fax machine area, giving your employees the ability to shred confidential documents as needed, rather than letting them sit around or pile up.
3. When a shredder is centrally placed for general use, sometimes the inherent noise can be a bit of a distraction for the rest of the office. To help remedy this, the 20506 encases its cutting shafts in an all steel frame and places that frame on rubber shock mounts. This greatly reduces the vibration of the cabinet and makes for very quiet operation.
4. The cutting heads are made of the best German steel, and are guaranteed for the life of the machine. The rest of the 20506's parts carry a warranty of two years.

Weaknesses:

1. The 20506 is a strip cut shredder, and as such only offers a security level of 2. This is fine for general documents, but not for information that could be considered extremely sensitive or confidential. If you or your employees are going to need a higher level of security, you may have to step up to a machine like the Dahle 20514 office shredder, which cuts sheets into a cross cut or confetti pattern, and thus offers a higher level of security.
2. The 20506's motor is only one half HP, which is not as powerful as some of the rest of their line. While this should provide plenty of power for the use for which this machine is intended, you will have to make sure that you learn its limits and don't work it to the point of overheating.
3. With a capacity of 16 gallons, we found that the shred bag filled up a little more quickly than we would have liked. This is especially true on a strip cut model like the 20506. It may not be such a problem on the cross cut models.
4. As Dahle's auto oiling add on mechanism can't be used with this machine, you will need to make sure that you oil it at proper intervals. This is not a big deal or a major detraction, (just normal shredder maintenance), but it is something that you should be aware of nonetheless.

Article Tags: Dahl 20506

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