Powershred LX45 Cross Cut Shredder

The LX45 is the smallest and lightest machine Fellowes offers in the LX line: 10.4 pounds, a 4.4-gallon bin, eight sheets a pass and a cabinet barely wider than a sheet of paper.

It is also fast for its size. Fellowes rates it at about 12 feet per minute, which works out at roughly 96 sheets a minute of throughput — more than double what the larger LX65 manages. For someone feeding a few sheets at a time, that speed is more noticeable in daily use than the sheet capacity.

Key Features

• Eight sheets per pass on 20 lb paper at DIN 66399 P-4.
• Cross-cut at 5/32 x 1 15/32 in (about 4 x 37 mm, roughly 148 mm² per particle).
• About 12 ft/min shred speed, roughly 96 sheets a minute of throughput.
• Nine-inch paper entry — full width despite the small cabinet, so legal and A4 feed unfolded.
• Shreds credit cards, junk mail, paper clips and staples as well as paper.
• Patented Safety Lock, plus auto start/stop, automatic reverse on jams and a manual reverse.
• 4.4-gallon bin in a 13.00 x 8.25 x 14.94 in cabinet weighing 10.43 lb.
• One-year machine warranty with five years on the cutters.

The duty cycle is the specification that defines this machine's role: six minutes on, twenty minutes off. That is a personal shredder's budget and there is no way to read it otherwise. Six minutes at eight sheets a pass will handle a day's post or a small envelope of statements comfortably. It will not handle a drawer, and if you try, you will spend most of the afternoon waiting for the cool-down.

The Safety Lock is worth a mention because it is unusual at this price. It disables the machine so that it cannot be started accidentally, which is the feature to look for if the shredder lives in a household with children rather than an office.

Specifications

Sheet ratings are Fellowes' figures for 8.5 x 11 in, 20 lb paper. Fellowes publishes no decibel value for this model, so no noise row is shown.

What's in the Box

Shredder with 4.4-gallon bin and power cord. Fellowes specifies its own non-aerosol vegetable-based shredder oil, part 35250, applied each time the waste bin is emptied. Aerosol lubricants must never be used in a shredder.

Who Should Buy This — and Who Should Not

Buy the LX45 as a household or single-desk shredder for the ordinary run of personal paper: statements, junk mail with your name on it, delivery notes, expired paperwork. At P-4 it is a genuine confidential-destruction level rather than a token one, the full-width entry means nothing has to be folded, and at ten and a half pounds it can live in a cupboard between uses.

Do not buy it for an office. Six minutes on and twenty off is a hard limit, and a 4.4-gallon bin will need emptying every hundred sheets or so; the LX65 gives you ten sheets and six gallons, and the LX200 steps up to twelve sheets, a finer cut and ten minutes of running. Do not buy it if you need CDs or DVDs destroyed. And if a policy names P-5, nothing in the LX line reaches it.