One hassle that came with moving to the island is that I went from Northern California dry to mist forest humidity. Things that handle paper fared poorly. I wasn’t surprised that I started having trouble with my printer jamming. Even the scanner was consistently double- (and triple- and quadruple-) sheeting. While a disappointment, it wasn’t a total surprise. What did surprise me is that my shredder stopped working. Of course, the sheet feeder failed. That wasn’t a surprise. But even carefully feeding it single sheets, one at a time, it would grind slower and slower and eventually stopped altogether.
I bought a brand-new shredder to address my growing backlog of documents in need of disposal, but it only lasted a few days before it became very slow. Even though it was rated for six sheets maximum, anything over two would cause it to overheat. Eventually, it would overheat and stop with even a single sheet. I disassembled it and cleaned out a bunch of chad that had wrapped around the cutters. It shredded only a few more sheets before it was grinding to a halt again. The most common bit of online advice was “don’t use it when/where it’s humid.” Great. Days with humidity below 80% are downright rare here, and usually my mail (the biggest source of shredder fodder by far) is already saturated when I pick it up from the post office.
I did run into mentions of shredder lubricating sheets. I’d always hand-oiled shredders when I bothered at all, but it seemed as though more thorough lubrication might help. I ordered some lubricating sheets. They got lost in transit. I ordered more. After many weeks, they showed up. I took the shredder apart and cleaned it meticulously. I ran a couple of lubricating sheets through it, and let it run in reverse for a minute or two after. (Running in reverse occasionally does seem to help keep the chad from building up.) Since then, I’ve been carefully giving it one sheet at a time. It’s slow, but I think it’s going to hold up. I’ll just be doing my scanning and shredding on island time.
The shredded paper is useful for starting fires in our woodstove, and providing nesting material for the chickens.
—2p