I’ve changed my mind on woodchippers

So I had this thought years ago that chipping the wood debris was the answer to keeping things tidy in suburbia. My only experience over the years has been commercial units that arborist’s have access to. So fast forward to today. I’m cutting down an arborvitae hedge and I asked my neighbor if I could borrow his chipper because I was worried the neighbors would turn me in to the city for untidiness or some nonsense. Wow! That thing was incredibly hard to use. It was a gas powered unit that could probably do 2.5” stuff. Pretty standard residential stuff. The branches were constantly jamming. The motor was super loud and smelly. It’s burning gas which isn’t great. I’m exhausted after just an hour of using it. After this experience I think I’ll just continue what I’ve been doing which is spend a little more time chopping branches into smallish pieces and spreading them around as is. The mushrooms can do the rest.
It’s way way less work to just distribute things around the yard and stack up the bigger chunks for firewood.

Yep. Small chippers suck.

We have had a couple - my dad was keen - and they have been universally underwhelming. They work well on small stuff that would compost fairly quickly anyway, but don't cope well with the stuff that is slightly too heavy for easy composting, but is too small for firewood.

These days we make all that stuff into biochar instead. It works great, provided you can let it dry for a while. I use a trench system which can process a huge amount of material quickly, and with minimal handling and cutting of feed material.

The best system I’ve seen is a very sturdy table, like a butchers table, set up next to your compost space. Put the garden cuttings on the block and chop it up with a machete. Something like this:

The first chipper I could tolerate was the Titan that attaches to my tractor PTO.  As someone commented earlier, small chippers seem to jam on anything heavier than an oak leaf.

I have two chippers.  One is a 15 HP Stanley CH5 and the other is my big Woodmaxx PTO chipper.  Both work great.  The smaller chipper will chip 3" branches with no issues, the big one will chip an 8" log.  I wouldn't want one smaller than the 15 HP one, but it works great for small jobs like cleaning up after limbing a tree.  The really small ones sold as "home use" are generally, as you said, more trouble than they are worth.

The two I have: