Does Buying a Woodchipper Make Sense?

Branches go in one end, and mulch comes out the other - sounds amazing - but this magic act does not come cheap. Are woodchippers worth the money? Read on to find out!

I use a lot of mulch - both in my garden and on my property. For years I have relied on getting mulch from tree services, often for free, and sometimes for a price - but recently I've been finding it hard to source¹. No one seems to want to give it to me for free, and paying for it now costs more every year. I have contemplated buying a woodchipper for years. I have a reasonably large property; lots of trees and brush; and many neighbors who are always cutting down trees and brush. From a resources point of view, a woodchipper makes sense. So I bought one - but was that a good decision? In this article I take a look at the numbers - because the number’s don’t lie.

Return on Investment

The question of whether it makes financial sense to buy a woodchipper is one of anticipated return on investment or "ROI" as it is referred to in the finance world. An ROI is a financial metric. In terms of a major purchase for a machine that makes something you would otherwise have to buy, the question is one of how many years it will take for the savings created by using the machine to equal the cost of buying the machine. To put that another way - it is a question of value. How many years will it take for the value created by the machine to equal or exceed the costs associated with owning and operating the machine. This can get complicated depending on how many items are being brought into the calculations, so we’ll keep it simple to start, and build from there.

1) Cost alone

I bought my used woodchipper for $750. I need about 4 cubic yards of woodchips a year. I can have 4 cubic yards delivered for about $250. So in principle, after about three years, the woodchipper will have paid for itself, having made $750 worth of woodchips.

The table above shows the “starting position” for each year, with the ending position carried over in the subsequent year to reflect gains or losses each year. As can be seen above, by the end of year three the ending position is zero - indicating that by that time, the value of the mulch made by the machine equals the cost of buying the machine - thus, a three-year ROI. Of course, this does not take into account fuel and maintenance.

2) Cost with inputs

Running a woodchipper requires fuel and maintenance. For fuel, I worked out that it takes about four liters (~1 gallon) of fuel to chip a cubic yard of mulch, so for four cubic yards that works out to $24 in gasoline. For maintenance, I estimated roughly $50 a year, reasoning that most years, only an oil change might be needed, but in some years, blades may need to be sharpened or replaced - so $50 serves as a rough averaging of those costs over time.

With those added costs worked in, we can see that it takes a little longer for the woodchipper to start paying for itself, and we’re not in the black until the end of year four - so that’s still not bad with a four-year ROI. If you consider all the time that is needed to feed branches into the woodchipper as just good outdoors exercise time that you would otherwise spend on a treadmill or doom-scrolling on Facebook - then a woodchipper might be a good idea for you - but what if a value is attached to that time?

3) Cost with inputs and time

No one pays me anything after 5pm - so my time outside of my day-job is kind of “worthless” in a sense. But for the sake of the exercise, lets pretend it is worth something. Let's say it's worth minimum wage - since that's what I would have to pay someone to feed a woodchipper, and that’s what I would make if I started working evenings at the local Burger King. So, at $16.00 and hour - and let’s say it takes 2 hours to gather enough brush and feed it into the woodchipper to make 1 cubic yard of woodchips - that's 2*$16 = $32 worth of time per cubic yard. So to make 4 cubic yards of woodchips it costs $128 at minimum wage.

Once time is factored into the calculations when using the lowest possible value in terms of wages to represent time-value, the time to ROI shifts dramatically. With all of that factored in, we now have a sixteen-year ROI. Sixteen years is a stretch for a used woodchipper - and since mine is relatively cheap anyway (cost about $1,150 brand new, all in, taxes included). I’m not confident that 16 years of minor maintenance would be enough to keep it running if it is grinding out 4 cubic yards of mulch a year. Most likely there would be other costs, extending the ROI further into the future, or perhaps into infinity. And this is not even taking into account depreciation, or opportunity costs. If you don’t enjoy spending hours of your life gathering branches and feeding them into woodchippers - then you are better off having them delivered.

Man plans and God laughs

I don’t speak Yiddish, and I have no idea if this translation of the old maxim is correct, but I heard it years ago when I was young, and have been repeatedly reminded of its wisdom many time since then. We simply do not know the future, and our best laid plans can never account for every possible contingency. And as it happens, while I was writing this very article - can you believe it - the woodchipper had a catastrophic breakdown. While I was feeding leaves through it, part of the impeller assembly broke off - and as that component found its way through the various other mechanisms, the machine rattled and shook as it tried to digest the indigestible, and then spit out various metal parts into the woodchip bag. Now the entire impeller needs to be replaced². The part is made in China; the woodchipper company is in the USA, and I live in Canada³. If you have no appreciation for how intractable this problem is, at this particular point in time in history, given various complications with regard to international trade, I envy you. Suffice it to say, it will be quite some time before my Champion 338cc woodchipper is ever running again, and it will not be cheap to fix.

Final Thoughts

When I started writing this article I fully expected to be able to justify the purchase of a woodchipper, at least for some people, in some situations, and within a given price range. I feel I have done that to some extent. For people with lots of land and materials, and who like spending hours of their time doing physical work, who can get a good one for under $1000, it makes sense - assuming it does not have a design flaw that will lead to a catastrophic breakdown after very little use. Otherwise, I have to say that it probably makes better sense to just order large amounts when they are needed. It saves loads of time, will probably save money over the long run, and piles all the risks associated with owning and operating heavy machinery onto the professionals. An equitable trade in my opinion!

FREE SHIPPING FROM VESEYS SEEDS

Use my NEW coupon code “GAVS25” to get free shipping from Veseys Seeds on seed catalogue orders. Free shipping is not applicable on surcharges on larger items. Promo code is valid until November 30, 2025.

1. And yes, I tried “chipdrop”, multiple times, every year, to no avail.

2. I took it to a mechanic and he is convinced that it was due to a design flaw. One of the moving parts, which routinely comes under a lot of stress, is held together by a long, skinny 1/8” bolt. Pretty flimsy…

3. Ironically, the particular model I bought is sold by Canadian Tire!