ECHO ES-250 Shred and Vac: Complete Review and Demonstration

"This is the ECHO ES-250 Shredding Vac, and today we're going to tell you all about it. But first, let me go over all the important specs. These are the numbers that you guys are probably most interested in, things like weight. This thing is coming in at about 9.12 lbs. Also, the air volume and air speed are very important. Average air speed is about 140 mph, the maximum air speed with all the pipes is 165 mph, and the air volume comes in at 391 cubic feet per minute. That's not a whole lot of air; however, we're not really pushing a lot here. We're using this to suck up the leaves. Yes, you can use this as a blower, but it's not really meant to blow a large quantity of leaves, like if you were using the PB-910, for instance. And last but not least, the sound levels come in at 70 dB. It's not too bad, and you'll hear in a moment it's not really that loud.

Out of the box, you're going to get everything you see here. You've got the tube for the blower, and then you've got the tube for the shredding VAC part of it. The primary blower motor, the bagging tube, and then, of course, the bag here.

Converting between the shredding VAC setup and a blower is fairly simple. We can go ahead and take off the bag, and then in here, there's a place to insert a screwdriver. You insert a screwdriver on the back, that pops the tab, that allows the tube here. It takes a little bit of force to come out. This tube right here just twists. There you go. And then you can pull this guy out. It fits over the top; you make sure that the screen falls into all of its grooves here to sit nice and snug. Get a nice close fit. Sometimes you've got to shimmy it there. Close that nice and tight, and then the last part is putting the blower piece back on. Just boom till it snaps, and then you've got yourself a nice little blower here.

So behind me, we have some leaves, and what I'm going to do is kind of make a pile here using the blower part of this, and then we're going to go ahead and suck it all up with the shredding VAC part and show you how this thing works.

You can hear me talking over this. The purr is very low. Let me go grab my safety gear. All right, now we've got all our safety gear on. We're going to give this another shot.

Pretty much it picked everything up. Suction was, I think, just right. I think what I'll try to do is see if it'll work in a mulch bed without picking up too much of the mulch or in a pebble bed or like a rock bed where you know you get the leaf debris. You can get in a corner, but it won't suck up the rocks. You just want to suck up the leaves, and I think that's where this power is perfect, where it's not really meant to blow a large quantity of leaves, and that's really all you want it to do.

Now you can see we've got our leaves just kind of up against the fence there. It's nice to get these leaves into a corner or up against; maybe some people put up like a snow fence, the orange fence or temporary construction fence to sort of create a Corral or whatever you want to call it, where you can kind of blow all the leaves into a spot. Then use the vacuum part of this blower to suck everything up and mulch it into the bag.

We have a partially full bag here, just picked up a really small leaf pile, but I want to show you what these leaves look like when they're all mulched up. Just on the side here is the zipper here, and we'll open this up.

There you have it. I hope this video was helpful for you. If it was, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe, follow, and I'll see you in the next video."