Automatic can crushers

Automatic can crushers can be a really great  thing to save you the energy and allow you to crush your soda cans with ease promoting recycling and increasing environmental awareness. These electrical units come in various sizes and strengths but they all use electricity to apply a force on those empty can crushers and that allows these devices to flatten those cans reducing their overall size many times over and allowing you to collect more cans that you can later transport to the recycling facility and make some money for your work.

Depending on the Country you are in you can get anywhere from 1 to 5 cents for every can that you recycle and that makes sense as the aluminum inside them is valuable and can be easily recycled. But are these electrical crushers economical or are they just convenient because they do the job of recycling your cans much easier? If we take an average 1 horsepower motor then an hour of work would use up around 30 cents in electricity costs and that means you have to crush at least 30 cans every hour when this device is running. And that makes complete sense as looking at these devices you need anywhere from 2 to 5 seconds to crush one can and load up the next one so if we take the middle 2.5 second that means that you can crush 24 cans every minute and that equates to more than 1400 crushed cans every hour so you will most definitely make your money back using one of these devices even if you buy it for a hundred bucks.

There are many industrial can crushers available for huge recycling facilities but they are of no interest to you or me so I will try to review some of the more uncommon plans and crushers that I found on the internet that could be of some interest to you.

Automatic crude can crusher

home made automatic can crusherThe first device that I found is a homemade can crusher that is made from a motor and some scrap metal part. There is almost no information about this device and what I can tell from that moving gif is that the person behind this crusher has made it from an old motor that looks like the windscreen wiper motor from an old car as it moves very slowly but looks like it has a lot of force. The creator has strapped a hinge at one end of the rotating disk and uses it to power his creation. You just load cans in from the top and the motor crushes them to tiny pucks that then fall into the trash can that this device is mounted on. This device feels like a really great invention and I could see it commercialized if you could reduce the motor size and add some style and design to it.

Pneumatic PVC crusher

pvc can crusherThe second device in this list is another homemade can crusher but this time the creator has made a crusher from cheap PVC plastic tubes and a pneumatic cylinder that uses compressed air to power a moving arm that in fact crushes those cans. The design behind this PVC can crusher is pretty simple but to make it work you would need to make an effort and that is why there are also some construction plans available if you would like to build a device like this. The owner says that his crusher can be very cheaply made with materials that you can find in any hardware store and that will not cost more than 20$. This crusher feels like it would not last that long as it uses plastic not metal and plastic is much weaker and could break if something went wrong with that pneumatic air cylinder or a can would get stuck.

EZ Power Crusher

air pressure aluminum can crusherEZ power crusher is a device that is also uses a pneumatic cylinder that powers a crushing mechanism that is automatic and much more convenient that any hand powered device. This crusher is made entirely from metal so it is much stronger than the crusher before and this one also uses a much bigger and stronger air pressure cylinder that would be able to crush any beverage can including those big ones that are just now appearing in our stores. This EZ Power Crusher is just a prototype and it needs some work done before you would be able to use it efficiently in day-to-day operations but as a concept it works really great and from the description it sounds like the creators would like to sell it for around 270$ a peace but that sounds a bit too much if you ask me.

Pneumatic Wood crusher

pneumatic can crusherThe last homemade automatic crushing unit that I found is a can crusher that is made from wood and also uses air pressure to crush those aluminum cans. The guy behind this device has devised a somewhat simple but elegant device that utilizes one pneumatic cylinder that drives a wooden block that in fact crushes the can put in the appropriate slot. This crusher does not have a mechanism that would disperse those crushed cans automatically and it can’t crush those cans with a single stroke and you need an additional metal block to crush them completely. Of course this is also a homemade device and it is far from perfect but it shows you that you can also use materials like wood to make a wooden can crusher that uses air pressure to crush your used beverage cans. This would also make a real commercial product if it would be designed properly and that pneumatic cylinders would be longer and could crush your cans with a single stroke.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *