My husband is a small business owner and I work from home on Fridays for my job as an editor at a business publishing company so we use our home office quite a bit. We live in a ranch style house built in 1968 and what was once the two-car garage is a finished area that serves as our office, as well as a place to store a lot of the girls’ toys. One of these days my husband will have a man cave! Any way, we do a lot of paper shredding and it always made me a little uneasy to have a paper shredder when the girls were toddlers.
June was Home Office Safety Month and with more people telecommuting (and many of them parents with small children), Fellowes, which is a manufacturer of paper shredders, and the Home Safety Council released some helpful tips for preventing home office injury:
- Keep your work space off-limits to children unless supervised by an adult.
- If you have an entire room devoted to your home office, consider installing a door lock and keeping it locked when not in use.
- When purchasing a paper shredder, look for one with safety features to protect children and large pets from injury.
- Unplug shredders and other office equipment when not in use.
- Keep scissors, letters openers and all sharp office supplies in a drawer and out of harm’s reach.
- Install safety covers in unused electrical outlets.
- Make sure all electrical cords are not cracked or worn and in good condition.
- Look for certification labels from an independent testing laboratory such as ETL or UL when using extension cords, power strips and surge protectors or other electronic equipment.
- Store printers and ink cartridges in a high cabinet out of a child’s reach.
Fellowes sent me one of their newest paper shredders, the Intellishred PS-79Ci, to test and keep. The PS-79Ci features SafeSense, an electronic sensor that surrounds the shredder’s paper opening and shuts down the shredder immediately when it comes in contact with the energy field created by humans or large pets. If you have small children or pets in your house who like to nose their way around your belongings and you work from home, this is a huge plus. This shredder also shreds very quietly and is capable of some heavy duty shredding as it will shred CDs and credit cards. It’s a cross-cut shredder that also safely shreds paperclips and staples.
Jack the Akita mix and our new Fellowes shredder.
The Fellowes Intellishred is available on Amazon.com for $177.87.
