Comments regarding Country Home Products (also dba DR Chipper and DR Field and Brush Mower)

I purchased a DR Chipper attachment that attaches to my DR Field and Brush mower. It arrived and I was excited to put it together, I worked for an hour getting it setup. The final part to attach was the discharge shoot, they welded a sleeve to the frame to run the bolts through to attach the shoot. The sleeve was not properly aligned with the holes on the frame so it was impossible to attache the discharge shoot. Very poor quality control!

When I bought my brush mower the first one they sent was bad and they replaced it with an upgraded model. The second brush mower has been great, but this shows their quality control is not good.

Absolutely terrible customer service, with the trite "Have a nice day" at the end. The problem is with the product and seller, not Dave's Garden. I bought DR Premier 26 brusher directly from Country Home Products. It arrived non-functional, no propulsion/drive. I had local authorized service dealer repair the problem. Used the machine 3 times and it was terrific. On the fourth use, the propulsion/drive went out again, completely. Same problem as when first delivered. Waited 45 minutes on phone, to have customer support inform me warranty would not be applied. Manager confirmed the same. Essentially the message was, "Too bad ... but it's your problem not ours" ... even on this new, undamaged, $1600 piece of equipment.
Let this company go out of business.

Another all day banjo story.
For context here is my situation. I've just had my property evaluated for fire resilience and forest health. We have 43 out of the 77 acres to be treated for thinning and fuels management. No commercial timber being extracted. There's a lot of small trees and brush out there. The prescription calls for good spacing between the conifers and plenty of room for the oaks which I plan to favor.
I'm going to have tons of fire wood. I use plenty for heat, cooking and the sauna. They're all wood fired in the winter. I also want to produce a lot of biochar for the orchard, vineyard, herb garden and vegetable garden. I'd like to produce enough for the forest itself also. I planned on having tons of wood chips for my food production areas and around trees etc.
Asked around about chippers. Two gents who I think are committed farmers recommended a DR chipper that they use on their tractors. I don't have a tractor so I did some on line searches and decided on the DR CP5 16.5 PRO with the extended chipper.
That's when the nightmare began. Seems like I waited forever for the chipper to arrive. With hindsight my guess is that they had run out of engines for their chippers. After over a month the extended shoot arrived. Still no chipper. Six weeks goes by and my chipper had been sent to a round about trucking outfit that had it circling the country. DR didn't even deliver the thing to the ranch. I had to drive 1 ½ hours one way to pick it up at the truck terminal in town. The crate looked like it had been through h**l when it arrived.
I got it home and began to assemble the extended shoot. No sooner than that and I get a call on my answering machine from DR that I had been sent a chipper whose B&S engine did not have an cut off switch. I was not pleased. My wife had purchased a DR trimmer that was sent to us without all of its parts just a couple a months earlier. I thought it was an anomaly. Man was I wrong on that.
It is now three full months since my chipper order. Still no kill switch kit after multiple calls and many hours of listening to that nasty freaking banjo music. I feel sorry for the poor suckers that have to answer the phones. I generally try to be civil and discrete when talking to the front line because I know they don't have a lot of sway in the situation. I repeatedly ask for their supervisor but never get one and have yet to receive a call back from any of them.
No doubt I could rig something up for a kill switch but hey, after dishing out well over 3K for the chipper, getting an extended warranty AND paying for shipping I think they owe me. I will never recommend purchasing a DR product to anyone. I'm freaking out that once I do get the chipper going that it will have been poorly assembled or some other unforeseen BS.
I am angry and feel taken advantage of. I'm an old koot and feel like I should have known better. What can I say? I did a fair amount of due diligence and realize now that DR spends a lot of money on their PR. I go to get my mail and there's another piece of slick DR junk mail promoting their junk equipment. It infuriates me every time I see it. About the same amount of distaste as I have for their sickening banjo music.
I'm still waiting DR. How about making it right?

Bought the DR 11.5 manual start chipper/shredder. Main bearing failed in less than 5 hours moderate use. Replaced under warranty. Factory recall for "safety reason" caused an easy to start unit to be literally useless. The change meant that the heavy flywheel has to be included when turning over the engine with the start cord. It's so hard to pull that the entire 200 pound unit lifts off the ground. I paid for a five year warranty and DR will do NOTHING to make this once easy to start unit useful. They suggested selling it and buying an electric start model from them. No thanks!!! Both their engineering and customer service are terrible in my opinion. After spending thousands with them I will never buy or recommend another DR product.

Started my brand new DR 11.5 chipper-shredder, and it worked beautifully for about 20 minutes. Then it began making a terrible scraping noise. I stopped it, disassembled the screen area to see inside, and found a retaining ring and a washer on the floor of the discharge area. The shaft had slipped to the right so the blades were scraping the wall of the chipper.

Wrote to DR, and a tech responded right away. He told me how to fix it. He was wrong. He also pointed me to the wrong schematic in the owner’s manual. Spent probably 6-8 hours trying to do the repair myself, but the deeper I went, the more problems I found, such as a loose bolt on the belt pulley as well as a protruding key. And I still can't figure out where the stray, disconnected nut goes.

Went to their support page and contacted a tech via Live Chat. When I explained the problem, he said I had to call the tech department, even though I was already talking to the tech department. Repeated attempts to reach the tech department by phone resulted in an interminable marathon of banjo music. Back to Live Chat with a plea for help that didn’t involve banjo music. Haven’t heard back from him. Must have hurt his feelings. Maybe he was the banjo player.

Now I’m taking the chipper to a local repair shop. So it was 1,000 bucks for the chipper, probably 200 more for the repair. But at least I no longer have to listen to telephonic banjo music.

If you want to buy a $700 lawn ornament then the dr chipper is for you!

What a disaster. I ordered my chipper after a big storm in early spring knocked down a bunch of trees and branches. Unfortunately the chipper never arrived to help me clean up the mess. About a month after ordering the chipper I received my first piece. Basically the engine and one of the input chutes. The manuals, nuts, bolts, stabilizing foot, etc. were no where to be found. After calling up and waiting on hold for nearly an hour the tech. send me the url for the docs and shipped out the parts to me.

A week passes

The new shipment arrives! Unfortunately with the wrong parts and without the nuts and bolts. Another hour on hold - another promise - another week passes - more wrong parts.

This process repeated a few times and finally I had all the parts and pieces. The chipper was assembled, gassed up, fresh oil, all set to go! I started it up, it was purring along for about 5 minutes as I let it "warm up" ..... I fetched a 3 foot long branch about the diameter of a pencil - I fed it into the hopper and wow it shredded 1/3 of the branch before puttering to a stop. Engine completely dead.

One more hour on hold as I call DR.

This time they are at a loss for an answer .... they say "we will have to have briggs & stratton give me a call" to diagnose what happened. I should expect a call in 24 to 48 hours ..... that was last week. Still no call. Still no working chipper .....

I give up! I'll stick some flowers in the chutes and perhaps get it to pass for a planter ....

I live in Vermont and WORKED for this company (DR Power Equip). I was hired as a "seasonal" technical support specialist in March of 2016 and wasn't needed any more by late september of the same year, when the incoming calls slowed down. This company hires up to 20 seasonal tech support people every year, gives them mediocre training at best (I actually heard one ask "what's the difference between a gasket and a washer?") and "throws them in the pit" fielding technical questions from customers, most of which are not having a pleasant experience with DR products. Only a select few tech support staff are knowledgable and are kept on year round. It was very frustrating for me having to hear all the problems people have with DR equipment and not being able to help. Part of the reason is this; keeping a tech support job (even seasonal) is contingent on the time it takes you to answer a call (must be less than 5 min), the time your phone is idle (5 min), time spent TALKING to the customer (5 min), upselling them parts they didn't call about in the first place, and the big one; selling extended warranties. To wrap it up, what my experience at DR taught me is that this company's equipment is built with design flaws, low quality materials, overpriced and poorly assembled with a strong need for stricter quality control and better trained technical staff.

Chuck - Bristol, Vt.

Posted on September 12, 2011, updated September 30, 2011
Posted on August 31, 2011, updated September 12, 2011
Posted on August 19, 2011, updated August 31, 2011
Bought D R Power Premier woodchipper with 3 year warranty. Followed manual to add oil and gas and started up. Briggs & Stratton engine ran literally two minutes then slowed and stopped when chipping half inch branch. Called tech support. Immediately was accused of not adding oil. Apparently 3 year warranty is just a scam. Easier to blame customer for defective machine. Friend has aleady cancelled plans to buy brush hog machine from D. R. Power. Company unwilling to stand behind its products and honor warranty is useless; worse unscrupulous. Tech support should immediately have arranged replacement, not accused me of doing something wrong. Very disappointed and angry that U.S. company, allegedly high quality, is acting this way.