Royal Sovereign 1 Row ECO-Friendly Manual Hand Crank Coin Sorter (QS-1), Single,Black

My coin sorter arrived well packed and the only assembly required was to attach the hand crank with a single screw. The instructions are simple. Load coins in the top hopper, hold the sorter with you left hand, and crank with your right hand. I guess this would be less than ideal if you were left handed. You will experience occasional resistance to the crank. When this happens it tells you to crank backwards up to 1/2 turn. The coins fall into one of four clear cylinders. When the cylinder is full you have a roll of coins.I have seen YouTube videos where people put coin wrappers into the cylinders but I don't recommend this. It doesn't happen often, but the sorter will occasionally drop the wrong coin in the wrong tube, and the coins don't always drop flat in the tube. The sorter will also sort any trash into the cylinders. Until you get used to each coin cylinder, you need to count coins. 'Full' is slightly different for each type. Also, it will work better if you remove any foreign coins and U.S. Dollar coins as it doesn't handle these well.The one problem I had with the sorter was that the penny slot would jam up occasionally. Pennies would stop coming out and the crank would stutter. Eventually pennies would start coming out in the nickel tube. The only way I found to clear this reliably was to remove the coins from the hopper and the tubes from the sorter, close the front door, and shake the machine until all of the pennies fall out. I don't know if this is peculiar to my machine or an issue with all machines but it doesn't happen very often and usually means that I was cranking too fast.I bought my sorter to sort and wrap nearly $500 in assorted coins collected over 10 years. Once sorted and rolled my bank accepted the coins without question. I'm not sure what use it will be to me now, but I felt is a better value than giving up $56 at the coin kiosk. If you have a lot of coins to sort or need to sort coins on a regular basis this a perfectly functional tool even for a relatively large job.

I haven't tried the electric coin sorters, but this one works fine for me. I would suspect that the electric sorters would suffer from frequent jams. This one does too, but they are easily remedied if you are cranking slowly. Just reverse crank ever so slightly and it should unjam the stuck coin. I initially did about 1500 coins, mostly pennies, and it worked fine, only jamming a few times. My best technique was to crank slowly so that a jam was detected immediately (before it became worse). As other reviewers have mentioned, some coins will stand up against the side of the hopper, but a light tap will knock them down.Based on other reviews, I purchased the Royal Sovereign coin wrappers, and filling them is very easy. However, since the assortment includes equal numbers of all wrappers, and I had mostly pennies, I found that I used up most of the penny wrappers and very few of the others. So now I have a whole box of nickel - quarter wrappers but I'm short on pennies. It would be better if you could purchase individual denominations of the wrappers.As for the machine itself, here are a few observations:1. It isn't accurate for pennies. I would often only get 49 pennies instead of 50. I think it has to do with the thickness of some of the pennies, how dirty they are, whether they are bent, etc. The problem, though, is that there is no way to know without recounting all of the pennies, which defeats the purpose of stacking them, since you have to dump the container out to count them and then roll the loose pennies. You could weigh them (if you have a very accurate scale handy), but I just tossed an extra penny or two into each roll instead. I think it would help if a simple counter were included that just tripped each time a coin went into a hopper.2. When a hopper is full, the coins just start overflowing. That isn't a big deal, but it's a good reason (among others) not to be cranking too fast on this thing.3. If you jam a coin and have to crank backwards to unjam it, don't crank too far backwards, as that will cause smaller coins to fall into larger holes. For example, dimes will fall into the penny holder. I didn't have any problem with that when cranking forward, as long as I cranked at a reasonable speed.4. Overall, I like the crank system vs. electric, as it gives me fine motor control over the speed of sorting.This machine is fine for occasionally emptying your pockets or purse of loose change. I would not recommend it for a business that handles a lot of coins, as it's relatively slow and doesn't have a counter. Since occasional use is all I have, it works fine for me and sure does beat having jars or bottles full of random coins. I just keep my change in here and roll the containers when they get full, take them to the bank, and swap them for some real money.

Simple design and usability. No electric or batteries needed.My last machine was left with the batteries installed which eventually leaked and necessitated replacement.