Start with the thing almost every listing gets wrong. The number in a chipper model name is not its capacity. A Vermeer BC700XL is a 7 inch machine, so that one happens to line up. A BC1000XL is a 12 inch machine, not a 10 inch one. So is the BC1200XL. On the Bandit side, the 150XP is the entry unit of the XP series and it is also a 12 inch machine, same nameplate class as the much better known 250XP.
Read that last one again. The smallest chipper in one manufacturer's line and the workhorse of the same line carry the same rated capacity. If you are shopping by model number, you are shopping blind.
Same rating, deliberately different throughput
Here is where it gets interesting. An arborist forum owner describes the 150XP as "just about the same thing as a Bandit 200," with the feed rollers run at a slower speed to produce smaller chips and a safer feed. Same rated inches. Slower on purpose.
That is a manufacturer telling you outright that rated capacity and real throughput are different numbers. The 150XP will take the piece. It will take longer doing it. A crew that sized the machine off the capacity figure alone and priced the job off assumed throughput will lose that difference every single day.
The rating assumes fresh knives, and knives do not stay fresh
Nameplate capacity is measured on a machine in good order. Yours will not be, most of the time.
A knife edge runs roughly 25 working hours before it needs resharpening. Bandit's own service video says dull or badly damaged knives "significantly reduce" performance, which is the manufacturer's careful way of saying the machine stops hitting its own rating. On the anvil side, a dealer quoted the anvil set for a BC700XL on camera at about $210 for the lower anvil and about $190 for the side anvil, roughly $400 for the pair. A worn anvil does not shear cleanly against the knife. It crushes, and crushing feels exactly like a capacity problem.
So a machine that bogs on 6 inch material may be perfectly healthy and 30 hours overdue for a knife service. Or it may be worn out. Those two have the same symptom and very different price tags, which is the whole reason to test rather than trust.
The quiet one: hydraulic pressure that drifted
There is a third explanation nobody checks. A Vermeer service video on a BC1500 explains the feed hydraulics are set by a relief valve to hold 3,000 psi, and that relief valves drift low over time, to something like 2,700 psi, in a way the operator "wouldn't notice." Not a breakdown. A slow bleed of the capability you paid for.
We have that documented on the BC1500 specifically, and the same SmartFeed architecture runs across the BC-XL line, so treat it as a family-level check rather than a confirmed spec for your exact model. If the feed is sluggish and the knives are fine, this is the next thing to look at, and it is a set screw adjustment rather than a parts job.
Fresh paint and a low meter
The capacity question and the honesty question are the same question on a used lot.
Long-running arborist forum testimony in our records has 5,000-plus hour units still working daily. Meanwhile a poster evaluating a 2000-model-year 250XP with 1,000 claimed hours ran the arithmetic and pointed out that works out to 1.37 hours per week over the machine's life, which is not what a commercial chipper does. Another flagged fresh paint and new stickers on an older unit as a signal of either meter manipulation or a cosmetic flip.
Paint is cheaper than bearings. A machine that has actually worked shows it: worn paint where operators climb, hydraulic staining under fittings, scarring in the feed housing. When the cosmetics and the meter disagree with each other, believe neither and load test.
The three minute load test
Bring your own material, in the species and size you actually run. Not the seller's tidy pile.
Feed three or four pieces one at a time. Watch engine speed recover between pieces, listen to the disc, and feel whether the feed pulls steadily or hunts. A machine that bogs well under its rating is telling you something is worn or adjusted wrong. While the engine is off, spin the feed wheel by hand. If it spins unusually freely, that is the documented tell for a broken feed pump drive shaft, and the dealer quotes behind that repair are about $120 for the shaft alone or $700 for the full pump assembly, because the dealer in that documented case would not sell the internal bearing separately.
What the market pays, and what it does not tell you
Observed ranges from live listings in our records: BC1000XL $19,900 to $32,900 across eleven listings, BC700XL $6,900 to $15,900 across sixteen, BC1500 $7,600 to $59,500, and Altec DC1317 $1,050 to $16,000 across fourteen.
Those bands are wide because condition, not capacity, sets the price. A BC1000XL is a 12 inch machine at $19,900 and a 12 inch machine at $32,900. The rating is identical. What separates them is knife hours, bearing condition, hydraulic pressure, and whether the autofeed electronics have already eaten someone's $850 control board and $350 service call, which is a documented $1,200 event on this model.
What to ask the seller
Ask what their typical piece size is and whether they run at the rating or stay under it. "We never push it" is honest data about how the machine was worked. "Full capacity all day" is a claim you can check against knife wear in about ninety seconds.
Then ask for the knife service history. Frequent knife changes mean the machine was genuinely worked at capacity, which is wear but it is honest wear. No knife history at all on a meter reading thousands of hours is the combination that should slow you down, because one of those two facts is wrong.
The full inspection order is in our wear story guide, and the knife and anvil math is in knives and anvils. Price against the observed band in the model's own record rather than against the number in its name.