1 love my fruit just as it comes - straight off the tree but I decided to buy a juicer after I bought a house in France. The garden that I inherited has 4 cherry trees, a large delicious yellow plum tree, 2 peach and 2 apple trees. There are also red and white grape vines, running the length of the garden. The reason I decided to buy a juicer was because of all the windfalls and the quantity of fruit that would go to waste if not eaten or juiced.
I decided to buy the Philips HR1858/97 from Amazon for £34.99 in one of their sales. I had the juicer delivered to my English address partly because of the free delivery and partly because most electrical goods are cheaper in the UK than France.
When the fruit harvested I had a great time collecting the fruit and juicing the ripest or the surplus. There are 2 controls depending on the fruit you are juicing. I invited my French neighbour to watch my juicing and to bring some of her own apples to try. Madame P is in her late 70's but always willing to try get involved in what her new 'anglais' neighbour is doing. She watched on incredulously as I added her chopped apples to the juicing bowl. The jug holds about 1.5L and was soon delivered as gorgeous apple juice into the jug. I have to say the noise was pretty horrendous and the cat hid under the kitchen table. We needed about 50 full bowls of fruit to get 5 litres of juice (Madame P and her neighbours wouldn't consider any type of juicing that was less than 5 litres!). The kitchen was a bit of a mess, our eardrums had taken a bit of a bashing and the cat needed valium, but what the heck, we both had 5 litres of fresh apple juice to show for our efforts! I have to say that the blade part of the juicer was a pain to clean and in the end I left it to soak in a little washing up liquid and used a brush.
I carried Madame P's 5 litres of juice across the road to her house for her. She insisted on showing me her large wooden apple press that she keeps in her barn. She hauled a 25kg bag of her garden apples into the trough, turned the handle a few times and the apples disappeared through the huge wooden cutters. Apple juice gushed out into a vat at the bottom and she proceeded to pour apple juice from the cute little wooden tap into bottles....
If you do not possess a huge apple or other fruit press I think you could probably get away with a Philips HR1858/97