
The Devil's Hair Dryer: Hell is other people, with leaf blowers (2016) - jseliger
https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/11/the-case-against-neighbors-with-leaf-blowers/506324/
======
uptime
Sign me up for the blower hater brigade. I can almost forgive these during
leaf season. I hate them being used in place of brooms for landscaping.

A ton of noise to move a very small mass of clippings, etc, creating a cloud
for 30 minutes to do a less complete job, often just blowing it all into the
street without concentrating it and picking it up. Maddening.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
As a greenie, there are plenty of things that I think are kind of dumb and
misguided (say, automobiles), but at least I understand the thinking behind
them, and hope that some day better alternatives (public transit, self driving
cars, bicycle and scooter sharing) will make them obsolete.

But leaf blowers are unique in that they're not only obnoxious and wasteful,
but also stupid to begin with. You’re spending money and time and effort and
polluting both the environment AND mental environment to avoid raking, just so
the wind can undo your efforts??

Leaf blowers make me profoundly misanthropic.

~~~
taeric
Leaf blowers are demonstrably faster than raking, though. So... I don't get
your point.

Even more, it isn't like rakes don't have a horrible sound of their own, as
soon as you get a single paved section involved.

~~~
frabbit
"demonstrably"?

Please define your terms. I have seen the people wielding these monstrosties
piss around for hours chasing one or two leaves or meaninglessly form pile of
leaves that have no function other than to appear large so that the other
inefficient human can stop only once to load them onto their gasoline chariot.

Most of this work could easily be either: 1) solved by refusing the scorched
earth, anal standard of lawn care ; 2) good old fashioned, quiet wheel barrows
and rakes operated by people paid a fair wage for manual labor instead of
externalizing costs onto the rest of us.

~~~
taeric
I have seen the same with rakes. Done the same, truthfully.

Used even remotely competently, a blower beats a rake. Hands down.

Now, there is a solid argument that for small yards, a rake and broom are
fine. And indeed, that is what I use when doing my yard. With a large yard,
though, blower with bagging lawn mower could accomplish in one day and ten
bags what would take three days and forty bags. Easy.

------
mysterypie
Not just leaf blowers -- there are hundreds of irritating sounds all around
that we have little control over:

\- TVs blaring in waiting rooms when you'd prefer to just sit in silence.

\- Appliances and gadgets that make unnecessary beeps; my coffee maker makes
some irritating chirps when the coffee is ready and a particularly unwanted
second set of chirps 2 hours later to tell you that it's turning off.

\- Trucks that make a shrill beep-beep-beep when they go in reverse. Think
about snow clearing trucks at 3am if you live some place that's difficult to
clear.

\- Useless announcements and even ads on subways, buses, and flights; who
needs instructions on how to attach your seatbelt on a flight (ridiculously
sometimes given after takeoff).

\- Autoplaying audio on websites. Fortunately, we've made progress on this one
with browsers settings.

\- Monthly fire alarm testing in some condos and office buildings. Surely,
some way could be devised to test the system without disturbing thousands of
people at once.

It's tragedy of the commons where the commons is the air space.

~~~
jfim
> Trucks that make a shrill beep-beep-beep when they go in reverse.

Trucks can't see directly behind them; the sound is so that pedestrians notice
the truck backing up so that they don't get hit or crushed by the truck.

> It's tragedy of the commons where the commons is the air space.

Agreed. There should be a tax applied that's proportional to the level of
annoyance generated by such things.

~~~
Nasrudith
I wonder about how well back up cameras would work now as an alternative.
Although ironically I know of some cars with back up cameras that added a
back-up beep - at least internally.

------
ancorevard
I bike to work. Leaf blowers almost kill me every time. Here in dusty Southern
California I can spot a leaf blower half a mile away by the cloud of brown
dust being picked up. While biking through it I hold my breath and squint my
eyes – hoping for the best. It's a nightmare.

I'm convinced that these leaf blowers cause half of the particle pollution
here in LA. One day, the leaf blowers blow the dust into the street towards
the other neighbor, only so that the next day the other neighbor blows the
same dust back to the other side again. This is a great business for the
gardeners, they are paid for pushing the same dust around the block ad
infinitum.

The second reason they are a nightmare for the environment is what they cause
of water consumption. Yes, you read that right. The same dust pushed around
lands onto the cars parked on the street, causing them to need much more
frequent trip to the car wash than they otherwise would. It has a a massive
impact.

California can not claim to care about the environment before they ban leaf
blowers.

~~~
ravenstine
I don't want to ban leaf blowers, but I want to ban leaf blowers.

Maybe it's different elsewhere, but in California it seems our obsession with
landscaping is pretty out of hand. It's normal for people in SoCal to hire
workers who use multiple leaf blowers at once, and just walking by them is
unpleasant to almost all the senses; the exhaust smells, the dust is dusty,
they're loud as, and totally distracting from the scenery we should be
enjoying. Property values _must_ be maximized, thus all hedges must be cut to
90 degree angles with no rogue twigs or leaves. Let's not even get started on
_lawnmowing_.

Oh god, the noise! One of the reasons I found it hard to consistently work
from home was the fact that gardeners are basically present blowing leaves
somewhere nearby every day. I could never escape them... I'd decide to take a
break from work and shoot some hoops at the park down the road, only for there
to be more gardeners there blowing leaves and mowing lawns.

Are a few leaves or grass trimmings here and there really so offensive to
people? It's _nature_ , and after a few days the wind or foot traffic will
kick that stuff to the side. If the leaves must be blown, can the landscaping
be at least limited to one day of the week so the other 7 days can be free of
extra noise and dust?

If only we spent as much money collectively on the homeless problem and
picking up actual trash as we do on the sisyphean task of blowing leaves.

------
pasbesoin
Leaf blowers I can tolerate. Those fucking car stereos with their sub-woofers,
that serve no other purpose than to demonstrate testosterone and dominate the
environment with sound? Evil.

\--

P.S. For the downvotes, I'll add Harleys and kin with "straight pipes".

They don't save lives. They shave days from others' lives, at each pass, in
terms of stress.

\--

P.P.S. Pardon my outburst -- or not. But people who don't live with these
being inflicted on them should understand that when it's chronic and out of
your control, it becomes a severe stress. And it's _simply not necessary._ It
is another's choice to completely and abusively dis-respect you. And, they get
enough "looks" from people around them to know what they are doing.

~~~
crushcrashcrush
If I could push a magic button to never hear a straight-piped Harley ever
again, I would.

~~~
lostlogin
If it makes you feel any better, examining New Zealand’s injury stats shows a
large number older men mangle themselves on them. To much power, too little
skill, too old.

~~~
metildaa
Harleys are relatively underpowered and heavy FYI, the former to create the
classic Harley sounds people know. The weight of a heavy cruiser bike like
most Harleys is a significant factor in making that type of bike so dangerous.

------
markbnj
Basically it comes down to this: lawn grass is ground cover and leaves kill
lawn grass. So you have to get them off. Getting them off with a rake sounds
fine if you don't actually own a lawn and this is all academic. Otherwise you
probably find raking very labor and time intensive. Firing up a blower to
whoosh the leaves back into the forest where they came from is so much easier
and faster. So obviously the real problem is owning an unproductive acre of
suburban land that needs ground cover. Reply to this comment if you'd like to
buy mine.

~~~
colanderman
> Otherwise you probably find raking very labor and time intensive.

I find it to be a good excuse to spend time outdoors performing a meditative
physical activity.

I would be _mortified_ to subject my neighbors – 10 or so within 200 ft radius
– to the hellish cacophony of a leaf blower. Even an electric one, which one
of my neighbors uses, sounds like someone is running a cheap air compressor
inside my home for hours on end.

~~~
markbnj
For one thing it's shared pain: I'm not subjecting my neighbors to anything
they are not in turn subjecting me to, so we all deal with our pain in the
name of leaf removal once per year. Also, we all collectively have many
opportunities for "meditative physical activity." There is grass to be cut,
beds to be weeded, snow to be shoveled, paint to be painted, etc. What we have
less of is time. I was born in the 60's so I've done a lot of hand raking,
including my current property before I owned a blower. It's a matter of
probably 8 to 10 hours to do the whole thing. So we all make judgments, I
guess, about where to spend the free time we have, and what amount of labor
saving is worth what amount of cacophony.

------
seccess
I wonder how the author feels about leaf vacuums like this, which is what I
use: [http://a.co/d/dGh7M4R](http://a.co/d/dGh7M4R)

Its electric, so no fumes, and since it sucks instead of blows I don't have to
worry as much about annoying passers-by with dust. Sadly it still makes noise,
of course, though its far quieter than the backpack blowers the author is
talking about.

~~~
mjevans
I have a neighbor that has something like that.

Compared to a leaf blower it's wonderful.

------
mysterypie
I'm wondering if this story made it to the top of HN because hackers and
developers are more sensitive to noise than most people. I heard that all
programmers at Microsoft would get private offices(&) because Bill Gates
himself was so irritated by distracting sounds that he couldn't imagine
productive work in an open office space.

(&) Is it still true today?

~~~
gushers
Nine tenths of the developer jobs I've moved through in the past 5 years, I
have jumped ship seemingly on coin flip to external observers and colleagues,
and the key factor underlying those decisions has been the office environment.

Crowds vary, and environments differ, from luxury, appeal and cost, to
interpersonal variations.

But for sure, the open environment put all of them in the crosshairs. The
noise? It's less about noise, and more about the content of conversations.

You hear half a conversation, and when your paycheck is on the line, hearing
the wrong part of a conversation leaves you wondering if they were talking
about you, and whether or not anyone intended you to hear it. You hear people
judging new hire candidates after a round of interviews. You hear people
gossiping. You hear people talking about raises and reviews. Who's fucking
who.

Worst of all, you hear sideways remarks from people in a mocking tone,
_clearly_ within earshot. Passive aggression, hostility. But all work related.
None of it discriminatory. It all targets the impostor syndrome of holding
down what amounts to a bullshit job to begin with.

Every word crystal clear. The whole conversation, unmistakably audible to you,
but you are not a participant. Is it a taunt? Are there more people agreeing
with what they said, and chiming in with additional sarcasm? Are they ganging
up on you? And you have to sit at your desk, quietly uninvolved, minding your
own business, and focus on stepping through some useless convenience widget in
a debugger.

Sure thing. Where's the door?

~~~
lolc
If you're worrying about your teammates ganging up on you, how's that a noise
problem?

~~~
lolf
You don't get it, dude.

It's having to hear other people's negativity at all, and dealing with the
revelation that people you'd like to respect, are actually fucking horrible.

Even if they aren't ganging up on you, hearing them gang up on other people
behind their back, knowing that they're two-faced, and having to continue to
work with them is, well, kind of awful. In an open office, you sometimes find
out unceremoniously, that everyone is backstabbing everyone else.

Sure, let's lend some perspective to that. A silver lining. Better to know who
the sociopaths are right? That's life, yes? Deal with it like an adult? Or
maybe not.

Maybe, if everyone's a backstabbing two-faced piece of shit, then hey, maybe
it's okay to just betray anyone, because everyone's awful.

If everyone's smug on twitter and facebook, is seeing it and knowing about it
worse for some of us?

If no one has any integrity anymore, it leaves you with no allegiance.

Sometimes, there are things you'd just rather not know.

~~~
pavel_lishin
You sound like you work at a really bad place. Your experience is not
universal. You should try searching for a new job.

------
dantillberg
The heat map in this article is hard to read/understand.

First, it shows Boston Harbor and Mystic River as water, but I can't find the
Charles River, which makes it really hard to figure out what is where.

Second, the intensity at each point in the map with a survey response seems to
be fixed to the exact value at that point, and then _between_ points there's
some sort of averaging taking place. In 2D charts, this would be like drawing
a jagged line connecting each point to the points next to it.

For example, if I live at 1 Main St and I responded with a value of 10, and
you live at 2 Main St (across the street) and gave it a 0, the map would deep
red at my house, deep blue at your house, and yellow in the middle of the
street.

Some parts of the heat map are broad regions of red or blue. Are those places
where there was broad agreement in the poll? Or -- as I suspect -- are those
just places where only a few people responded to the poll?

Other parts of the map are chaotically speckled with small blue and red dots.
I figure this is because there are more survey responses in those places (it
seems responses are clustered around the Red Line, and especially in Cambridge
& Somerville). It's confusing to read, and I'm not sure what conclusions I can
draw from it. I doubt there's this much fine variation between one block and
the next with regard to leaf blower annoyance; but if there _is_ , I doubt
this survey or heat map accurately shows it.

------
p1mrx
I see that it's now possible to buy an electric leaf blower with a backpack
battery. As battery tech gets cheaper over time, it seems likely that all
2-stroke devices could become obsolete.

~~~
simonsarris
I haven't used the Makita leaf blower but all their other battery tools are
amazing and 100% worth switching to from 2 stroke. I've used their trimmer
with a brush cutter head for clearing land and it's powerful, quiet, and if
you need to go for longer than 45+ minutes of clearing brush you can always
get more batteries, which charge fairly quickly.

(Used their circular saw, drills, and angle grinder and chainsaw too all of
which use the same batteries.)

The thing is, for home owners this stuff is amazing. For lawn care companies
that need it to work for 10 hours, it might be a lot of battery to invest in.
I'd be interested to see how the economics shake out though.

This is one of the game changers a Tesla truck would bring. Much easier for
lawn co's to switch to all electric if the truck is electric.

------
sifoobar
I've had plenty of time to watch and listen to these things lately, Germans
seem to have a soft spot for complex technological solutions to non-problems.
And for hiring the cheapest labor possible, people who just don't give a
flying crap; and handing them a pile of hair dryers and other gasoline driven
tools to play with.

Walking by with my son is just not an option, he's very sensitive to sounds;
and he wakes up screaming whenever one goes off outside the house. If anyone
else made that much noise for something as meaningless, I'm pretty sure people
would gang up on them.

------
hwillis
>The crude little two-stroke engines used by most commercial backpack-style
blowers are pollution bombs. “Simplest benchmark: running a leafblower for 30
minutes creates more emissions than driving a F-150 pickup truck 3800 miles,”
Fallows writes. “About one-third of the gasoline that goes into this sort of
engine is spewed out, unburned, in an aerosol mixed with oil in the exhaust.”

uh no

~~~
justin66
I imagine the author is talking about particulate emissions and unburnt VOCs,
two things that won't make it out of the F150's tailpipe, and is asking us to
ignore CO2. Under those constraints he's quite right.

------
Justsignedup
This rings similar to things I read about food trucks. They run inefficient
gas electrical generators. A single one running for a day can display dozens
of cars switching to hybrids. Point is these small things are huge
perpetrators of pollution that we forget when we regulate the car industry.

Pollution is not a single solution problem, everything must be accounted for.

------
monotone666
The Unabomber carried out his bombing campaign because people were riding
snowmobiles on his property

------
reddog
I don't know. Maybe lawn care professionals know more about the best tools for
lawn care than us hipster bloggers, engineer coders and Atlantic Media
editors. Maybe people who have never pushed a broom or a mower for a living
or, in fact, done a single day of manual labor in their lives should be a bit
more circumspect in their advice to those that have.

There are a lot of good discussions on HN but this one is so clueless,
condescending and elitist it leaves me cold. Its like running across a thread
in a lawn care forum complaining that programers are lazy and stupid for using
an IDE and decreeing all coding henceforth should be done only with vi, make
and in assembly.

~~~
scotty79
Maybe there should be a way to place the environmental cost of "lawn care
professionals" activities on them so they can decide better if they want to
use rakes or pay the neighbourhood to use leaf blowers for the suffering ans
pollution they cause.

------
swampthinker
That heat map of Boston is amusing to look at. All of Brookline and the single
family homes of West Cambridge are bright red.

~~~
uptime
Right. Having a lawn small enough to manage yourself or without overpowered
gear is key.

------
mc32
There are some echo blowers which top out at about 64db—much less than the
rest which are about 70db. Nicer sound than corded ones. I almost plunked down
for one. Might just use a power washer instead to pull double duty. Really
intrigued me why other mfgs don’t try to lower the noise and type ov noise.

~~~
brokenmachine
70db is way too low for an average leaf blower.

A vacuum cleaner is 85db.

~~~
mc32
I’m going by their published ratings. One is a Stihl the other Echo. Both the
~25cc entry backpack model.

------
cm2012
Anecdote: I grew up with people use leaf blowers outside, so the sound is soo
soo comforting to me.

------
algon33
Is anyone else reminded of that SpongeBob episode where Squidward leaves to be
free of leaf blowers?

------
joejerryronnie
You know what I hate more than leaf blowers? People letting their homes and
yards fall into disrepair which becomes a blight on the entire neighborhood.
If the price for a nice neighborhood is hearing a lawn mower and leaf blower
once in a while, I will gladly pay it.

~~~
vbuwivbiu
you mean _every Sunday_ , which is most peoples one and only opportunity for
peace and quiet in the week

------
xoa
This is finally ready to change. I just this summer got an Ego backpack
electric blower after having very good experiences with their chainsaws.
Having actually now used it for a season of cleanup and _far more importantly_
the first winter snows done I'm delighted to say that at long last battery
tech seems to be right on the edge of being a total replacement for filthy two
stroke engines in all the typical applications. It's not _quite_ powerful
enough to handle all the same jobs, but it can do 95% of them and it's
completely met my hopes in terms of being quiet, clean, reliable, and just
better in all the ways I hated about two stroke (goodbye fuel mixing and spill
issues and priming and...).

But given the comments I see so far I also want to add that those two stroke
power tools have stuck around because they are _insanely useful_ in a lot of
contexts, particularly rural ones. I was highly skeptical of blowers in
particular until I got one on sale a few years ago, and I hated how noisy it
was and the fumes and all that right off. Yet here up north I was sold on it
after the first season, with leaves actually being the least important by far
aspect. The real value has been snow, a lot of people around here have decks,
semi-covered porches, long walkways, and most do not have garages either. A
powerful blower clears snow, even somewhat dense snow, not just fast but
better, it gets into spaces between rough stone that are impossible to do with
a shovel and that inevitably melt/compact and freeze indefinitely (direct sun
doesn't do anything really when it's -10 to -20°F or lower) in slick ice. Walk
behind snowblowers have a place as well, but can either fail to deal with a
rough surface or can't get onto places like decks/porches (or you wouldn't
want to anyway) at all. And they're big themselves. Couple of feet of snow on
cars and other areas to clear before work is a lot quicker. As far as
chainsaws, trees come down and need to be dealt with anyway, and are needed
directly for firewood. But of course it's nice to be able to deal with this
sort of thing whenever there is snow, and I would never run the blower late a
night even with the nearest neighbor 600 feet away, it'd be rude.

I find certain kinds of external noise to drive me nuts, so I completely
understand why a lot of people would question the entire use of power tools
period. But when you're dealing with acres of field and forest, miles of dirt
driveways and roads, are (along with your neighbors) mostly responsible for
yourselves, and have parents and friends who are growing older and you need to
make time to go help along with your own family, well power tools really make
a tremendous quality of life difference. It just has really stunk
(metaphorically _and_ literally) that their power sources have been about the
absolute worst and most archaic thing. However I think at this point electric
is about there, and I think cities and even suburbs really could get away with
demanding a shift to them and an end to two stroke use entirely. That was a
lot harder without a drop in replacement, but the market foundation is ready
and now could just use an extra kick. I'd definitely suggest people consider
try to push ordinances there, it might be a lot more successful then in the
past. If you have two stroke tools yourself consider looking at modern 40/56V+
battery replacements, and then demonstrating them personally to people. Seeing
and _hearing and smelling_ the difference has been very motivating for those
I've showed so far. We had all been resigned to how things were, it's a big
deal when people realize no, you don't have to deal with that anymore and you
don't have to sacrifice the tool either. I can't wait for mowers and tractors
to get electric next!

------
mberning
I guess we should outlaw or regulate every labor saving device that produces
any form of annoyance, no matter how fleeting. What a bout loud circular saws,
concrete saws, jackhammers, vibratory packers, etc. etc. These are
indespensable labor saving devices. If you have a neighbor overusing them then
that is an issue to take up with them directly. I don’t see why we should
regulate things out of existence because some asshole doesn’t know how to use
it appropriately.

~~~
JadeNB
> If you have a neighbor overusing them then that is an issue to take up with
> them directly.

To be sure, a problem between one individual and another is probably a matter
for individual rectification. However, as the other comments here indicate,
this is a systemic, not an individual, problem; and it is for precisely such
problems that regulation is meant.

(Regulation also answers the question: whose problem is it? If my neighbour
wants to use a leaf blower, and I think it's too loud, then we might find a
compromise. If some external company wants to use a leaf blower, then good
luck negotiating a compromise with them; they have no sense of neighbourliness
or community to which to appeal. Regulations provide a well defined sense of
who is (legally) right, and so a replacement for that missing sense of
community.)

------
giardini
Many posts here are missing the point, the raison d'etre of leaf-blowers: the
individual with a leaf blower has usually been hired by someone to do a job
(e.g., mow the lawn, clean up the leaves and grass). The whine of the leaf
blower is verification that he is doing that job. It is thus mandatory that he
spend a certain amount of time running the leaf blower in order to justify his
work time; silence would mean a job not done.

The next-door condominium, which has a front yard of about 200 square feet,
employs a small army of about 10 leaf blowers to clean the front yard every
Tuesday morning at 6:30 AM. Of course, winter or summer, rain or shine, the
leaf blowers fire up and are whining, raising dust and dirt levels, blowing
waste everywhere, coating our newly-washed cars in our parking lot and in
general polluting the environment. My only consolation is that those workers
will eventually die of lung cancer.

And the reason for too many leaf-blowers in use in urban areas? The "Agency
problem"! Usually there is a management company maintaining the grounds
(rather than the owners who would be cost conscious). The management company
funnels money to whom it wishes. Its easy to keep your cousins employed when
each one owns a leaf blower. Need to help a friend? Hand him a leaf blower.

