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.
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??
I will add to your burden of sadness: in some places with snow they pepper the beautiful snowy winter streets with grit so that the delicate automobiles are facilitated in their mad career. In the spring when it all melts they need to clean all this grit up... some of it is sweepable from the asphalt, but much has been displaced onto the margins and roadside lawns, so they need to rake it out. But what is this done with? Why, with nothing other than a horrible modified strimmer with four rubber blades which scrapes the debris into a pile. Like one of these: https://www.ebay.com/bhp/power-sweeper
If you think a leaf-blower is irritating you have never heard one of these f*s.
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.
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.
If you want to really supercharge leaf collection, use a large tarp instead of a wheelbarrow, then carry your plunder like santa. Wheelbarrows are a waste of energy for carrying leaves.
Some cities collect leaves and all you need to do is rake them into the street. The city comes around and sucks them up. I know I've lived in at least one if not two that did this - one of those cities also offered free compost to people. I seem to recall them using a street sweeper vehicle to do this with. And honestly, if you already use the street sweepers, might as well do what you can with them especially if you were simply going to have people use special lawn refuse bags for their leaves anyway.
I think it depends on the lot, but while you certainly can blow leaves into someone else's yard or the street it's definitely possible to control things enough to blow it into a pile or into the woods
"Never underestimate the poor taste of the public"
I had a neighbor who would swat flies outside.. There's a lot of crazy idiots around. I am no longer surprised by their disturbing frequency of appearance.
I heard someone on HN say to treat climate change like a war. If we did we would make more drastic changes required, which under normal logic would be "we can't do that it will kill the economy..."
I wonder if the planet will be habitable in 1000 years time by 'traditional' humans. We may need to transcode ourselves into computers, or at least get pretty damn bionic.
As someone who has worked landscaping on commercial sites and large apartment buildings and been yelled at or treated like shit for using a leaf blower to do it. You go try raking a truck full of leaves without one, making sure you get every corner and crevice underneath bushes and back corners so you don't get yelled at by customers or the boss. Not that you don't have to rake it all after anyway into large tarps or garbage cans that you then drag and carry by hand. Now do this in pouring rain, or snow, or when the leaves are frozen.
Trust me it's not fun.
Now personally myself. I think it's stupid to remove leaves from a site rather than let them decay naturally and add their nutrients back into the soil. But when you're being paid to do something and you need to make money to keep living in a house. That leaf blower is really handy.
When I was younger, my mom had a house with a large house full of oak trees.
We had to rake the leaves, because, if they were allowed to decay on the ground, it would kill most the other plants.
There was a leaf blower, but we didn't use it for long - personally, I thought the rakes got the job done more quickly and thoroughly, even with that obnoxiously large yard. But then, I suppose I wasn't doing it professionally. Maybe with practice I'd have gotten better at it. The leaf blower was new; rakes are something I grew up with.
It was certainly more work to use a rake. I see that as an upside, though - it's always struck me as odd that people will spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make it so everyday tasks require minimal physical effort, and then spend even more money on home fitness equipment and gym memberships in order to artificially replace all the physical activity they were ostensibly trying to avoid in the first place. Again, though, that's personal use, not professional.
> it's always struck me as odd that people will spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make it so everyday tasks require minimal physical effort, and then spend even more money on home fitness equipment and gym memberships in order to artificially replace all the physical activity they were ostensibly trying to avoid in the first place.
A few days ago as I was doing some basic yard work when a friend stopped by and suggested I hire someone to do it instead. I told him exactly that, “If I pay someone to do this, I’ve got to pay for a gym memebership too.”
It’s also a nice change of pace to do something that not only doesn’t involve a computer, it doesn’t have any moving parts or machines at all. Very relaxing.
There is one additional perk to exercise as opposed to tasks. Work tends to involve straining physical repetitive labor. Dedicated exercise can be more targeted and fits differing constraints. Of course vanity is part of the reason for that optimization - just like a full body tan is more 'fashionable' than a farmer's tan working out can focus more on 'mirror muscles' than practicality.
Just look at Olympic weightlifters - they tend to look plump but they certainly are well strong as Olympic weightlifters.
> it's always struck me as odd that people will spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make it so everyday tasks require minimal physical effort, and then spend even more money on home fitness equipment and gym memberships in order to artificially replace all the physical activity they were ostensibly trying to avoid in the first place.
There must be a name for this strange human condition. I marvel at people who spend ridiculius sums of money to get the latest, lightest carbon fiber paddle for their stand up paddle board.
a) you're trying to get exercise,a heavier paddle will give you more
b) if your goal is to go faster then almost anything will do it - try a kayak
If it's any consolation, I think we all agree this is a general human problem instead of a problem with the men doing the labor. Why does the company require this service? Why do customers request it? How can people think a few leaves are bad? Etc.
People have very strange ideas about landscaping, and that usually means bad things for the environment. eg: "I'm a fully functioning adult, but I couldn't bear to see two kinds of grass so I had to cover the whole lawn with a neurotoxin."
I kinda wanted to respond to all the comments generally here. I agree with most of what you all say. Landscaping, at least the way I spent a lot of time doing it is ridiculous. I have no idea why customers request the things they do, I honestly have no idea why people spend so much money making the outside space of their property into a sterile tidy space. It's never really sat well with me.
My keaat favourite part of landscaping was never the work or dealing with lousy people, it was the fact that people were paying so much money to have what was not only pointless work done much of the time but work that was actually detrimental to them having nice productive gardens and greenspaces that didn't require chemicals and constant work.
My background is in ecology and ecosystems management and restoration do s lot of the work i did as a landscapre really was at odds with a lot of the things I was trained to do professionally and a lot of the things I belief in morally.
I have to admit not all the work I did was like that, I spent a bit of time working for a company that specialized in making natural gardens, we didn't use power tools or spend much time rakinf and tidying, and honestly the work was far more rewarding, but I do really appreciate the need to use powertools and do these unpleasant things if that's what customers want.
It sucks. The traditional English garden or the idea of a proper landscaped exterior is really a terrible idea in a lot of says. I've never really liked the way a perfectly pruned and immaculate yard looks, even if i'm fairly good at making it look that way.
Working landscaping though is kind of like a lot of service work. You provide a service a lot of people want, you get treated like, shit for doing it and in the end the work you do is at best pointless at worse actively detrimental in a lot of ways.
The problem, like with a lot of thibgs, is people have this made up ideal of how their things and life should be, and they're willing to spend lots of money to make sure it's exactly how they want. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but the ideals of what people think is the 'thing to have' is definitely skewed towards a lot of pointless, expensive, polluting work that really doesn't need to be paid for.or done on such a scale as it is.
Right, I don't think the blame should be placed on the poor bastard who is forced to use the infernal machine on pain of being thrown out of his house. The problem needs to be addressed at a higher level. In this case, there is a simple solution: leaf blowers should be banned.
I call BS on the pouring rain and snow: wet, frozen leaves are not blowing anywhere.
You would get more hours raking and thus more income if you were not using leaf blowers: you are externalizing costs to the detriment of both your own income and the rest of us.
Wet leaves stick to paved / metalled surfaces such that rakes & brooms ride right over them.
Without a blower you're down on your knees lifting them with your fingers.
Been there, done that.
It's odd to see suburbanites raging against blower noise whilst just shrugging at traffic noise as 'necessary'. At least blowers don't operate between midnight and 05:00...
Nah...a commercial leaf blower makes frozen leaves fly really good. We used one of the stihl ones. With a rake you lift large chunks of frozen solid frozen organic matter that you have to try and rake away a layer at a time. I'm telling anyone that doubts it to go try it. A whole apartment complex worth of frozen wet leaves. You've got 3 hours to get it all done before moving to the next site. Try it. Do it one day with a rake. Then head back next week late autumn after a good wind and rain storm and do it again with a leaf blower and see how much faster and easier it goes.
I agree it's better to let them decay in lots of cases.
Also, I try to give the benefit of the doubt to the people outside doing this every week, but I'm extremely annoyed. I don't really have a choice; I rent and everywhere one can rent, one has to be a part of this madness. I wouldn't by choice pay someone to do this.
Some trees (walnut) have poisonous leaves that can't be left to decay in place and must be treated and removed, but this is the best option in the majority of cases, yes.
I'm just wondering.. poisonous to who/what? Kids? Pets? How long are they poisonous for while decaying?
How long have people been 'treating and removing' them? Presumably the leaves were tolerable while on the tree, yet poisonous. It doesn't seem to stop people planting them. (A lot of questions, but there are a lot of experts on here!)
Normally to other plants, rarely for animals (see: poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac). In really extreme cases can be very dangerous even to burn it (but nobody has a manchineel in their garden). Walnut can poison the soil for a couple of years so is better put its fallen leaves on a isolated compost pile. It depends on the species and the chemistry of the soil.
"Juglone is occasionally used as a herbicide. Traditionally, ...has been used as a natural dye for clothing and fabrics...and as ink. ...has also found use as a coloring agent for foods and...hair dyes. ...is currently being studied for its anticancer properties"
Except when the leaves form a coating over grass that grows mold, and you are allergic to mold, which will also kill the grass. You don't have to remove every last leaf, just enough to give the grass breathing room.
In fact I just spent six hours today doing that... with a rake. We had a window where the snow cover lifted just long enough. It'll rain tomorrow, then freeze and snow again later next week.
Leaf blowers make working from home surprisingly difficult. I can be attempting to work on a given day in a quiet suburb of Menlo Park and completely unable to concentrate. The sheer pointlessness of it drives me nuts.
I bike to work. During the local dry season (roughly April to November) I need to keep an ear out for leaf blowers on the way to work and adjust my route accordingly. Otherwise riding through one of their dust clouds is like dredging a chicken breast through flour.
A few times I had to interrupt my ride and return home for a second shower because of leaf blower dust storms. Luckly they have been banned in my town (together with anything with a 2 stroke engine). And hey, no leaf-apocalypse has happened after the ban.
Sure, almost. But in the middle of summer? Or winter? Come on now. I lived at an apartment complex that started up leaf-blowers year round at 10am every single Tuesday. What's worse, I worked from home. Even now, having left several years ago, the sound of a leaf blower causes my blood pressure to spike. Destroy them all!
30 minutes, if you're lucky. In SoCal, one set of gardeners might be done in that time, until another set rolls up another one of your neighbors yards and begins the process all over again. As I mentioned in another comment, this is one of the things that's made it tremendously difficult to work from home.
Everywhere I've lived with this "service", there's been no respect for potted plants either. They get the full violence of the wind.
There was even a group of these guys who came straight up to my door, open except for the screen, and blew right into the house. They arrived early and started blowing in that very spot, which is why I hadn't had time to close the door. Just jerks.
I don't have one. A few times a year, I wish I did, not for raking the lawn, which can be done quickly enough with a rake, but for clearing leaves out of garden beds--the rake does bring mulch and can bring plants along--and from a short gravel walk.
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.
> 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.
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.
Besides things like favoring walking/biking over cars and maximizing both density and green space, it would be lovely to ban leaf blowers and truck reverse beeps (and mufflerless motor cycles, cars with loud bass, etc). Perhaps the large trucks could drop things off at the edge of the city, and from there smaller, electric, beepless trucks could bring goods the rest of the way in.
You missed off my two. Stereos that are 90% baseline turned up way too loud and the teen craze in my area of putting stolen megaphones on their bikes and playing 5 second snippets of music at incredible volume. You can hear them from several km with no exaggeration. The odd damaged individual does this to their car too.
And now many gas stations have video screens on every pump that include blaring audio. I was at one station in Minnesota that had about 10 loud screens all playing slightly out of sync in a cacophony - I can’t understand how people design and install systems like that thinking they’re normal or useful.
Autoplaying audio on websites at night is so stupid that they must have a good reason for doing this. It seems the perfect design to chase off people, get rid of the people that hangs on, and "optimize" the ratio between number of visits and resources needed
They changed the flight plans for SFO after that one jetliner crashed on landing partially due to unfamiliarity so they made the landing easier and less steep (saves fuel and even inexperienced pilots can do it - yay I guess), but now the approach is lower from 30+ miles out and almost every community gets to hear the jet planes going over head for 20 hours a day. I can hear them going overhead from pretty isolated parks on the other side of the mountain ridges, too. If you have a/c running at home one probably would not notice but if one does not it's louder than the street traffic noise for me.
The cynic in me thinks it was regulatory capture. Manufacturers of the beepers lobbied to make them required. Like scaffolding in New York. No proof though.
I think the only home appliance beep I actually like is the soft beep-beep-beep my fridge makes if you leave either door open for more than 2 minutes or so.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I wonder how the author feels about leaf vacuums like this, which is what I use: 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.
I have something similar. It grinds whatever it sucks and creates a lot of dust unfortunately. Hopefully your model is better. I think it comes down to bag quality.
The article mentions a blower that runs on batteries and is super expensive. Yours has a cord and is cheap. It seems yours is better as long as extension cords can be dealt with.
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.
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.
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.
If I'm ever in the situation you describe, I'd want to be seeking help from a trusted person immediately. Not to discuss "noise problems" but these questions: Am I paranoid? If not, how do I get out?
The scenario of being surrounded by backstabbers raises so many questions that there is no point of discussing noise problems.
When I was annoyed by open office noise I just heard disgusting stupid humans blabbing about disgusting human stupidities, why won't they just shut up and let ne think.
I guess my misanthropy was acting up.
Maybe open office disturbance just causes unique cracks each person has in their psyche to show up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think most "lawn care professionals" care whether they use a rake or a blower, because they get paid hourly, and their wage floor is set by other economic factors. They use a blower because the company employing them tells them to, so they can charge less and make a higher margin by being able to cram into each day more visits to lawns whose owners are sufficiently inconsiderate or powerless to accept externalizing the noisy consequences of this cost-saving measure onto their neighbors' eardrums.
The IDE analogy is a bad one, as the consequences of using an IDE are not visible to the consumer. A better analogy would be, people in a lawn care forum complaining about pop-over ads on lawn-care websites, 300 MB app installs to browse lawn-care store catalogues, and lawn-care online storefronts that double-charge purchases because they had the temerity to click the "back" button. And they'd be well within their right to complain about the negative externalities they must suffer as a consequence of rushed software development owing to mismanaged "agile" timeboxing and dark UI patterns designed by paperclip-maximizing sales teams.
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.
Most people will buy based off of cost and weight rather than sound. In round numbers, no one knows what 70dB means relative to 64dB. But everyone knows what $30 or 3 extra pounds means. (Except for the majority of the world which doesn’t used $ or pounds of course), and bonus addendum, 70dB sounds about 50% louder than 64dB.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.)
>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.
Yes, all of those should be regulated. They should be made as noise pollution-free as possible, and their hours of use be made as small as possible. There should be a monetary penalty for ruining the environment - some kind of noise tax.
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.
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.