We don't need quieter electric leaf blowers. We need to ban the gas ones, with no grandfather clause. Not just for the noise pollution but the local air pollution. It's crazy the volume of air that can be ruined by a single gas leaf blower, far worse than modern cars, and they are inescapable in cities.
They have been a bad idea from the start. Who thought an unbalanced, two-stroke internal combustion engine with a minuscule exhaust (and no muffler!) was a good idea for a tool operating in residential areas.
It’s the power-to-weight ratio. Two-stroke engines are used in blowers, chainsaws, trimmers, and edgers because the power:weight ratio is far more practical for handheld tools than a four-stroke engine.
Motorcycles and snowmobiles are mostly four-strokes these days because the increase in weight isn't a big deal compared to a chainsaw or trimmer.
And the other underlying problem implied there is that electric leaf blowers are only viable for household use. They are just so completely impractical for commercial use that no one will ever use them.
So use a rake and broom, it's what I do when I clear my yard and driveway.
Edit: and for that matter we probably need to stop clearing so much yard waste. My village has crazy expensive yard waste tags (with free pickup on select weeks of the year, usually fall) and everyone agrees it's not worth it to bag grass and leaves for the better part of the year. Unsurprisingly we have tons of pollinators, healthy firefly populations, and plenty of critters that feed on all the bugs. Not to mention during spring, every one who's too lazy to manicure their lawn sees blooms with dandelion, clover, ground ivy, and columbine. My block looks like a meadow for April and May with zero effort.
It seems that the value of clearing yard waste depends on the local conditions.
Some climates produce layers of thatch from simple lawn clippings, for instance, which can be problematic. And for some people, fallen tree leaves can be a real concern.
My lawns (all of which have been in Ohio) have never had these issues. I just mow the grass. Stuff (leaves, grass, whatever other stuff is growing or present) gets chopped up, either with a "mulching" mower or a side-discharge mower (and it'd probably work about the same with a reel mower). It degrades quickly-enough in-situ that neither lawn clippings nor tree leaves are ever things that are a concern. (The biggest lawn-oriented issue I ever had was that of having a large number of black walnut trees; the walnuts themselves were unseen ankle-killing traps and/or projectiles in the fall, and the abundance of food lead to an abundance of squirrels and thus fleas.)
But as I understand it, some others are not so lucky. I'm not familiar enough with the problems because I've never had any problems, but I understand that they do exist in some areas.
(Heavily-manicured deliberately-monoculture lawns are a different thing that I'm not even attempting to address here.)
Uh, what? You realize the problem with electric blowers is that they don't have enough power for commercial use compared to gas blowers, so your suggestion is to use a rake?
The problem that blowers solve is moving light yard waste. Most people can do that with a rake and broom. And most of it doesn't need to be moved in the first place.
The problem that blowers solve is moving a huge amount of light yard waste that would not be practical with a rake. Naturally, most people cannot do that with a rake and broom, without dedicating multiple days to the job.
Are these companies operating at scale? We have a couple in my city as well. But it's one guy maintaining their own fleet of equipment. Does the cost rival gas powered companies? The companies I'm aware of that offer this service specifically market it as a premium and appeal to eco friendly consumers that want the less noise and pollution, and are willing to pay more than double what it costs to have a gas powered company do it.
Unfortunately, until the technology improves I think we have a tragedy of the commons scenario here, because gen pop is probably willing to trade the noise and air pollution for the cheaper service
Sydney City Council, a large council, uses electric blowers. They have a small backpack so the blowers are kept light even though they have a much larger battery for much longer operation. They look quite good to use. Certainly better than my heavy dual battery one.
Why? I'm sure they're less practical than the gas powered ones, but every tool system with their own battery standard seems to have one. Even if you had to have a few batteries charged in reserve, that seems more like slightly more expensive and annoying than utterly impractical. Am I missing something?
You basically can run through a high capacity battery in less than 10 minutes, completing a light cleanup of a standard 1/4ac lawn. The battery itself will take 3-4 hours.
Running through an entire block would deplete numerous batteries, meaning you’ve got to purchase 2 dozen if your crew is going to do the average 20ish homes a day. The purchase cost is one thing sure, but batteries are a consumable and the logistics of charging are no joke for the average crew.
This is all just to blow some light leaves and clippings. This doesn’t account for running trimmers or god help you the lawnmower itself.
The tech just isn’t there yet and given the extremely high energy density and ease of use of gasoline, it may never match it.
I understand that they are less convenient and probably significantly more expensive for commercial use. That's why legislation is necessary, so landscapers who choose them aren't at a cost disadvantage. Externalities like air pollution are the textbook reason for regulations like this.
I mean we are talking an order of magnitude more effort and cost in exchange for noise pollution. I suspice if you told voters lawn care would quadruple in price in exchange for less (note, not eliminated) noise and air pollution that voters would not be terribly keen to approve such a solution.
From a little looking, the Greenworks 82BA26-52DP[1] seems like it might work well. It has a fairly long run time on battery on high (40 minutes), very long on low (2 hours), and has a dual port charging solution that seems to be able to charge batteries in 40-60 minutes depending on battery size. About a hour per tank of gas for a gas powered leaf blower seems to be about average, so I don't think stopping that often is really a problem.
It is more expensive up front, from even the electric blower's own numbers, but they say it's much cheaper over a year if you have a 4 hour daily usage cycle.[2] I don't know enough to know whether the claims make sense or not. Maybe you know more about this, but maybe it's not as clearly one sided as you think?
I'm on the (admittedly expensive) EGO system of lawn tools, and I can mow, trim, and blow my entire yard (front and back) in a relatively normal lot (8000 sq ft) on one 10.0Ah battery. It recharges in 2 hours. So I think electric is a touch more practical than your numbers might represent.
But for commercial use I agree, the upfront capex cost is prohibitive. And the need for charging infrastructure (in truck or other) presents an issue.
The truck, yes. A few extra batteries and a charger are somewhat expensive, but within expectation of the job I think. I doubt most locations are entirely without power that they can use. Even public parks often have outlets at specific locations.
In the end the extra battery cost might be cheaper than the gas and maintenance requirements for gas blowers over time.
Those minorities get the worst of the air pollution and dangerous noise levels themselves. And you have to add the externality of everyone else being affected by the pollution before you weigh the costs and benefits. Of course landscapers shouldn't be expected to switch voluntarily when it puts them at a competitive disadvantage, it's a textbook case of externality needing regulations.
> My 80v electric blower with a heavy battery runs for 21 minutes. A gas blower with 1.5 gallons of fuel will last 10 hours.
I found backbpack models (and if we're comparing professional services that's what seems we should compare) that claim 60 minuntes on high at 800cfm+ and 20 hours on low, with dual charger systems you can buy to supplement.
I saw numbers quoting that most professional leaf blowers go through about 0.43 gallons of fuel an hour. The top backpack blowers I looked up didn't even have a 1.5 gallon tank. The Echo PB-9010T has a 83.8 fl. oz. tank. The Stihl BR 800 C-E Magnum has a 67.6 oz. tank. The SCHRÖDER SR-9900X 80cc has a tank size of 75 oz.
If you have to stop to refuel every hour or so anyway, swapping out a battery that's been charging doesn't seem like a big inconvenience.
> A ban on gas blowers - or blowing in general - will only harm minorities already underpaid, often under the table.
I'm not sure we should be avoiding legislation meant to protect the public in general (air and noise pollution) because of possible affects to some specific subcategory (leaf blowing) of an industry (landscaping) which happens to employ minorities in a higher percentage than other industries. If we were to always do that, then we'd rarely ever have any useful public protections, would we?
How many professional leaf blowers per capita do you think we have, anyway, and if it costs more for everyone since it's regulated, why would the impact really be that great, since it should just mean they charge more?
Maybe they sound loud when you're using them but the difference is night and day when you're a bit farther away. I haven't heard a single electric blower that's louder than the quietest gas blower. And honestly the air pollution is my bigger complaint.
I'm not talking about CO2 for global warming here, it's negligible. This is local air pollution, polluting the air I breathe in my house and on my street. The other big offender in this category is wood smoke from fireplaces, which I would also be in favor of banning, though I understand this would be extremely unpopular (I know, I love a good fire too).
People don't realize that wood smoke is every bit as harmful as cigarette smoke and much worse than modern car exhaust. Many (most?) days in winter around here fireplace smoke is by far the biggest contributor to general poor air quality, and then there are the days when my neighbor's chimney smoke blows directly into my yard where my children want to play, for hours...
The city I'm in banned fireplaces in new houses a few decades ago. Of course, Phoenix is too hot far more than it resembles cold, and most will stay inside as much as possible for at least half the year.
Also, crucially: dB is a measure of sound pressure level at a point in space. It is not at all a measure of total sound output. And it tends to fall off at a rate of 6dB per doubling of distance.
So by halving the measurement distance and changing nothing else, a thing reads as being about 6dB louder. And by doubling the measurement distance and changing nothing else, a thing reads as being about 6dB quieter.
So stating that a jackhammer is 100dB and a television is 60dB is rather meaningless by itself.
If the jackhammer is measured at 0.5 meters (the distance of the operator's ears, say) and the television is measured at 2 meters (the distance of the viewer's ears, say), then there is a measurement delta of 12dB, which is a difference more than an order of magnitude in energy intensity.
And all we did to produce that massive delta was vary the distance where we've placed the meter.
(And, no, there is no standard measurement distance. Loudspeakers are often [but not always!] measured at a distance of 1 meter, and generators are often [but not always!] measured at a distance of 20 feet. It needs to be explicitly stated.
In all cases, if the only parameter relayed is "dB" then it doesn't really mean very much.
And this isn't even getting into other important factors, like if the measurement is performed in a half-space or anechoic or whatever environment.)
...yet where I live all the parks, public landscaping, etc., that are owned by the municipality are maintained with electric leaf blowers except for areas where they have it contracted out and then it's a mix. It's totally possible, but I think the larger problem is the sunk money on equipment that doesn't need to be replaced any time soon.
I've seen a couple businesses in my city that use electric. It's their main selling point. But in both the cases I'm aware of it's literally just one guy maintaining his own tiny fleet of equipment. And it's more than double what it would cost to get a bigger landscaping company to do it. I would really like to see an example of a landscaping company do this at scale, because I haven't seen it.
The equipment itself is not even really that big of an investment to my understanding. A good electric leaf blower and battery is probably equivalent or cheaper than its gas powered equivalent. It's the logistics and maintenance burden of having to constantly charge, swap, replace, and maintain the batteries. Kind of why electric cars only became viable in the last 20 years. The technology has been around a long time, it's just only now viable enough due to capacity restrictions.
Due to the form factor and energy requirements, it may be a long time before that happens to replace two and four stroke motors for commercial use cases.
DC seems to be doing pretty great with our ban. Theres some loud-ish electrics but it's still 1/8th the horror that it used to be; it used to be that someone two blocks away was still creating a living hell, but now it's really just someone across the street with a particularly poor model.
Next up on my list, construction sites! We've had a small condo going up nearby, wood framed, and the generator is loud as fuck all the time. They use so little power though. A hybrid setup with 1kwh battery would let that thing rest 95% of the time. Ditto for their air compressor; a even modest sized 300 PSI air receiver tank would radically improve the neighborhood for nearly no cost.
Another thing that sucks about construction: the dust. Workers have to wear respiratory devices on some of these jobs and yet no issues if the jackhammer is venting particulate into a schoolyard across the street.
Also sidewalks are routinely trashed by construction companies, destroyed to rubble even by their trucks and not repaired until the project is just about finished. Never mind the years where disabled people could not walk around the project.
I am so tired of noise and air pollution having 0 enforcement in cities, but if a car is parked for 15m too long in a metered spot they are ready like hawks to swoop down and dispense a $60 ticket.
I was eating lunch at a restaurant few weeks ago and a parking enforcer was ticketing a car right next to us. A few feet past the car three dudes on motorcycles were revving their engines and blasting music at the stop light. No one could talk and the air smelled for a couple minutes after they left. It just seemed so wrong who was getting punished and what cities prioritize in that instance.
Usually the ban is something like you cant use it in 500ft of a residence, which obviates that issue if cops bothered to patrol for this or if there was a reporting hotline that was well advertised.
The video shows the electric leaf blower before, and with their invention after. And it's a big difference, and makes the electric even quieter. I think we definitely need this even for electric!
I'm always shocked that small ICE equipment don't have catalytic converters, or any emissions reducing devices. Especially given the operator is actually holding the thing and the exhaust is just a foot or two from their face, surely the health consequences are capital letters bad.
That is exactly the kind of situation where regulations are needed. Sometimes the market can take care of things, and regulation isn't needed. But these workers don't have lots of leverage. If conditions are bad, they can't tell the boss "I have other options" and quit. So the market won't solve this case.
In all fairness, we’re not wrangling in a megacorp or small company / bad actor type.
These are usually tiny businesses where the owner is busting their ass in the hot sun alongside their crew. These are usually the smallest of small biz, and oftentimes just a young guy and a single helper.
I don’t believe we can expect lawncare prices to 4x, but this is a perfect example of targeting those who we should be supporting. If anything, structure the regulations to tier controls by size of the operation.
We absolutely should not be making the lives of a 20 year old kid trying to start something up any harder than it already is.
But by that logic we should let a 20 year old kid start as asbestos mine with hand tools next to a drinking water source, or let them operate heavy machinery on a highway with no training of any kind.
Clearly, just because doing <something> is a path to making money, it absolutely does not mean we should automatically reduce all barriers and allow it to happen.
"More jobs" should absolutely NOT be the goal, and anyone that says it is clearly hasn't thought to hard about it.
Quality jobs are clearly much, much more important.
> But by that logic we should let a 20 year old kid start as asbestos mine with hand tools next to a drinking water source, or let them operate heavy machinery on a highway with no training of any kind.
This is a dramatically exaggerated equivalency and you know it. Comparing someone operating lawn equipment to driving heavy equipment without training or mining biohazards next to a waterway would be humorous if you intended it a joke.
> “More jobs" should absolutely NOT be the goal, and anyone that says it is clearly hasn't thought to hard about it.
Oh come on, this is so far from established societal norms that it’s a fringe statement as it is.
It’s a fact of life that someone’s going to need to mow lawns. The externalities are so minor that it makes those in opposite appear borderline petty, but certainly not based.
I expect you don't see the hearing protection most of the time. 30 dB Ear plugs are 20 cents each and a reusable respirator is ~$25. Peanuts compared to gas and equipment.
I'm in California and the ban is only on sales, not use. There has been no difference in practice, yet. And my city also has a citywide ban on use, but there's no enforcement, so it's pretty much a joke all around.
I’ve noticed a drastic reduction here where I live already.
Use will take care of itself if you ban the sale, which is what happened.
Why the pessimistic take? Don’t you want to live in a quieter environment? Transitions take time — but we are well on our way. Most places can only dream about not having a gas powered leaf blower going on and on for hours while they try to work: here it’s already transitioning. So why be anything but positive about it?
What I loved about this is that all of their prototypes were with a stock leaf blower with *3D Printed* attachments. This really shows the value of the rapid prototyping that 3D Printing has allowed.
It also shows that any of us could have done this with enough time and effort. And I don't mean literally any person- but there are a LOT of YouTube engineering channels that could likely have tackled this, had they been asked to.
There are a lot of ongoing attempts in the 3d printing community to replicate the Wilson airless basketball. I expect there will be similar efforts in to produce something similar to what the students created. Wonder if they applied for a patent and if that would prevent clones from being made.
The funny part here is they say product, but in reality as soon as this ships someone will hit it with a hammer, figure out the internal layout with some calipers and we'll have an STL lol
I watched years ago a presentation at the City of Irvine, California, from a scientist that all these small engines (leaf blowers, mowers, etc.) pollute California's air way more than all cars combined. Also, the leak machine oil. To me personally, leaf blowers are bad not only due to their exausts, but because they also make all kinds of bacteria and pollutants airborne, most specifically, fungus, feces from animals, large particles, etc., which end up in our lung eventually. To me leafs are not a big issue. I'd rather have grass with decaying leaves then grass and leaf blowers!
UPDATE: It seems that California has banned the sale, not the use of gas-powered small engines [0]!
I welcome even quieter electric, but the two stroke engine on most blowers (particularly the pack blowers) is the real problem and they are EVERYWHERE. Every day from sun up to sun down from March until December my neighborhood has a nearly constant drone and reeks of two stroke gas. It has gotten so much worse over the past 7 years I’ve lived here, and sharply worse since pandemic. I dunno if it’s attributed to more affordable pack models becoming more popular with homeowners or increased usage of landscapers, but it has become an extreme nuisance.
I have a handheld electric to help with a couple of hard to reach spots. While it’s not as quiet as I wish, you can’t (well, least I can’t, from my testing) really hear it after about 75 to 100 feet. The surrounding neighbors’ blowers can be heard over a quarter mile away when I’m walking around the block.
It has ruined enjoying time out in the backyard, especially during the fall which is my favorite season.
Unfortunately the article is very poor on details. The sound from the video is insufficient to tell.
Personally, I'd be quite excited to see what are the changes engineering wise. I bet it'd make a proper addition to BOLTR.
I still can't see how it'd be much quieter, as lots of the noise is just the air moving (and making sound waves), perhaps less vibrations, different frequencies due to different rpm?
"Our product takes in a full blow of air and separates it," said team member Leen Alfaoury. "Some of that air comes out as it is, and part of it comes out shifted. The combination of these two sections of the air makes the blower less noisy."
Sounds like they created a noise cancellation air channel.
During the great American knowledge collapse, it's becoming more and more important to make American students look smarter for working, like, less harder.
And as has already been pointed out elsewhere, even if it was an actual 37% reduction it would be useless anyway since no commercial operation would be viable with electric leaf blowers. They’re good for blowing the leaves out of a homeowners driveway and not much else
I got an electric leaf blower mostly to avoid the noise and partly to avoid gasoline engine issues (a Kobalt 80V blower). What baffles me is that here the designers had a chance to make something truly quiet but instead they blew it and used a super-high-RPM motor-powered narrow turbine placed inside the pipe. It sounds like a dental drill amplified through a set of loudspeakers.
I would kill to get a commercially designed blower powered with a large squirrel cage driven by a low-RPM brushless motor. I'm sure they exist by now and I imagine they are glorious. I'm not sure what these students did but if I was doing that project today that is the first thing I would try.
> What baffles me is that here the designers had a chance to make something truly quiet but instead they blew it and used a super-high-RPM motor-powered narrow turbine placed inside the pipe.
They didn't change anything about the blower. They made an adapter you plug on the front that tries to cancel out the the worst offending frequencies. Like a silencer, but for leaf blowers. It's the red thing you see on the pictures.
They are made. Of course a hand-held blower that has enough air velocity to do its job is going to make some noise, but I walked by a landscape maintenance guy outside work yesterday, he had a battery-electric blower and it was much quieter than the old two-stroke gas blowers they were using last year. I didn't note the brand but the casing was green. Maybe Deere, but it wasn't quite the Deere shade of green so I don't know. You know what's quieter than any blower? A broom. But not as fast.
> There is a similar noise-is-strength in vacuum cleaner sales.
Thankfully that seems to only really happen on the cheaper, or smaller end of the vacuum spectrum. My Shark handheld is so obnoxious that the dog tries to rip it out of my hands so she can chew it to pieces. My Sebo canister vac, on the other hand, is much quieter. It's a selling point. And it really, really sucks!
Back before they started adding in artificial noise, I almost got hit by a Prius because I couldn't hear it and the driver was distracted. It was only due to the noise of some loose gravel on the pavement that I became aware of the car and got out of the way.
>> instead they blew it and used a super-high-RPM motor-powered narrow turbine placed inside the pipe.
Because it is a handheld tool. It cannot be heavy. If you want to shove lots of power through an electric motor then that motor has to be either very heavy or very fast. The same is true for turbines. And a lighter consumer product will generally be cheaper to manufacture.
Another reason for smaller and lighter fans is the lower moment of inertia, which means faster spin up and spin down. Unfortunately, these frequent spin ups annoy me to no end.
I have had the twin battery Makita model for several years now. It’s a fabulous tool, basically functions how you describe I believe. Puts out a max of 61db on high. Expensive, but we already have makita tools, and it made a hated chore essentially not exist because its so convenient, fast and easy.
Elon Musk at one point once suggested Tesla would make a quiet leaf blower - due specifically to the noise.
I wonder if Tesla perhaps has a whole bunch of technologies they're developing incognito in the background - or if he's perhaps being limited for some artificial reasons?
It may just be a market size issue - and cities passing bylaws to disallow gas powered, only allow electric under a certain dBs is the fix; and for some reason aren't caught under existing noise pollution-nuisance laws.
I want it. Specifically I want it to be mandatory for all of the lawn services that use straight pipe two stroke leaf blowers at 6 in the morning, every morning.
All other lawn equipment is loud but manageable. Leaf blowers are unreasonable. They are also the only equipment even the lawn service guys wear heating protection while using (sometimes).
i think i've just grown up in different areas to a lot of you all then. this has never been a problem for me, but maybe it's regional/cultural/climate-dependent.
They could open source the tech and the take PR victory laps on how they are helping lower irritating noise, saving the environment, and being very cool about not trying to profit over it. That's the kind of thing that would blow up on this site.
How would an electric leaf blower (or anything electric/battery/motor related) released by Tesla be any different from a flamethrower made by Boring company? At least there's a bit of resemblance from the tech used, but a self-lighting gas device from a digs hole in ground company has nothing to do with anything.
It's probably just not a market anyone really cares.
The person who does it a few times a year just buys something cheap.
The professional needs to have it running the whole day. No cable and just noise means that the boss saves money and the worker can just use ear protection.
I don't understand. You opted to buy the inexpensive store brand tools (Kobalt is Lowe's house brand) and now you're complaining that shortcuts were taken and it didn't exceed requirements or your expectations?
I don't walk into Harbor Freight and expect Snap-On tools.
If I am not mistaken, the first sentence mentions what the GP commenter has, while the second sentence talks about what's mentioned in the article. You seem to be conflating the two.
The Kolbalt 80V line was made by Greenworks, which makes excellent products for pros. I have the Kobalt 80V blower and it is an excellent blower (loud) and is just a rebranded 80V Greenworks. Not Harbor Freight cheapness for sure. I also have the 80V mower and trimmer and they too are just rebranded Greenworks tools. Excellent products overall.
You'd be surprised with the quality of some of the latest harbor freight tools. They are still shaky with some stuff but they aren't the "hazard fraught" of 5+ years ago.
This is a good point but you're never going to win an argument with somebody who has spent more money than warranted on a purchase.
Whether it be title insurance, a name brand on an item that came from the same factory as another item, or even religious tithings, people are both financially and emotionally committed to past expenditures and it is extremely tough to fight past this commitment.
I tried this when I first got a house. The leaves decompose and you end up shoveling a layer of mud off your waking surfaces. It also becomes incredibly slippery when wet. A dense layer of waxy oak leaves can be like walking on ice.
He's saying to leave it on the yard to break down, if you do that it turns to slippery ass mud eventually, and guess what people like to be able to walk in their lawns, if we're sweeping up the entire yard so that we can use our yard without it being slippery and muddy from decomposed leaves... congrats you've just fucking reinvented the rake and leaf blower
If they are serious, then they are making the equivocation fallacy - arguing by using a word in two different ways and hoping nobody notices the mistake.
But it's likely they are doing this as a pun, where readers are supposed to notice the equivocation, and find it funny or annoying. For example we can imagine a lazy husband saying "they're called leaves, so that is why I'm going to leave them for tomorrow!" This is not a serious attempt to equivocate the two meanings of "leave" - it communicates non willingness while also causing laughter or annoyance.
An obvious equivocation is not usually an effective argument. But making it a pun can win points with a good humored audience, because they find it funny. Funny arguments can influence opinions even though we know they are nonsense.
TLDR; when people mix word meanings secretly to confuse people and win points, it's equivocation, and that's a morally bad argument and is usually unacceptable. But when people mix meanings blatantly to win points by being funny, it's a pun, and that may be acceptable in non-serious conversations.
I wonder if the efficiency is indeed unchanged, or as quoted in the article "keeps all that force". If so, and if the added weight is really minimal, I wonder if this could be applied to EDF aerial vehicles such as hobbyist RC planes.
"Their design cuts the most shrill and annoying frequencies by about 12 decibels, which all but removes them, making them 94% quieter. The team reduced the overall leaf blower noise by about two decibels, making the machine sound 37% quieter." [1]
Somewhat upsetting here... I don't have a problem with people doing things like this and students need encouragement, but we are talking about shifting from the sound of a leaf blower to the sound of a vacuum cleaner [2]... in the best case.
One particular annoyance here: the sound emission must be from the end of the blower but also from its casing. I feel many products like these are cheaply designed, and the OEM could solve many of the nuisance issues with simple housing changes... or spending a few more pennies on the bearings or blades in assemblies. These are not OEM primary goals, as they are looking to save pennies in a lot of the parts in these designs.
JHU should make these comments!, and also offer their designs for free given these are public orgs using mostly public dollars... if the result is such a big deal, getting manufacturers to commit to sound reduction in licensing deals would be a true result!
Yes, these mechanical engineering senior design projects at JHU are all sponsored by some organization or another, and the sponsor gets to keep the end product (and in this case also patent pending). Source: did a mechanical engineering senior design project at JHU 6 years ago (though mine was less successful, haha)
"Johns Hopkins researchers' success in winning federal funding—which accounted for close to 87% of its 2022 R&D expenditure—enables them to pursue projects in an array of fields, from human genetics to artificial intelligence."
[1] https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/01/05/nsf-higher-education-research...
Oh yes... "private" org using public dollars is more appropriate.
It appears as if this specific research was funded by Black & Decker. If they couldn't get the benefits from it, it's not as if they'd pay JHU to do and make public this research, but rather that they'd do the research a different way, likely robbing the JHU students of the real-world problem-solving experience as a capstone project of their engineering curriculum.
How JHU's other, unrelated research is funded doesn't seem terribly relevant to this privately-funded, patent-pending innovation.
Tuesday I mowed the lawn. Yesterday morning, I got up, made coffee, grabbed my shop broom and cleaned up out front. Not a leaf blower insight.
Sure it took a couple of extra minutes but I also got some light exercise. I understand why a lawn service uses a leaf blower. I don't understand why my neighbors do.
Hey whatever. I don't care. But when I hear a leaf blowers early on a Sunday or even a Saturday, I cringe. There's no reason miserable people need to make others miserable as well.
A quieter leaf blower? No. They did not do that. They found a way to quiet an existing leaf blower. Adding a silencer to a gun doesn't mean that you have invented a new gun.
>> They workshopped more than 40 versions of the solution they finally settled on: an attachment that cuts the machine's noise almost like a silencer on a gun or a muffler on a car.
And for all the people screaming about electric v. gas, this isn't about that. This device looks like it could be used on any leaf blower, although the difference is probably less dramatic on a gas-powered model.
I still recall a tragicomic leafblower event that made the local news when I lived in Australia.
A caretaker was killed when a tree fell on him while he was using a leafblower during a storm. The added irony was that he was doing this at 'The Lodge' - the official residence of the Australian Prime Minister which had been vacant for some time because the Prime Minister refused to live their (preferring a residence in Sydney). So an entirely unnecessary event all around.
I actually got into metal casting and blacksmithing because one day I tried using my dad's shop vac to blow air into a fire I'd made in the backyard. The shop vac was about as strong as a leaf blower and was extremely effective.
After that I dug a small pit, trenched a 2" pipe into the bottom of it to act as a tuyere, and then hooked the shop vac hose to the other end of the pipe. That fire got hot enough that some rocks lining the pit glowed white and sand started to clump together. I could toss an 8-10 inch piece of (undried) oak log into the fire and it would completely burn away in under ten minutes. I had used an old log holder from a fireplace made of 3/4" iron bars to allow airflow around the larger logs as the fire was starting. When the fire died down I discovered it had completely buckled and collapsed from the heat.
I went on to learn how to make refractory bricks and distill charcoal. I switched from the shop vac to a computer case fan for my actual forges though, as the shop vac easily blew all the charcoal out of the fire pot and was very loud.
I have never dried my own cars but my dad and grandfather insisted on towel-drying cars to avoid water spots.
Though come to think of it, a leaf blower might not work for that, unless it's actually managing to remove the water mechanically and eliminating evaporation. I recall mechanized car-washes using blow driers so maybe this does, indeed, work.
When you wash the car properly, you want to remove the excess water as it's not clean. Most people do this with a microfiber, towel or chamois. These can scratch the surface if not done properly.
A strong blower will remove the water without scratching the surface. It also works in places too small to reach with a towel.
I've noticed roofing crews use them to remove old shingles. It must work pretty well, if they are dealing with carrying them around on the top of a house.
Can someone explain to me what "quieter" means in this context and/or how it's calculated? I don't understand what they mean when they say reducing the noise by 2 decibels made it 37% quieter -- it wasn't making only 5 decibels of noise before, was it?
>>Their design cuts the most shrill and annoying frequencies by about 12 decibels, which all but removes them, making them 94% quieter. The team reduced the overall leaf blower noise by about two decibels, making the machine sound 37% quieter.
But that is NOT the same as human perceived volume.
Less 37% energy is not 37% less volume to humans.
You won’t be able to tell the difference in volume except for the tone which could be more or less pleasing depending on the frequency they say they got 12db on.
I learned something new today (I didn't know decibels were logarithmic), but I still don't understand how it relates to "human perceived volume" as you put it. If a typical electric leaf blower makes 70 decibels of sound, it seems odd that cutting that to 67 decibels makes it sound 37% less loud. Perhaps it does, but I think I'll have to hear it to believe it. I may have to buy a sound meter and run some experiments.
A reduction of 3dB at any point in space is equivalent to halving the energy at that point.
But we humans don't perceive sound energy linearly, so half of the energy is not equivalent to half of the perceived loudness.
The usual rule of thumb is that it takes a reduction of 10dB (1/10th energy) for a thing to sound about half as loud, or an increase of 10dB (10x energy) for a thing to sound about twice as loud.
(This leads to all kinds of interesting problems with making things quieter or louder. It seems superficially implicit that moving from a 100-Watt amplifier to a 1,000-Watt amplifier would be strikingly-dramatic difference, but in an ideal world where everything else is the same then that change only makes things about twice as loud -- the same as moving from a 1-Watt amplifier to a 10-Watt amplifier.)
The sound has 37% less power, but human perception of sound intensity is roughly logarithmic. Looking at the difference in dB will give you a better estimate of the perceived change than the difference in actual sound power.
Doesn't matter. We have quiet vacuum cleaners, quiet cars, quiet motorbikes, and quiet mowers, but that doesn't trigger the feeling of primal power that many buyers search for.
Thank god, i am so sensitive to all lawn equipment noise, this is a huge public good and I think there should be more restrictions on this class of machine, gas and electric
Not when you have gravel landscaping and a yard full of shrubs with small leaves. The rake will work a little on the larger branches but won’t do a good job of cleaning up.
If these truly sound that much better I'd personally buy every gardener in a 3 block radius one of these myself just to get rid of the bloody gas ones.
Many affluent areas have already banned gas leaf blowers and it’s incredible how quiet the battery powered replacements are. I was in Palm Springs recently and had nearly walked past a landscaper using one before if occurred to me just how quiet it was - didn’t even interrupt our conversation. I believe it was a Stihl backpack version (maybe https://www.stihlusa.com/products/blowers-and-shredder-vacs/...) but yeah, highly recommend!
It isn't so much the noise that bothers me, what I've never understood about leaf blowers is what are they meant to accomplish? When I watch people use them they either blow the leaves into the street or the neighbors yard. What do they think that does?
Now on the other hand, I do own a very noisy leaf vacuum. But when I've collected a bag full I can just deposit the leaves in my collection container. They are taken off to be composted
I use mine (electric) to blow leaves from the street and sidewalk back onto my grass so that I can mulch them with the lawn mower. I also use it to blow debris back onto the grass-free perennials area around my tree to get free mulch. I'm weird, but it's really handy for that. The entire reason I own a lawn mower and a leaf blower is because I couldn't find a lawn care crew that would mulch everything in place - everyone around here wants to take your leaves away and then bring in artificially dyed mulch (and charge you for it).
They also work for blowing snow off the sidewalk if the snow is still fluffy.
I own a Stihl leaf blower and primarily use it to clear debris from the gravel paths in my garden. Because raking gravel also collects the stones. Debris includes leaves, leaf husks, beech nuts, catkins, and a range of other things that drop off trees. I use a big rake to clear the lawn (I actually enjoy the physicality of this task).
All of this stuff is composted over the year in a large pile in a secluded corner of my garden, along with grass cuttings, scarified moss, etc. The volume of stuff usually exceeds the amount I can get rid of using the local council's garden waste collection.
Now that you say that, it makes much more sense. It isn't like I go into my neighbors backyards and monitor them using their leafblower. So all I really see is the yard maintenance guy in the front yard. I'll commonly just see them blowing them into the street. Not all of them do this however.
I use mine to blow debris from the driveway onto the lawn so it doesn’t get tracked into the garage, or to clean the leaves, sticks, and pollen from our many trees that accumulate on the back deck. The times I’ve had landscapers come they used tarps to collect the bulk of the debris they gathered with the blowers and hauled it away.
generally for landscapers it saves them the trouble of raking, which can put a lot of strain on your back — they'll blow the leaves onto a tarp and then wrap them up for easy removal
in my experience, homeowners mostly dick around with them
This thread is like people who’ve never cleaned a yard before saying “I’ve never understood the purpose of rakes and brooms - don’t they just move things around? Surely you need to pick things up to really clean?!”
My son and I raise money for our Boy Scout troop by doing yard cleanup in the fall. Using leaf blowers and tarps is how the crew worked through 20 acres of cleanup over two weekends.
There is a pile of leaves so deep in the street in front of my house that it has an entire ecosystem living in it. At this point they have composted some, insects have begun to live in them and grass is growing from the pile.
In many places that would be the homeowner’s responsibility to clean up. Even if not, it’s often in the homeowner’s best interest to not have a huge pile of rotting leaves clogging the gutter.
Our town used to do that, then they decided it was too costly and stopped. I am waiting for them to corelate the increased need to clean leaf-clogged storm drains with this decision.
To be fair, they are very good at removing debris from a front-porch. I fully support banning them, and they are heavily overused in situations when a rake works just as well, but they are superior in some cases.
I use it to remove pollen, pine needles, gravel, debris from clippings, etc from my deck and drive-way. Sometimes I use it to clear out the gutters on my roof. I usually blow it all down into one corner then use a dust-pan and broom to collect it all and throw it in the debris bin. I hate it when people just blow the debris somewhere else; they're making it somebody else's problem and that's wrong.
Wouldn't letting the leaves to decompose be better for the soil instead of constantly removing them? I mean, the tree supposedly uses the nutrients from the soil to grow those leaves, and if you keep removing them away, at some point the tree will simply starve and die, right?
There are problems with battery-powered tools (at least, leaf blowers) still, especially at the commercial level. For one, they just don’t have the runtime. I briefly had an 80V blower. On its highest power – which is the only way it could come close to a gas-powered model, it was barely able to get all of the leaves out of the yard (we had a tree with leaves that had needle-like protrusions, which made them quite hard to dislodge), and lasted about 10 minutes per charge.
If you don’t have sticky leaves, or are clearing primarily hard surfaces like a deck, then absolutely, battery-powered is the way to go. But if you’re a commercial operator who is driving tools more or less non-stop all day, it’s going to be a hard sell to have to have a minimum of N*2 batteries (at $150-200 each), plus the downtime of swaps, plus having to run a generator on your truck constantly to charge the off-duty batteries.
EDIT: Sibling comment below linked to a Stihl model that appears to offer an hour of runtime at full tilt. It’s also $2400 for the unit / battery / charger, tbf, but it at least has the performance.
A whole hour of runtime would be mean 1C discharge. 80V (which is likely 72V, but in the US it's ok to label the max voltage rather than the actual one) is made of 20 Li-Ion batteries in series. Lets say 2 in parallel, so total 40 batteries. I'd go with 3Ah per battery (could be more for 21700) and around 2Kgs weight. For 1h work that's ~430W of power which is rather under powered.
That fast charger (say 30min to charge) for this thing would be quite a thing to witness with over a kW of power draw.
About Stihl, it uses a 36V battery, so 10 Li-Ion in series. Which is half as powerful. I can't see a capacity higher than 36V/6Ah from Stihl. Now, it possibly uses multiple batteries, however, the issue with charging still remains the same.
Running a generator would be louder than the device, so imo that's a moot point. I'd consider using a massive power bank and/or lots of pre-charged batteries to carry the day but not an inverter.Taking enough batteries to swap and charging them in off-hours seems the only sensible approach (albeit not cheap)
In San Jose, whenever someone proposes this (or at least getting the gas powered ones to stop dumping carcinogens), they’re non-ironically branded as racist.
People argue the battery powered ones aren’t good for professional use (short runtimes) but that problem was solved years ago. They also argue they’re too expensive,
but that argument falls apart if you include engine maintenance and gasoline in the cost.
Isn't it called a leaf rake? Frankly I never understood the popularity of leaf blowers to begin with. They are noisy, less effective than a leaf rake and very bad for health and back of the users.
It seems they exists only because people are stupid enough to think that something that makes noise and use a lot of energy would necessarily be better.
> less effective than a leaf rake and very bad for health and back of the users.
Citation needed. I can clear my whole yard with an electric blower much faster than with a rake. I also have no idea how holding a leaf blower would be bad for my back or health.
It's called hearing protection. People wear it while operating heavy machinery, shooting guns, or being at rock concerts. Might not hurt to keep a pair around your home.
While I'm usually very free market, I think this is a case where we have such a high negative externality that we need regulation. Everyone is annoyed by leaf blowers, but the tradeoff for users, especially commercial, of paying the extra cost isn't worth it to them. I don't think we should ban them, but have a maximum permitted noise level.
love the ingenuity but this reminds me of the "pen vs pencil in space" myth. while the residents should not be really using them in the first place, i hope local municipalities would acquire quieter options for maintaining public spaces.
There’s some other “quiet leaf blower” on the market, and all they’re doing is reducing power and telling you special nozzles make up for it, which of course they don’t. This article omitting performance measures is a red flag for me. What’s the CFM impact? It’s 40% quieter, but is it also 40% worse at blowing leaves?
Timestamp? I’ve watched the video twice now and read the whole article and can’t find one mention of it. The closest is one statement of “it keeps all that force still there”, which is vague, definitely not the same thing as CFM, and sounds like the sort of statement that’s compatible with the aforementioned nozzle lines.
Leaf blowers are one of the most idiotic inventions ever made. What is good about moving throwing leafs from place A to place B, where they will be rotting in the same way. Blowing with all other dust and trash. Luckily they got recently banned in Warsaw.
If three people make this, then it should say something about a.) leaf blowers and how they are liked by bystanders b.) that this might be solving the wrong problem.
"you had to be the 3rd one to make it?"
With people making a personal attack out of everything, I wonder: Does this make you happy? How are those people in real life? Can't they discuss things without getting personal? (Oh and I see the irony of my comment, but I do consider this a meta-discussion)
PS: No I don't read every one out of 180 comments before I comment myself. Chapeau if you do!
> With people making a personal attack out of everything,
Just because you feel attacked doesn't mean you were attacked. Nothing bad happened to you, other than being asked a simple question.
> PS: No I don't read everyone of 180 comments before I comment myself.
In this case 0 were read in order to rush and make a low effort joke because there were two rake comments above the fold and nowhere near 180 total when you wrote it. There's no need to lie here, you gain nothing from it.
"In this case 0 were read in order to rush and make a low effort joke"
You should work for the NSA or the three later agency of your country, you can spot what people do possibly thousands of kilometers away! There was this one Columbo episode, one of my favorites, where the NSA wanted to hire such a guy. Sadly it was all fake. So the cynical side of me assumes you also can't spot what I'm doing at my computer, and your assertion you could see what I was doing, was fake :-(
"make a low effort joke"
You still have not understood my comment. You make no effort to understand the comment, even with my explanation. I guess this is because you don't want to understand people but get something out of attacking them.
My comment was not a joke, which was the point of my previous comment.
I was not making a joke. But that's not fitting the narrative in your head.
You invent other people in your head, me "rushing to the comments to make a low effort joke", ignoring what they say ("I was not making a joke"), then make up what they say, so you can attack them, instead of an argument ("I was not making a joke").
"The point stands that you lied about the number of comments"
I never said how many comments I have read. How can I lie about the number of comments I have read then? Are you mixing up comments? You see me highly confused.
[Edit] I made the comment because there are many leaf blowers here - and while they do individually safe time to the user, they create hell for everyone else who might be noise sensitive. And I made the comment to express that there is already an invention, the rake. So people could use that instead of optimizing their comfort and time against everyone else wellbeing. But people don't care.
It's probably getting there given what Ego has on offer, but I think until it is downright better in at least some dimensions, it's going to be a hard sell. Right now it seems like it's more expensive, at best similarly powerful, and obviously batteries take time to recharge. I think it's gotta be niche for contractors.
That said, given how bad gas lawn equipment is for the air in a locality, maybe regulatory nudges are in order. I suspect if the incentives were right the rest of the problems would solve themselves.
As someone who went all in on Ego about 3-4 years ago, let me tell you, the technology is nowhere close to capable enough for even small-time contractors yet.
You would need at least 3 batteries per piece of equipment in use at one time in order to not have to spend time idle while a battery recharges ($700-$1000 upfront investment in batteries per piece). The lifespan of those batteries under constant usage would be atrocious.
Even if you could solve the battery problem, the power of the equipment doesn't come close to gas. My Ego leaf blower doesn't even compare to the plug-in electric one I had prior to acquiring it, and I still have to revert for some harder jobs. An example of this: if there is a clump of wet grass on concrete, like something left behind from a mower wheel, the Ego struggles to move it while the plug-in has no problem. Or if a pile of leaves is damp, forget about it.
The mowing quality is terrible, leaving long patches everywhere (despite a sharp blade and slow progression). The form factor of the mower deck makes corners and edges much more difficult than other machines. And because the power is limited, the mulching capabilities are almost nil. It shuts down quickly if you hit a particularly tough piece of lawn to avoid overloading its motor.
Reading through the comments here I feel like I live in a parallel universe.
I have Ego products and don't see any problems with them whatsoever. I've used and have gas and corded equipment, and by far prefer Ego. I haven't noticed any functional difference in how they perform, and if anything I get annoyed by gas models because they're heavier and more annoying to start and stop. Sure they're more powerful sometimes but I've never needed the extra power they provide. It's not like I'm going to chop up a log using my lawnmower. I've never had problems mulching anything or mowing well, and it works perfectly. And I live on a fairly wooded property so we get tons of leaves. The batteries last plenty long and charge really fast.
For what it's worth, they do make batteries in different Ah capacities. I don't even remember which ones we have but maybe we have the higher capacity ones?
I can see why contractors might have issues with constant use of cordless equipment. But I'm not a contractor, and my guess is they'd have more problems with battery lifespan than charging in practice if they timed the charging well.
I also understand why people wouldn't like the sound of leaf blowers but to me I don't understand the level of animosity about them, in the sense that there's other things that are much louder that I don't hear laws being passed about and so forth. To me it feels a bit like they're being singled out for some reason, I assume because people believe they're unnecessary? Either that or I'm just not bothered as much by that particular noise.
Like I said in another comment, perhaps some of the more recent models of ego mowers have better power but my model from 3 years ago is no where the quality of a cut that a cheap gas mower would provide. I still love my ego mower though.
1) You have to buy special blades because of weight.
2) The lift on these blades are not as great, you can definitely bag but its maybe 50% the lift a gas mower can provide.
3) This also impacts things like mulching where your not getting enough lift to chop up the grass enough.
4) It can bog down a lot quicker than a gas mower.
Still love my mower but at least the prior generation was under powered in the motor department.
I have all electric lawn equipment as well, though my mower is a Toro. No disagreements that a 13A blower connected to AC will beat the shit out of a battery-powered leaf blower, but I'm sure you do and hopefully did realize that, the math just doesn't work out. The one place the Ego does excel at is stuff like edging and string trimming, where there's not nearly as much power needed. They definitely struggle a bit on things like chainsaws and blowers where more power is just generally better.
The place where it is weakest is probably snow blowing. They now have a 2-stage electric blower, but I am pretty sure it's just nowhere near gas. I live in the midwest in an area where the 1-stage Ego electric blower is already kind of overkill, so that's what I'm running. It has its negatives and positives: it always starts without having to worry about the fuel sitting over the seasons, it's quiet during operation and doesn't pollute, the batteries are always ready since they are on the charge when not in use, and I have enough battery to run it for much longer than needed. That said: the batteries are, indeed, simply too expensive.
I'm surprised the mower sucks, this Toro electric mower feels reasonable compared to anything else I've ever used (granted, I do not have much lawn and have never used any serious mowers. Just your average lawn mowers). I wonder if it's true that all electric mowers suck or maybe it's just that Ego isn't/wasn't doing a good job on mower design.
I have no real problem with the blower being underpowered compared to a plug-in, but for commercial use, it would be a deal breaker.
The Ego leaf blower and even the chain saw are good tools for 90% of my average home usage, and the convenience of not having to deal with cords or trying to start a small gas engine makes them worth it to me. I have not had to go to my old string trimmer once and should probably sell it. Living more north of you, I haven't dared try the snow blower. The gas blower I have struggles with some of our snows up here.
The mower on the other hand, I wanted to return after the very first mow but convinced myself that even with a poor cut the trade off was worth it. 4 years later and with batteries dying I'm considering other options (including the Toro electric, but many reviews made similar remarks to the Ego).
> I have no real problem with the blower being underpowered compared to a plug-in, but for commercial use, it would be a deal breaker.
Yeah, exactly. That was my thought, too.
I don't think they're that far behind, but improvements in battery technology might be necessary for commercial usage to become viable without being subsidized or regulated.
> The mower on the other hand, I wanted to return after the very first mow but convinced myself that even with a poor cut the trade off was worth it. 4 years later and with batteries dying I'm considering other options (including the Toro electric, but many reviews made similar remarks to the Ego).
Yeah, I suspect you really do need the power of gas for your mowing. That does make me wonder why some people clearly do and some people clearly don't, but it's probably not worth wasting too much time pondering.
I love my ego but agree will all of your problems. It just does not have the power that gas mowers have. Suction can be a real problem on them, they use proprietary blades that have to be light weight because of the electric motor.
I do think their more recent models fix a lot of these issues but I don't think its ready for commercial use. Just having to have a large number of batteries to sustain your day of work is limiting.
Maybe it's just a UK thing but I can't think of the last time I even saw a non-electric lawn mower. Even going as far back as the 80s they were the standard, just don't mow over the cable!
Depends on where you live and the size of the yard. Electric are great when the size isn't that big. Once you go larger, it becomes very hard to do practically with electricity.
There are different types of mowers - push (usually 4cycle), push+self propelled, riding one(s), then 2cycle scythe types, and then trimmers and brushcutters (spinning blades). Those options (more or less) are available battery powered, too. Battery powered ones have shorter use per charger but they are lighter (and usually less powerful).
However, if you can use a robot one (or few of them), it tends to be an easier setup - it does require flatter lawn and what not, though. However they are insufficient in cases where one really needs a riding mower.
Personally, I have/use a robot, a battery powered strimmer, gas powered brushcutter, and a push behind mower. The main job is done by the little robot, but the rest have their uses as well.
> Maybe it's just a UK thing but I can't think of the last time I even saw a non-electric lawn mower
UK here. I've been using a petrol mower for the last 25 years. My lawn is 40m long. I do own a 50m extension cable but it would be a real hassle for grass cutting. My three adjacent neighbours also have petrol mowers.
It will get there I suspect, the tools and batteries can charge in the truck en route. Easier to just fuel up the truck once instead of filling up little gas tanks all the time.
Charging using the truck would require running the truck all day -- probably not an acceptable alternative. Consuming 2-10 Kw from a 200 Kw engine would be so inefficient that it'd be too expensive anyways. Instead you'd need to run a generator all day charging batteries.
A fast charging, high capacity tool battery takes at least 60 minutes to charge. In high power applications (lawn mower, leaf blower, chainsaw, etc) those batteries might be emptied in a little as 15 minutes.
A better alternative might be corded 240v tools running directly off the generator for high-power applications. 120v tools are limited to 2-3HP which doesn't compare well to gas engines.
Instead buy 120-volt and 240-volt leaf blowers. BTW 2-3 horsepower is plenty (probably too much) for one man.
We use water hoses w/o bitching too much. We could used corded leafblowers tomorrow. Or butch up, get rakes and get in shape: cleaner air, more exercise and longer hours for the lawn laborers.
If you had a serial plug-in hybrid with a 20+Kwh battery which also supported exporting 120vac, that would work. AFAIK such a vehicle doesn't exist in North America yet and might not exist anywhere globally.
You start stacking energy efficiency losses (engine -> charger -> battery -> inverter -> charger -> battery -> motor) and economic losses (expensive serial hybrid, higher than expected vehicle battery cycles, still need a large number of tool batteries which wear out in about a year, etc.) though.
I am sure it will, its just no where close yet imo. Truck charging is not as practical; if the crew is running a tight ship, they should not be far between jobs. So you would basically need a lot of batteries to sustain a day full of jobs.
I love my battery powered mower and trimmer (wow there's so many names for that)! I can mow the lawn and come back in and relax with a quiet show or game!
Won't help much until these are mandated by law, or.. we just wait for a couple generations to die out. There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. Over time, the next couple generations may hopefully adopt more battery powered outdoor stuff (mowers, blowers, etc) because of environmental concerns, or... goodness - maybe actual sound concerns. But it's going to be another couple decades, I think. Yes, I live in a rural area in the US. Things ain't changing here any time soon.
> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them.
That’s an awfully uncharitable projection.
The lawn business people I know would love to adopt full electric fleets of gear. They aren’t sending their teams out with gas engines because it’s a “fantasy escape world”. They do it because gas engines are currently the only reasonable way to keep the crews running all day without spending thousands of dollars on batteries over and over again.
Current battery tech is hit or miss. The packs should be protected from over-discharge and last for hundreds of cycles, but in practice they got a lot of early failures. They also need extra packs to rotate while others are charging. At $100-200 per battery, they might be spending $1000 on batteries to operate a machine for a season, which would have bought them two gas powered machines and gas to operate them.
There’s also the issue of charging throughout the day. Getting a reliable charging setup that works on a truck inverter and getting crews to perfectly manage batteries throughout the day, including spares, is significantly harder than just filling up a gas tank.
Projecting all of this on to “fantasy escape world” is silly.
You are talking about people working in a business.
I'm talking about neighbors living in rural/suburban areas.
EDIT: We have a lawn care guy. He does our half acre in under 30 minutes. Our neighbors who do it themselves - same half acre size - typically take 90-120 minutes. They'll just sit on a riding mower and let it idle for minutes, while looking up stuff on their phones. Or let it idle and go inside for a drink, while leaving it running. They enjoy riding around with a loud engine underneath, like a really slow motorcycle. This is not speculation, it's from talking to them.
The business people have an incentive to get in and out quickly - they can do more lawns that way.
The people who like loud engine noise have no such incentive. They have an incentive to have a lazy afternoon of lawn mowing.
There’s some overlap as well–I recently had an extended visit in my rural hometown, working by a window overlooking the main street. Something I noticed quickly was that a huge proportion of passing vehicles that happened to be loud enough for me to glance up were actually lawn service pickup trucks with loud, modified exhausts. It also became clear that I’ve been living in the city too long to remember how obnoxious the all-day-every-day drone of lawn equipment is, it sort of blew my mind.
People letting an engine run, just because, they have such a weird quirk of the mind. It's bizarrely common.
It's not just out of spite, although for some for sure it may be part of it. It seems out of a weird affection for things that are noisy, under their dominion.
Not the OP but I would agree with you if I was not told explicitly by several people that they love being outside with loud gas powered engines. These people happen to be my neighbors. There's a culture around small gas powered engines. People grew up with them, and learned engine repair on them, which helped them build a career. I have used battery powered leaf blower and a battery powered weed eater, and I have been told "that's nicer than anything else I've ever used, but I just love gas engines".
>Projecting all of this on to “fantasy escape world” is silly.
I kind of agree. How I see is that there's a lot of frustration in people in general, and many manage their internal turmoil by manifesting it into external stimulus. Many behave actively, organizedly anti-social ways, so much so that new words, Wikipedia articles have been created to describe the behavior, like "Rolling coal" or "Whistle tips".
Now, I think that these can be thought of as tips of an iceberg. The iceberg being unhandled emotional stress, a system that perpetually creates it, and the behaviors of people that handle it.
I agree that the business incentives are there to keep ICE around. ICE is mature technology, battery-powered are not, and since batteries have not coalesced or aren't regulated around a handful of standards, manufacturers use this to lock in customers into their own ecosystem, among other kinds of power struggles being present as well. I'm personally not confident that I can buy a replacement battery for a new device in 5 years for a fair price, as I expect that there is going to be a new battery standard, with which my "old" device will not be compatible with. So ICE makes a lot of sense still.
On another level, I think it's important to note that noise is power. It affects us on ancient, animalistic level. Loud noise means us danger, or at the very minimum something important to pay attention to. A low level of constant noise feels like safety. No noise is creepy, we better watch out. To be able to make a huge noise is powerful - people and animals usually have gestures explicitly for this reason, and it has been used in warfare too, both in the distant and close past.
So, people are sensitive to this power. Combined with the ability of increased mobility, or the safety that a metal chassis provides, it makes it an attractive way for people to feel like they are in power, or to reduce the powerlessness they feel in other parts of their life.
I just bought a battery powered lead blower from Costco. It's my first one and it's awesome! I use it all the time for things I didn't think I would.
However, it is still very loud and doesn't last long enough for commercial use.
One instance recently, had a few very aggressive wasps in the garage (Son is allergic). In the past I'd use some chemicals, the leaf blower got them out in seconds, it's so powerful it blew them outside far enough they couldn't get back and just flew off.
Inspirational words, but I'm not giving up my power drill. Long ago my family had a brace and bit, but it's long gone, and would be awkward to use where I use the drill.
I'm a bit frightened to ask what surprising use cases you found for a lead blower.
On a more constructive note, I don't know where people get the idea that battery powered means quiet. My vacuum is electric and far from quiet – why would a leaf blower be?
It just is. You don't need a theoretical explanation, just go turn on a gas leaf blower and a battery operated one and see for yourself. The internal cumbustion engine is much louder than the actual blower mechanism.
We need LiFePO4 packs, we need them at a +200% markup ($300/kwh) rather than a +900% markup ($1000/kwh), and we need them mounted in a frame based on good backpacking backpacks with a wire running along your arm to the tool.
It's neither uncharitable nor a projection. My dad is one of these - the loudness is entirely the point, by his own admission. He told me this. He intentionally buys the loudest most powerful/obnoxious tools he can rather than the most practical and dicks around with them.
My dad is also the laziest man on the planet and does ZERO housework. He only does lawn work because it's an opportunity for him to play with his toys.
>The lawn business people I know
Nobody's talking about people with lawn businesses. Businesses will want to just get the work done and move onto the next client.
I have been running the best of the best in tools and battery tech: Milwaukee.
The blower and weed trimmer (especially) burn through very expensive batteries (XC8.0) very quickly. It is not a feasible replacement for even a moderate job. My yard is super small and I move quick and have learned to pull the batteries at 50% to keep from ruining them. But I have burnt up at least one $200 battery that will only charge to 75% now. That happened in the first season. Otherwise, performance is good.
> I have been running the best of the best in tools and battery tech: Milwaukee.
I've found Makita to be better for my line of work at least. I love my older Milwaukee tools. My 10" chopsaw from the early 90s is a solid beast, as well as my worm drive. Newer Milwaukee is a crapshoot, I've had three dead batteries from them, none from Makita. Two burnt out super sawzalls, and a miter saw with no idea what true is.
I will say Milwaukee tools have more power to them, but my Makita ones are more reliable. Less frills, less price too.
I am biased as I do more finishing then rough work, so I have an understanding that Milwaukee is better/quicker for that, but I'll stick with Makita for battery tools. I can go two, three days on a single charge with my miter.
You're talking about an 18V battery, maybe up to 8Ah. About 144Wh.
My batteries on my blower and trimmer and lawn mower use 56V batteries, up to 12Ah. About 672Wh. The smallest battery I have for it is 280Wh.
Milwaukee might make some decent power tools, but they're still batteries designed for a drill or some other smaller handheld tool used for short stints. Companies focusing on lawn care products have much different battery packs.
When we moved into a new in city home a few years ago, I wanted to keep things quiet and electric. I bought a ryobi leaf blower and lawn mower, with four 40v 6.0ah batteries. Our lawn is neither small nor big - not sure on sq ft but it’s far from huge.
It takes me about 6-8 gull charges to complete mowing and blowing. Leaf blowing is by far the more energy intensive. During the fall I have to space out the work in order to charge. Granted my property has a lot of tree cover and therefore always has a lot of leafs and debris.
Needless to say I regret my decision.
One of the problems with the blower is that it has a standard mode that is effectively useless, barely usable for even clippings. You have to run it at “max” charge for it to be remotely effective.
Edit: I have a previous year version of the RY404170-LB backpack blower. It eats batteries like candy.
When we moved into a new home a few years ago, I wanted to keep things quiet and electric. I bought an Ego lawn mower, multi-head trimmer/edger, and blower. A 56V 8Ah and a 4Ah battery. Once again, our lawn isn't small or big, fairly average 80s suburban lot.
I pretty much never need to recharge the batteries when working. I haven't needed to do much maintenance to it at all, just sharpening the mowing blade. Even after a few years the batteries still have plenty of charge to mow, trim, edge, and blow both yards. I don't normally have enough battery to do all that and do the hedge trimmer for a while though, I'll normally go inside and cool off for 15-20min and then go back out if I need to handle that. The fast charger can get a pretty good charge in 20 minutes
For what it's worth, automowers are great. I had a Husqvarna 330X doing .75 acres and was very happy with it. I don't even know how far it got on a charge to be honest, it just charged itself so I never had to worry about it.
Those look amazing. We have a rather long and complicated and hilly lawn and due to trees. Do you think a roomier like the 330x can handle a more complicated lawn layout?
Perhaps, ours had a gazebo, vegetable garden, dozen or so trees, and a very long rectangular path we mowed for access and it managed well. We spent some time getting it clear of rocks and divots though.
> best of the best in tools and battery tech: Milwaukee.
Is Milwaukee better? I always understood Milwaukee (Red), Dewalt (Yellow), and Makita (Teal) to basically be interchangeable for most products and it just depended on who you ask and which color team they were on.
If your yard is that small, why not use devices powered by a cord? Our yard is middling, but the trimmer, with an extension cord, reaches everything that needs trimming. I confess I know nothing about leaf blowers. My wife talks about getting one, but we still use rakes.
I doubt it applies to leaf blowers unless you get one with a battery pack that mounts on your back, but battery powered snow blowers are considerably more powerful than cord powered snow blowers since a cord is limited to 1500W continuous.
Convenience is a big reason. People look at me when I use rakes in the garden. Just to save some time I ended up getting a cordless leaf blower but my wife thought she might find it fun too. The area we have to clear was never going to support the maintenance of a gas-powered blower.
Separately, I was tired of the stand up vacuums for smaller jobs so got a corded stick vacuum. It's still a bit of a hassle even though I use it frequently to avoid messes getting out of control with the kids and pets. I know that if it was cordless it would get much more proactive usage by others. The design of the corded vac could be improved to make it easier but there is little incentive to do that.
A cord is limited to the amount of power you can get from mains. When you need a lot of power a battery can deliver - for a few minutes, then you have to charge for an hour.
I took this to mean my father-in-law, but not a paid business or situation where these things are a necessity. He is a lawyer who's worked remote since 2000 only leaves home for necessities and outside hobbies, but has all kinds of equipment including a tractor and snow plow. Of course, he has a ride-on mower and enough other equipment to start a landscaping business.
this is quite a straightforward reality for many people and calling it a “fantasy escape world” and “uncharitable” is itself miserly and uncharitable, and classic HN rules-lawyering in a nutshell.
like yes people do like using loud power tools for the sake of using loud power tools, most people would consider them at least moderately fun.
These were my neighbors growing up. Chain saws, quads, backhoes, bulldozers, fire engines, school busses -- anything with wheels and big motors they would be running all day long. Every day during the summer I'd wake up at 8am to 3-4 quads being driven around outside my window by the neighbor kids, and that would go on all day long until sunset.
That actually wasn't bad though compared to moving to San Francisco, where they decided to carve a narrow chunk out of the side of a solid-rock hill right below my window. Jackhammering all day from 7am until 5pm. I bought a sound meter and complained several times that they had exceeded the sound limits but no one cared.
It really affected my wife, we had just moved to SF and she had no where to go while I was at work. She tried libraries and parks and such but there were too many homeless there and they harassed her. She has trouble sleeping due to mental health issues and she usually sleeps from 4am to 12pm, but she couldn't do this due to the jackhammering outside of our window that started at the crack of dawn.
This meant she didn't sleep at all for months, and she ended up having a psychotic break, for which she was hospitalized. She was sent to a hospital in Santa Clara, and I drove there every day to see her.
Anyway, all of this is to say that noise issues are serious to some people, and there's really no limit to how much noise someone can make. You can complain but nothing happens.
Respectfully, no, earplugs do not work when they are jackhammering a mountain outside of your window. I shouldn't have to dull my senses just to live in society because some people have no consideration of making others uncomfortable in their own homes.
As a car-person, gear head / petrol head, etc., this has always been somewhat baffling to me. I've always been in it for the speed, the exciting sensation of your body moving through space. Lots of things end up being kind of cool by association: fat tires, wings, loud exhaust, a lopey idle. But to me they were only interesting because of what they implied, something that can go fast. Some people add those things without being able to go fast, which I've always found distasteful, a thing frequently derided as "all show and no go". It took me a while to accept that some people really are in it for the noise. I can't really knock it, I'm getting a sensory experience that I enjoy but can't quite explain, and I suppose they are too. But keep it away from my house. ;-)
Once I was riding my motorcycle to work, and another guy rode passed me on his motorcycle. His exhaust was so loud it gave me a headache almost instantly. I can't imagine how much it must hurt to actually ride the thing.
You just aren't looking at the full set of options available then. The Stihl electric line is used by contractors and cities all around the world, and are incredibly reliable / strong.
I was out weeding my garden yesterday evening and there was some pleasant bird song around me. And the droning of a gas mower a block away. And someone zooming back and forth on their crotch rocket on the main street in the other direction. At least the mower sound probably wasn't intentional...
Leaf blowers are already mostly electric, and they are annoying as hell. People will take time to replace them, but I assure you they aren’t loved at all.
They chew through batteries so fast and they have a really high pitched sound ~16kHz that gives me tinnitus when I use it without ear protection. I suppose the same would happen with a gas one, but I was hoping to avoid wearing ear protection.
It's both. This design focuses on quieting the airflow. From TFA:
The team started working last September. They hoped to improve an electric or battery-powered leaf blower, which is already much quieter than the notorious gas-powered ones, where the sound can carry over an average suburban block.
I don't believe that part - the ones shown in the picture/videos are brushless motors, quite efficient (90%) and really silent on their right own.
The noise comes from the need to move air (and the noise is just air waves), along with certain vibrations. A brushless motor is super silent if you exclude the fan(s) cooling it.
Not in rural areas. People shoot guns at 1am and... "god given freedoms" and "piss off back to the city y'all" and all that are trotted out anytime a complaint is made.
Again, it may change in another couple generations, but it'll be slow.
I lived in cities for four decades and rural areas for two. Hearing late night gunshots was routine in cities. I think it's happened once in hearing from my rural home. My neighbor is a state biologist who put down a sick coyote.
Or course it can happen a lot if you get the wrong neighbors. But that's more of a risk in the city where you have so many more neighbors.
Wow, which cities? I've lived between cities and the sticks in the U.S. almost my entire life and while I've never once heard gunfire in a city, in the country it's a daily routine (occasionally, if rarely, even fully automatic).
I live in oakcliff in Dallas (area SW of downtown but still in Dallas proper). Gunshots every night and automatic weapons fire once a month. Police have completely given up, granted it’s all celebratory and usually not crime related. For example, when the cowboys score a touchdown you’ll hear a burst of gunfire.
You had some pretty well-off rural neighbors if they shot guns daily. Ammunition isn't cheap. I've lived in a rural area for a long time, and, yes maybe once a week or month a neighbor will practice their marksmanship, but thankfully it isn't a daily occurrence.
It gets massively cheaper when those priorities include reloading your own ammo.
My most well off neighbor is the most prolific shooter I know. He shoots targets almost daily with his .22, and I don't hear it at all from 1/3 mile away. He doesn't use a suppressor, but some kind of quieter round. I guess that means slower.
I lived in downtown San Jose for ten years and someone was shot to death right behind my apartment. San Jose isn't all that unsafe either, relatively speaking.
Making something officially transgressive often makes the thing more attractive.
Is one supposed to avoid purposefully releasing diesel particulates by rapidly increasing engine speed? Yes and people sometimes still do it for whatever reason.
This is a shitty take. Everyone I know who refuses to use battery powered landscaping equipment absolutely hates the noise and dealing with the gas engines.
The problem is that the battery stuff doesn’t compete on price/power if you’re doing basically anything more than a lawn measured in square feet.
Battery stuff is just fine on the power aspect. However price weight kill you. Gas is light for the amount of runtime you get, while a battery is very heavy. A contractor will need more than $1000 worth of batteries to get through a day per person or $4 worth of gasoline.
I don't think this is nearly the same thing as people being obnoxious with their motorcycle or car exhausts.
What I'd really say is maybe we should rethink if blowers are even useful or necessary at all over the old broom and scoop.
Many times I see landscapers use them to simply blow dust and leaves everywhere, including into busy streets, rather than using them to try and collect all detritus into a single pile for collection.
If that's more commonly the case, then why use them at all?
> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers.
Leaf blowers are pretty terrible for the yard, so anything that makes them more acceptable will just make things worse.
Bad because they blow away topsoil, leaving a hard pack behind that absorbs little water. Just walking around my neighborhood it’s clear who doesn’t use a leaf blower: the dirt is crumbly and the plant life better. If people have pots as well you can see the difference between the two.
Also bad because they blow away all the decaying leaf matter and bugs from under the bushes, again hardening the soil and losing a;l the advantages of bugs perforating the soil and drawing nutrients below.
Of course you can try to fix this by adding chemicals…ugh
Yes, it can be a real problem, that over-use. You can also fix this by using judicious aiming and throttle control and still be more efficient and easier on the exosystem vs raking.
But you must first understand the issue and want to solve it. Unfortunately, most people, even "lansdscape pros" do not understand it, or want to take the extra care to do it.
Source: my wife is extremely knowledgeable, educated, and passionate about the plant and soil ecosystems you describe, yet I was able to adjust technique to satisfy her scrutiny in a reasonably short time. You just have to get a clue and want to act on it. And yes, we've both seen more abuse done with a leaf-rake approach too. It's not the tool, it's the user, tho these blower tools make it easier to abuse at scale.
Are leaf blowers only a North American thing? When I grew up in Germany I hardly ever saw one. When I moved to the US they were everywhere. Not sure if they became popular around that time or if it's just more common in the US. When and where I grew up everyone also took care of their own garden, so I suspect that played a role as well
However, I think the idea that everyone needs to have a gardener loudly and poorly tend their 1/16th acre lot at random times is a problem unique to California suburbs.
Yeah I have to think it's the same phenomenon that makes people buy large 4-wheel-drive pickup trucks that they rarely use for anything but commuting and getting groceries. The same phenomenon that makes people buy a commercial-style zero-turn Dixie Chopper to cut their suburban lawn once a week. Big? Loud? Smokey? Gratuitious in every way? I want it!!
I share that sensibility, but it makes more sense in spaces that have already acheived a "wild" equilibrium.
In many cases, existing crafted landscapes can't handle the acidity/moisture-trapping/etc of decaying leaves. So you're really advocating for people to give up on expensive, considered, laborious projects that exist for functional or aesthetic reasons. Even if there are alternatives that are comparably functional or beautiful, what's there is there already and a lazy wilding doesn't necessarily lead to one of those agreeable alternatives.
Moving hundreds of pounds of leaves each season is backbreaking and time consuming work. The game changer is to rake the edges in and mulch them with a mower. Not quiet but it's quick.
Most American's would benefit greatly from some time consuming work. The comments on HN would likely improve from the mood altering benefits of exercise as well.
Lots of people have physically demanding jobs and things they do around the house.
And statistically speaking, most of this work is really done by professionals since most people live in cities without their own yards to clean up. People are paid to do physical labor all the time. It's often healthier long-term than desk jobs.
A canopy of unblown leaves can cause damage to the surfaces underneath through mold or mildew. In some cases, this damage can be effectively permanent if let go long enough.
>In some cases, this damage can be effectively permanent if let go long enough.
I have no expertise in leaf or ground quality. If this is the correct, even in very rare cases, over the quarter-billion years or so that trees have been shedding leaves, should the entire planet not be barren wasteland by now?
What's the process by which leaf damage is undone over very long time periods?
It's just an ecosystem thing - if the ground cover can't handle the leaves it probably should be a different ground cover there. This does remind me of something cool though. I was up in the UP Michigan canoeing and ended up in a forest of maple trees. Their leaves had so completely dominated the ground that it was just a blanket of leaves and sap for miles. Only a few patches of fern could make it there but otherwise there were no (visible) ground plants
I did that my first year of home ownership (because I am lazy). When I spring came around and the snow melted, all of the ground cover had turned into mud. No living plant life at all. I had to replant it all.
Something tells me that was not your desired outcome. Now I remove the leaves.
Yup! And deciduous trees planted next to your house are an excellent green way to decrease heating and cooling costs. Shade when you need it, not when you don’t. This is the exact reason we blow leaves too.
Exactly right. It's asinine to blow leaves. They don't do any damage and they create habitats for spiders and insects. I hate poeple who want clean, empty mowed lawns, aiming for an ideal that is far away from nature. Sickening.
I don’t want a natural habitat in my yard. That’s what the woods behind my house are for. I want a clean, relatively flat, and soft field of grass that my kids can run around barefoot in.
I’m all for natural beauty, but most people already live in urban or suburban environments. What’s the point in pretending when you’re surrounded by asphalt and brick?
>> It's asinine to blow leaves. They don't do any damage and they create habitats for spiders and insects.
Leaves are a problem in many areas, be them footpaths, roads or even railways. And good luck trying to maintain a golf course by just leaving the leaves out to rot on the grass.
I think it varies and you probably shouldn't have that much confidence stating something you don't actually know as fact. In my personal experience I see more commercial operations using them to blow cut grass. Maybe a higher ratio are privately owned by individuals though. Who actually knows?
In my area they're occasionally used to blow leaves in the fall. Mostly they blow grass clippings off the street and sidewalk. Leaves in the fall are mostly mulched by mowers. It's about 20 times faster than blowing them around and collecting them.
Some yards are large and some people are older. They can’t take and lift leaves. Many communities have it so they can be blown the street and are picked up every few days - much less labor and effort than raking into piles, picking up, bagging etc.
