The Devil's Hair Dryer: Hell is other people, with leaf blowers (2016)
citylab.com
citylab.com
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.
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!
They're very effective and quick for snow removal.
Consider your self lucky… my neighbor's service starts the engines every Tuesday at 7:30 AM sharp.
(BTW, if anyone has any tips how to best manage cross-town-border noise complaints, I'd love to hear them.)
But leaf blowers are unique in that they're not only obnoxious and wasteful, but also stupid to begin with. You’re spending money and time and effort and polluting both the environment AND mental environment to avoid raking, just so the wind can undo your efforts??
Leaf blowers make me profoundly misanthropic.
Even more, it isn't like rakes don't have a horrible sound of their own, as soon as you get a single paved section involved.
With a rake or broom you can remove the leafs/dust, a blower mostly just makes it someone else's problem.
That said, I definitely have a push broom I use to finish off the sidewalk. Have to first rake, though, as i am moving a lot of leaves over it.
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.
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.
I can't hear your rake through my headphones two blocks and three stories up.
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.
If you think a leaf-blower is irritating you have never heard one of these f*s.
One of my neighbors used a leaf blower just hours before the expected arrival of a hurricane.
Explain that one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
Black Walnut: The Killer Tree https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/2005/jul/070701.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juglone
"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"
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.
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.
Just look at Olympic weightlifters - they tend to look plump but they certainly are well strong as Olympic weightlifters.
Did you mean powerlifters?
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
The same reasoning for accessorizing cars to look like UFO.
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."
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.
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...
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.
I'd love to work outside with my hands all day but not with those horribly loud power tools. They seem like fighting against nature somehow.
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 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.
Maybe there's hope for my area. They really are the most pointless and annoying things.
- 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.
Where do people find enough megaphones to steal for it to become a craze? WTF?
That's the silliest, most annoying and pointless way to ruin the environment for everyone.
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.
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.
When I can, I turn the TVs off. No one has complained yet.
I used to have an app on my old phone that did the same thing, but new phones don't seem to have IR transmitters.
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'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.
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.
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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.
Leaf blowers I'm forced to endure more often, unfortunately.
Sounds like he spends a ton of time around lawns.
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.
My neighbors do whatever they want - however pointless - whenever they want.
I'm inclined to suspect it might be because the landscapers are paid by the hour.
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.
Compared to a leaf blower it's wonderful.
(&) Is it still true today?
Although from what I heard, my team was more of exception (Security). And some were moving to an open office layout.
Crowds vary, and environments differ, from luxury, appeal and cost, to interpersonal variations.
But for sure, the open environment put all of them in the crosshairs. The noise? It's less about noise, and more about the content of conversations.
You hear half a conversation, and when your paycheck is on the line, hearing the wrong part of a conversation leaves you wondering if they were talking about you, and whether or not anyone intended you to hear it. You hear people judging new hire candidates after a round of interviews. You hear people gossiping. You hear people talking about raises and reviews. Who's fucking who.
Worst of all, you hear sideways remarks from people in a mocking tone, clearly within earshot. Passive aggression, hostility. But all work related. None of it discriminatory. It all targets the impostor syndrome of holding down what amounts to a bullshit job to begin with.
Every word crystal clear. The whole conversation, unmistakably audible to you, but you are not a participant. Is it a taunt? Are there more people agreeing with what they said, and chiming in with additional sarcasm? Are they ganging up on you? And you have to sit at your desk, quietly uninvolved, minding your own business, and focus on stepping through some useless convenience widget in a debugger.
Sure thing. Where's the door?
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.
The scenario of being surrounded by backstabbers raises so many questions that there is no point of discussing noise problems.
I'm getting the whiff of paranoia.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
uh no
Pollution is not a single solution problem, everything must be accounted for.
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.
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.
A vacuum cleaner is 85db.
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!
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 couldn't tell you the last time I ever saw or heard a neighbor of mine operating one of these. Leaf blower on the other hand? Yesterday.
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.
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.