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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

As much as the environmental impact is significant, I'm mainly enthused because I really dislike the impact of the noise pollution. Having worked from home for a few years now, the worst part to me is the frequent landscaping noise throughout the day. Even if the gardeners all come by your block at the same day every week, they may show up to nearby blocks on other days of the week and create noise that's audible from far away. An hour of hearing overly loud landscaping equipment ruins my day, and I'm otherwise not a very neurotic person. I don't even get why gas powered lawn equipment has to be that loud; I attached a 2-stroke motor to a bike once with a cheap muffler and even that didn't sound as loud as most lawnmowers.

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If you live in a suburban area like I do, practically every day one of the neighbors has these running. And half the time it's just blowing it to the street to later land on someone else's property.

Yeah, it's gotten a little better recently(dunno if it's just because of weather), but there was a long stretch where every day I would go out to my backyard and, on any given day of the week, there was someone mowing or weed whacking nearby. Weed whacking is almost worse because people love to "rev" the weed whacker constantly instead of just holding down the button. But yeah, it almost entirely ruins the suburban experience for me because there are so few moments when you can just sit outside during the day without having some obnoxious motor running somewhere.

Then again, I'm also averse to the lengths people go through to maintain landscaping. Landscaping is necessary, but so many homeowners care so much about property values that they want everything to constantly appear uniform. Some neighbors even rat on each other to their HOA if one person went an extra week without mowing.

Yeah, I just recently moved to SF and it's a lot quieter in the city than it was in the suburbs.

The irony.

save for screams of demented people. closer to downtown, of course, but increasingly prevalent.

Those screams exist in Palo Alto too - just mostly in the city council meetings.

> because people love to "rev" the weed whacker constantly instead of just holding down the button.

With at least the weedwhacker I have, there's not really an option. If you hold the button down, it overheats. If you leave it up to long, it shuts off. As a result, any time I'm walking across pavement, or in between patches that need weedwhacking, I have to rev the stupid thing.

I agree with everything you've said though. I don't have a choice right now, but the way suburban/urban landscaping is done is a nightmare.

> I have to rev the stupid thing.

Or get a new one if you can afford it. They're not terribly expensive.

I can't :)

It's also not technically mine.

Ahhh.... I remember when we used rakes.

Happy days. Then some guy decided all tools should be 'powered' and here we are.

Who would have figured that the invisible hand of the market was pushing a lawnmower.

I hardly ever see a user of a blower actually blow stuff into a pile and pick it up. This is the part that makes me crazy. The wind is just going to blow it right back to where it was!

I've seen that happen right before a hurricane. Wind was already gusting, roughly at tropical storm levels. The full force of a category 3 was just a few hours away. There was my neighbor, blowing leaves from his driveway.

That's exactly how I see pretty much every professional gardener use them.

Yes, absolutely. So irritating.

Noise pollution is one of those places where I am seriously conflicted. It’s one of those cases where you feel like it’s regulating common curtesy.

See also: Harley Davidson mentality.

What is your conflict?

I'm not the previous person, but I assume they mean that not everything about life should be regulated. There are actually some real practical problems with this, because life is complicated and has an endless list of edge cases that can't possibly be captured in law.

Every law your government passes is another nail in the coffin of personal freedom, so they must be carefully considered. Every liberal democracy will eventually die but we don't have to hasten it by making every new law "for the public good". I'm not saying what Oakland is doing is good or bad, but every new law should be carefully considered and I think that a lot of people forget that everytime the government makes you do something that means you lost another bit (or chunk) of freedom. See the Patriot Act for instance, we may never recover from that it severely damages and continues to damage individual rights and privacy as the primary cudgel the US government uses to justify unconstitutional surveillance of Americans.

Its like passing a law prohibiting farting in an elevator or wearing too much perfume. Fundamentally who is going to enforce it? Do we want to have police out there chasing people with blowers and wearing so much perfume you can smell them from half a block away?

Yet people do these things which are infuriating and intrude on those around them without a thought.

This is epitomized for me by the one guy in Santa Clara who I saw blow a single leaf an entire block rather than pick it up. I was already annoyed by their incredibly loud and inefficient landscaping and that just took the cake.

Was somebody following him filming it for TikTok?

Sadly, this is quite normal behaviour. As a species we have a long way to go...

Blows my mind how many shops in Western states water their sidewalk daily with a hose with the state of the water supply over there. It would be so simple to fine these shops.

How about charging them a fair price for the water they use, and letting them decide if that's worth it or find alternatives if it's not?

Can't speak for all of the Western states, but in SF it's basic hygiene to get piss off the sidewalk so that your store doesn't smell like it. Maybe there is a less wasteful way though, not sure.

"Can't speak for all of the Western states, but in SF it's basic hygiene to get piss off the sidewalk" This cracks me up. As someone who lives in a Eastern state I sincerely hope that doesn't speak for all western states, I've never heard of that.

No. It’s mainly just SF and To some degree parts of CA. It’s getting pretty bad in many parts of SF

Clearly you've never been to Manhattan or Boston!! Plenty of pungent smells in the East too. It just rains more.

In LA you would think it would be for the piss too, but it seems mostly to get off small leaves and dirt from the sidewalk that might take you ten extra minutes to sweep instead up, and you see it both in areas with encampments and without.

It shouldn't as the vast majority of water is wasted growing fruits and vegetables in what is basically desert/semi-desert areas. Watering lawns and sidewalks is small potatoes in comparison, yet very few people complain about the 80% problem and preach to their neighbors about the 20% issue.

The electric ones i've seen are still damn noisy. If you want to make a fan worth a damn to move leaves and debris, you are gonna make some noise no matter how it's powered, evidenced by the fact that it's recommended to wear ear protection still with electric lawn care equipment.

The bigger issue imo is that we incentivize the wrong things. Money and time instead of quality and a job well done. It's faster to blow loudly than to rake silently. A silent landscaping company powered by reel mowers and rakes would clear less properties per man hour, but maybe there is in fact a market there for that premium, nearly silent service.

I own a battery operated trimmer and blower, and unfortunately, they’re not much quieter (I hear my neighbors, too). In fact, they almost seem more annoying as they seem to emit a different frequency.

Agree with things to reduce noise pollution, but don’t feel like this will help much in that regard.

As far as noise goes, a lot of the noise is from the fan. The electric blowers are still pretty noisy.

They’re much quieter though. I have an Ego backpack blower and I can use it without ear protection for short periods.

No way, there is a SIGNIFICANT difference in noise between a gas powered weed whacker and an electric one. The only thing you hear in the latter is the bzzzzzzz which is a lot easier to deal with than a screaming 2 stroke.

GP mentioned leaf blowers, not weed whippers. Of course electric weed whippers are quieter.

Electric is always going to be quieter. Period. The sound of the fan is not the major contributor to noise. It's the loud ass two stroke.

It's both. Obviously, electric leafblowers will be quieter than 2-stroke leafblowers, but that doesn't make them quiet in any way. Just like electric cars are still loud at high speed and freeways will always be loud, because wind and tires make way more noise than any normal car engine crusing at 2000 rpm.

It's not the same, because cars have mufflers, and are MUCH quieter than your leaf blower during operation. Of course you're not going to eliminate all noise, but they are significantly reduced without an engine. Can't really compare a freeway to your neighborhood lawn care.

A quick google shows that electric blowers are 75% quieter than gas ones by decibel. In fact, they're comparable to using a hair dryer (around 70 dB):

Source: http://leafblowernoise.com/Electric%20blower%20sound.htm

So I would refute your claim.

The electric ones also move significantly less air. I say this as the owner of a top of the line electric blower that will never in a million years own a gas one. The gas ones are far superior for actually blowing large amounts of leaves or large areas, but I'm totally content to pick up most leaves on the lawn when I mow and use the blower just for hard-to rake areas. That works very well.

You can find electric ones which match pretty closely to similarly sized gas counterparts.

Husqvarna 525BX 25-cc 2-Cycle 192-MPH 493-CFM Handheld Gas Leaf Blower https://www.lowes.com/pd/Husqvarna-525BX-25-cc-2-Cycle-192-M...

EGO POWER+ 180-MPH Brushless Handheld Cordless Electric Leaf Blower, 500-600CFM https://www.lowes.com/pd/EGO-Power-56-Volt-Lithium-Ion-Brush...

I’ll refute yours. I own an electric. It’s insanely loud. I don’t need hearing protection for my blow dryer but I certainly do for my electric leaf blower.

Anyone who sincerely believes electric leaf blowers are - on average - even close to as loud as gas-powered blowers has to be arguing on the smallest of small sample sizes or bad faith. They're not comparable, there's a reason community-driven pushes to ban leaf blowers focus on those with combustion engines.

Can an electric leaf blower be as loud as a gas-powered one? Sure. I'm sure under the right circumstances a Prius can make noise comparable to Corolla too. Electric leaf blowers aren't silent and are often loud, but not aggravatingly loud. They won't make your next-door neighbors lose their mind, much less your neighbors two doors down.

The above poster isn't saying electric models are quiet, just that they are quieter than a similar gas model. Which makes sense when you think about it. Both of them probably have similar air turbulence noise of the blower part, but an electric motor is almost always way quieter than a bunch of pistons rattling about and having fuel-air mixture detonations.

> I attached a 2-stroke motor to a bike once with a cheap muffler and even that didn't sound as loud as most lawnmowers.

I'd guess a combination of inexpensive underpowered engines and a spinning blade. I have an old mower with a big engine that doesn't really seem to work too hard, and it's only a little bit louder than my electric mower.

The worst offenders are 2 stroke engines which are smaller per hp than 4 strokes that would live on your lawn mower where size matters less. 2 stroke engines burn oil as a feature and are irritatingly loud. Ive a mix of battery/electric and gasoline lawn tools and a relatively large plot of land.(5ish acres) I cant use electric without a fleet of batteries charged and ready.

I'm pretty protective of my batteries, but one time my wife accidentally ran one to empty and now it's a $120 paperweight. Battery prices are a big sticking point for me as my budget is just a little too small to be ok spending so much on one, and this incident made me reconsider staying electric in the future.

Makita puts the protection/charge control circuitry in the battery pack, instead of in the tool or the charger. That makes their batteries more expensive, but you can't kill them by running them dry or through overheating in use. The pack itself will cut power to the tool. Makes them much more robust than the other common consumer/prosumer brands (not sure about pro brands like Hilti and Fein).

Though not uncommon this is simply a faulty product. Running them empty should not lock them out.

I left a battery on the charger for too long and it became a paperweight.

This kinda soured me on electric lawn equipment for a while.

> As much as the environmental impact is significant, I'm mainly enthused because I really dislike the impact of the noise pollution

Noise pollution is an environmental impact.

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