Gas-powered leaf blowers: the most polluting machinery still in legal use | Hacker News Reader

Gas-powered leaf blowers: the most polluting machinery still in legal use

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47 pointsMilnerRoute33 comments

> If batteries can power a multi-ton F-150 truck, it is fatuous for landscapers to say that they aren’t strong enough for a dozen-pound leaf blower.

Sure, if the batteries are large enough. I tried Lowe's Kobalt 80V leaf blower, and only on the max speed setting did it have enough power to pull leaves out of the grass. Unfortunately, on that setting the battery would last ~10-15 minutes, which isn't enough time for the front and back yard. Sure, I could get two batteries, but now costs are rapidly rising, and I'm also draining the battery's useful life at an increased rate.

I want cordless electric gardening tools to be great, I really do. I don't enjoy having to deal with clogged jets in my weed eater's carburetor (Husqvarna 4-stroke, because what the article does get correct is that 2-strokes are obnoxiously loud), nor do I enjoy having to drive out of my way to get ethanol-free gas for them. However, I'll take that over mediocre performance and battery life.

Ego, Greenworks, and Ryobi also have backpack model battery powered leaf blowers. You might want to check out one of those.

Yes, you’ll need to swap out batteries more often than you would have to refuel your gas-powered leaf blower, but as a homeowner or home renter, that should be a lot easier for you than the “mow and blow” operations that have nothing more than a pickup truck and a trailer.

A family member who runs a landscaping business switched all his team's devices over to battery-based ones from Stihl and they're apparently really happy with no intention to ever go back.

Can't speak for the specific details, but apparently battery runtime wasn't really an issue.

What about fuel injected 4-strokes? (Maybe these don’t exist in the leaf blower market yet).

Don't know about fuel injection, but there are definitely 4 stroke blowers. Personally I prefer 4 stroke for small engines. 2-stroke exhaust gives me headaches.

https://www.amazon.com/Makita-BHX2500CA-4-Stroke-Engine-Blow...

Small four stroke engines never really got developed, mostly because devices that need tiny engines rarely care about fuel efficiency, and usually care far more about engine weight and cost.

My biggest issue is with the noise pollution. These things should be banned, period.

I guess the reason more people put up with the noise is because everyone loves a well cared for lawn without clippings laying around. Another thing I hate is that on some streets they push things like nails and glass into the roadway causing punctures.

The biggest insult seems to be just how inefficient they are to do... anything. Being in a nice park/wherever, greeted by someone revving away intermittently trying to push around a couple of leaves.

Can someone tell me what I'm missing when I think this tool is utterly inappropriate for the job? At very least it could suck; but really what's wrong with a rake? Genuinely asking here.

We do not have a leaf blower at all, but have considered getting one. My wife wishes to get the fallen leaves out of gardens every fall, and it is hard to do this without bringing a great deal of mulch along. We suspect that a leaf blower would work better. It seems unlikely to me that we will get one, after four or five falls of "we really ought to get a leaf blower".

The other thing is that leaf blowers compete not just against rakes but against brooms. I hear them all summer when yard crews are cleaning up a sidewalk after mowing. I think there is some savings in time there--not much for a homeowner, but enough to count for a yard crew doing many lawns in a day.

These were banned in Santa Barbara (where I grew up) a few decades ago. It was strange to move outta SB and encounter them again.

https://localwiki.org/davis/Banning_leaf-blowers finally a political party I can get behind

DC is beginning a year round gas blower ban in 2022 and MD is starting a January-mid-october ban. Could not be more excited.

Definitely not an easy conversion, and a lot of folks are going to have to adapt to battery power. Splitting up the work or having extra swappable packs will be a must.

Sadly i predict for a bit there'll be work trucks with a generator in the back, charging batteries. Over time i hope big & mild hybrids with decent sized inverters help a lot.

Tsk. Get clean by give them the cream of the petrochemical chain.

[1] https://www.aspenfuels.com/products/alla/aspen-2/

So sustainable, without the pain of feeling bad, it's almost unbearable, just mad!

Why are you calling that sustainable? It's a fossil fuel.

Maybe I should have marked it as satire.

OTOH, produced out of carbon sucked out of the atmosphere by whichever (nuclear) means could make it almost carbon neutral!1!!

Seems like the most impactful solution would be an EPA or CARB ban on sales of new two-stroke lawn devices. Although this article suggests a switch to battery powered devices, four-stroke replacements more easily fit the niche than something which degrades in charge and takes a while to recharge at that.

You just swap the battery out like other power tools.

The headline is sort of misleading. The article is about two stroke engines. Not specifically leaf blowers.

The picture showed landscapers using 4 stroke Stihl blowers. Much quieter as well as less air polution.

It's also misleading in that "they're the most." Something has to be #1

A single number representative of "total harm to human health" needs to be developed to evaluate things like this. Then we could say "people in Chicago have X harm from cars, X harm from planes, and X harm from leaf blowers".

The harm number could be based on estimates from experts on the life-years lost by inhaling each chemical in the exhaust and the quantities of each chemical emitted and breathed in.

It would then be up to policymakers to either tax or ban things causing lots of harm.

Without boiling it down to a single number, claims like "more ozone comes from a leafblower than a car" are really hard to know the impact of.

You need quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs). Simple life-years don't capture the harm from chronic health effects - like hearing loss or brain damage, to pick two that gas-powered leaf-blowers cause.

Electric leaf blowers utilize non-renewable rare earth metals, should we outlaw those too?

If Electric leaf blowers was the biggest consumer of rare earth metals for every hour of usage, then we would likely have an issue with those.

Leaf blowers could do what boat motors have been mostly forced to do and switch over to four-stroke motors. Motors have emission standards to follow. Battery manufacturers has environment laws to follow and if they produce products that fall below the minimum standard then they have to improve their product or be banned from selling their products.

Companies are already transitioning to cobalt free batteries https://www.electrive.com/2021/07/23/svolt-launches-producti...

Are you referring to batteries?

Edit: I'm not authoritative, but I can't think off the top of my head of any rare earth metals that an electric leaf blower uses except perhaps in the batteries. But also, there are plug in electric leaf blowers.

I presume the OP was referring to magnets. Rare earths are used to make stronger permanent magnets, which are used to make more efficient electric motors (for both plug-in and battery tools). This looks to be an intro article: https://qz.com/1999894/why-rare-earth-magnets-are-vital-to-t....

Interesting. I wasn't aware that there existed magnets with rare earth metals. Thank you for the information.

Non-renewable isn't ideal, but it's not half as big of a problem as spewing pollution everywhere - which is the problem under discussion.

Exactly, gas-powered anything should be more than an acceptable solution during the transition from petrol/diesel/coal to electric

In this case, gas == petrol, not natural gas.

Ops sorry, I meant natural gas

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