A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
1. They didn't ban leaf blowers, the banned _gas_ leaf blowers. Electric ones are quieter, inexpensive, and work just as well nowadays. My building has an electric Milwaukee that was 200 bucks and lasts all afternoon on a battery or two.
2. This isn't about people wanting to manicure their lawns out in the burbs at 7am on Saturdays and using a gallon of gas per decade. DC is relatively dense with mid-rises and office buildings, it's the grounds crews and landscapers running them 9-5.
3. Coincidentally now with the age of work from home it's an extra boon not to have your neighboring building's super blasting a leaf blower below your window at 11am during your zoom meeting.
With any policy you have to look at the downsides -- people and companies have to buy new leaf blowers and batteries, what's the cost in money and environment? But I think they're fairly minor compared to the upsides in pollution and peace and quiet.
The main people who get hurt by this policy are small business landscapers, who are eligible for a subsidy to help replace equipment, which I think is a nice compromise.
It seems hopelessly anachronistic and impractical, but why can't rakes be an alternative? It would take more time, but the landscapers would be paid more if they're working hourly.
Landscapers with leafblowers would outcompete landscapers with rakes.
b) Double digit minimum wage
c) Being able to afford a landscaper.
Pick two.
I own a rake and use it my damn self, which shouldn't matter but probably does.
It's funny to me watching the lawn crews get out their blowers at the end of every mow to blow the grass clippings. It seems like such a waste of time, and hence money to pay them for that labor. Simply preventing the need for using a leaf blower seems like something someone should solve for these lawn crews.
I have all electric tools and it's amazing how quiet they are. My neighbor laughed at me for wearing hearing protection until I told him they have Bluetooth in them. ;)
But... I suppose you can sweep them with a broom.
While noise is an issue with gas blowers, the biggest issue with all kinds of blowers is how much air pollution they cause by putting dust back into the air.
But yeah, protective equipment for workers is still required with electric blowers and air quality matters.
Maybe we could also go with making new ones illegal to sell, though we'd have to coordinate with MD and VA which seems unlikely.
Leaf blowers are a slam dunk, I don't know enough about scooters to comment intelligently.
Obviously CO2 is a problem for global warming, but I definitely don't think its worth the air pollution trade-offs of a two stroke in a crowded city, especially when 4-stroke alternatives exist and are better in almost every way.
https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-...
However, electric isn't going to do the job for a sit on top mower as far as I know and, in general, professionals who are using their equipment all day long are mostly not going to find electric's tradeoffs reasonable.
Also ancecdotally, a friend has cub cadet's battery-powered sit on top mower. He loves it
California has already banned the sale of small gas motors and others will follow suit; but it will take years and years for the existing ones to die off.
Not to mention the very serious environmental and health impacts of constant noise pollution
(Few things are quite as unpleasant as a crew using a stinky 2-stroke engine to do prolonged work on an otherwise nice plaza.)
Electric ones are 2000psi and corded (no major battery ones).
Gas are 3200 psi and have no cord.
Probably better to work on emission controls and better engines than to ban things with no gas equivalents.
Also electric saws are a damn hazard compared to gas saws. They cut right through safety chaps, no problem.
Ouch! I assume that's a combination between the higher torque of an electric motor and shoddy low cost Chinese engineering?
Electric motors on the other hand produce peak torque at 0 RPM, so it's way harder to bring them to a standstill.
Many of these electric chainsaws are premium brands and still have this problem- to my knowledge there are no electric chainsaws that have a safety feature designed to make sure chaps work.
The clever safety feature that could be engineered to help make these safer is to add a torque sensor to the motor that cuts off power if excessive torque is sensed. This excessive torque condition would hopefully be calibrated to not have any nuisance shutoffs, but can still stop the saw when needed for safety.
Electric saws deliver uniform power and don't have this quirk.
I would expect commercial-grade electric chainsaws to use similar technology, and that they could be programmed to cut power in the event of a sudden speed reduction, mimicking the safety of a gas engine. But what do I know.
[0]: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/199590/eu-houdt-nederlands-verbo...
Not really. I committed to the Milwaukee battery system and now have a leaf blower, a string trimmer, and a chainsaw, to maintain a few acres (nothing fancy just keeping it from being overrun with invasives). They all perform reasonably well in the instantaneous sense, but battery performance is a huge limiting factor. I get about 15-20 minutes of total runtime from everything at conservative speeds (turtle mode for the trimmer/blower, medium speed for the chainsaw).
But the bigger issue is heat dissipation, if you actually run them for 5 minutes in a row the battery heats up, drains super quickly, and the thermal failsafe shuts it down. Then the battery takes quite a long time to cool off during which time it can't be charged. To run these things at full load you need a collection of like 10 batteries (very expensive even if using "compatible" knockoffs) and a second person managing the battery logistics.
So, using these practically means running them in very short bursts with cooldown time in between, which is usually not conducive to efficient work patterns.
For the chainsaw, instead of felling a tree, then limbing/bucking it, then moving the wood to its storage place, it's more like do one or two cuts, move the pieces to storage, repeat - And a helper can't speed things up by moving wood as I'm bucking it. That being said, I typically don't drop more than 1 tree at a time and it is nice to not have to stop and restart a gas chainsaw.
The string trimmer is good for hitting small patches / edges separated by distance, but I actually bought another gas trimmer for mowing my rocky+stumpy hillside.
The leaf blower is basically garbage I regret buying; I went back to using a rake and have used the blower maybe once or twice for blowing powdery snow off of things and accelerating fires, mostly just because the thing is in my garage.
The one consistently good thing about them is it's possible to use them after dark without seeming like a total crackhead, which is nice I guess
Or, you know, leave the god forsaken leaves where they are instead of blowing them ten feet over?
Most useless activity ever.
I don't want to hear power tools first thing in the morning, whoever wakes up thinking "I'm going to start up some LOUD shit at 8am" better be playing bob marley records or something.
Just hearing those rocks hit against my window is stressful enough but that was enough for me to fantasize about locking people up for using these things if I owned my own small country.
Even if you wanted to grow vegetables you’d still need to cut the grass and keep saplings from growing wherever they happen to sprout.
See my other comment about bugs. Almost any option is better than a wasteful grass lawn
Keep in mind that when I talk about lawns serving a purpose I’m using the context of small, reasonably sized homes. In that context, you don’t want a dense thicket of brush reducing accessibility and potentially causing issues with the plumbing and foundation. You want to keep some free space to roam and work with as well. You don’t want a home where you open the door into a bunch of unkept flora. You don’t want to have to wade through waist high brush in order to get around the outside of your house.
It may sound a little extreme, but again I’m not advocating for perfectly manicured lawns - just reasonably kept ones with minimal pesticides.
Another idea could be to increase density of human housing while providing vertically built parks integrated into the housing for people who want to use them and keeping larger areas in their more natural state to foster vibrant ecosystems. This would allow people in the high density housing to have space to roam or work while giving the least human interference on the surroundings, in theory at least.
We could even move transportation underground with high density transit networks to decrease impact on surface ecosystems even further.
Many animals are harmless of course, but many aren't and the ones that are harmless living in your yard are the ones that dangerous animals prey on.
I don't carefully manicure my lawn by any means but I do make sure it's not too overgrown because I don't want skunks to move into my back yard
Trees make great habitats for local wildlife, short grass does not
Or time efficient man.
Lazy is a really good motivator. This is like saying automating a work form is bad because automation is just a “lazy man’s paper form.”
in my neighborhood, laborers use blowers to blow shit randomly into the air and the gutters (and into my windows) rather than being picked up and put in the trash/compost bin. blowers create pollution via that random action as well as via their exhaust, and that pollution combined with their ineffectiveness make them a net negative to me, not the noise. while i don't love noise either, any outdoor labor will produce some noise, so noise is unavoidable, which is why it's limited to working hours by statute (after 8am).
car/motorcycle exhaust noise, on the other hand, is entirely artificial, unnecessary, aggressive, and offensive, and should not only be banned, but punished heavily.
"In 2014 a study published in Nature Communications found that VOC emissions (a variety of carbon gases that can produce smog and harm human beings) were on average 124 times higher from an idling two-stroke scooter than from a truck or a car"
Though this quote does make me wonder, what about when each vehicle are in transit?
A far better solution is to replace these sorts of things with battery powered electric solutions.
Miniaturizing it to work on a hand-held lawn care device is just an engineering task.
Two simple things fixed that:
1. I switched to gasoline that does not have ethanol added.
2. Once every 2 to 4 weeks in the off season I start it and run the engine for a minute.
The container I use to store gas holds about two years worth and the mower runs fine on the the two year old gas. I do add fuel stabilizer. The bottle of that claims it is good for 2 years but my previous bottle was 6 years old when I replaced it and the mower was fine on 2 year old fuel with 6 year old stabilizer.
If you live near any body of water big enough to attract boats you might try at marinas. CENEX also often sells it. Here's a site that can help you find it locally if you are in the US or Canada [1].
I do not do any winterizing procedure for the off season. I asked the repair place I took it too one year when it would not start before I started doing #1 and #2 if winterizing was necessary if you were running it occasionally, and they verified that you only need winterizing if it is going to not be used.
For overwintering, I just detach the hose after the fuel filter and drain the remaining mower fuel back into the can. Or, on small push mowers where this isn't possible, use the fuel shutoff and just leave the gas in the tank.
Then run the mower until it dies. Doesn't take more than a minute.
Finally, unscrew sparkplug(s), pour a teaspoon of motor oil into the cylinder (keeps rings from seizing/rusting).
Leftover gas in the can gets put into vehicles at the end of the season so I'm not storing stale gas.
Cost.
I would have gone electric if I could but seeing as I don't obsess over my lawn (i.e. I let it grow out enough before cutting it back that most HNers would be hand wringing if I were their neighbor) there's no amount of mental gymnastics that makes it a sane tradeoff. I'm not gonna double the cost on something I run maybe 20min/mo. If I were one of those people who bought overpriced premium equipment I didn't need then it might make sense.
I could do without the noise but I own fancy Bluetooth hearing protection for other reasons so that's really a non-issue. A little bit of exhaust every 3-5 weeks in the summer is just a non-issue in practice. I'm sure if I had some ideological reason to care a lot I'd find it more annoying but I don't so...
I have a friend who has the whole 40v kit. In retrospect I definitely made the right decision because his stuff doesn't have the requisite power/duty cycle for my "it's been a month and I have company this weekend, time to mow the lawn" use case and the noise of the gas stuff is less of an issue when it's a monthly thing and not a weekly thing.
Here in the UK, an entry-level petrol mower is £150+ while an entry-level corded electric mower is only £50. They're also much lighter, which is great for ladies and kids. And they start really reliably, even if they've sat in a shed all winter.
I wonder if it’s due to our outlets being 120V? We’d be limited to less than 2.5 HP with a normal outlet, whereas gas push mowers typically have engines in the 5-7 HP range.
I live in a metro, but my property is about an acre. I bought an electric lawnmower/weed eater when I bought the house. I used them for a year, then donated them and bought gas (4 stroke for both).
The problems I encountered: Batteries are expensive and they just don't last nearly long enough (both charge and life). To do a real pass on my yard without waiting for a charge cycle, I would have needed about 4 batteries for the trimmer, and 8 for the mower. I do live in a heavily wooded area with a large number of vines (and kudzu...) but still - that's nearly 1000 dollars in batteries alone. I opted to wait, and stick with 4, but it means what was previously 4 hours in the yard is now 4 hours split into several sections - an all day affair.
Even with the above, I would have probably stuck with the trimmer (the mower was just garbage), except I had two batteries fail in the first year. That's just an unacceptable extra cost for yard work, and FAR eclipses the entire amount I've spent on gas for the mower/trimmer combined over the last 3 years I've had them.
So... No. Frankly I don't think they're there yet. It's very close, but it's slower, and frankly - outrageously more expensive.
So I'm going to wait for cost to come down, and regulation to address battery interoperability in this equipment (hah... as if our government would actually do something useful).
My reasoning is that oil still gets burned, likely at a higher rate than any oil that gets through on the four stroke. It would be interesting to see if two strokes could be redesigned to place the oil outside of the combustion chamber, I think that would be a serious game changer for ICEs.
That being said, I'm definitely an advocate for moving away from combustion altogether.
It works if each home owner buys a leaf blower of his own, but that's way less efficient from a manufacturing/maintenance perspective.
We're just increasing inefficiencies.
There's some other sub-optimal options, but hopefully we don't see this energy-wasting noise-making cheapening out. They can charge them when they drive in most modern trucks (AC inverters are practically standard for work trucks). Worse, they start carrying around generators or idling their trucks; back to far more expensive (over time), polluting, and noisy. But both ought be better than a small screeching 2-stroke in terms of quality of life for the hundreds of people in the nearby area.
We're doing great. This is a huge improvement for quality of life for a huge huge number of people. For far more energy efficient & less costly over time systems, at modest investment cost. Particularly if you are a landscaper, having 6 sets of batteries that last 5+ years (and many many more if you're only cycling batteries once a day) seems like an incredibly minor investment cost.
I can accomplish in a minute or two what would normally take 20+ minutes with a push broom.
Hopefully there’s some industrial version as carrying 20 batteries and charging them five days a week is really expensive.
Granted, it probably only makes sense for a smaller crew like the one I found, but I thought it was a nice solution.
I can see that being a possibility for someplace like a college campus where one crew is literally just roving around an limited area for the day to maybe get in 5.5 hours of straight actual use, maybe, if the team is super well pipelined in what they are doing. But it seems like a fanciful/rare/contrived example. How many days of this a year does the crew work? For most lawn-care folks, I tend to think they have a lot of different sites to cover, and there's some transportation, and a variety of tasks other than leafblowing. I have a hard time imagining someone actually clocking 6 hours of actual full-throttle use of a leafblower on any day, much less day after day.
Even in exotic uses (unseen in the city in question/my own city, DC), I think adaption is less of a challenge than one might think.
So my example certainly isn’t contrived. But it’s just one example and the only one I know.
You've specified an 11 hour work window. If, between two people, they spend 50% of that day working with full-throttle leaf blowing, I'm very impressed with their efficiency. Getting around & blowing being that dominant a factor in the day is impressive. That's still 9 batteries tops & they should accept that easily given the very very very very low total cost of ownership, given that they dont need to figure out how to lug a bulk of batteries around & can just carry 1 at a time (the backpack hardware allows for two).
I think the issue is that buying and managing 9 batteries is much harder than a tank of gas. Not that it’s impossible, but that’s not a realistic path for professionals. We need better batteries before this is a feasible replacement.
This is also just a two person company and they own their own business.
Why does this matter though? Does this army of leaf blowers that run all day actually contribute anything useful?
I get some people like a tidy yard or tidy lawn or whatever. Who cares though? It shouldn't be treated as some inalienable right to have a tidy driveway so leaf blowers must be allowed.
> We're just increasing inefficiencies.
Yes but it doesn't matter because the job of blowing leaves doesn't matter. It's just control freaks trying to tightly control nature and franky, who cares. They can pay more for the privilege of having someone use a rake or broom to clean up leaves instead.
But even in cities there’s reasons to clean them up. They clog drains, they lump together in the gutter creating blockages that cause large puddles when it rains, they stain the pavement, they decompose on the sidewalk and people track it everywhere in buildings, and more. Maybe you don’t see these as problems that need solving, but people aren’t tidying up leaves just for the fun of it, they have reasons. We’re not simply obsessed with cleaning up leaves.
Do you think we don't have trees and lawns in Europe?
I don't know why "they" don't do it in Europe, I have no idea where the commenter I replied to is from in Europe. I was just stating one reason why people do it here.
Q: "Why do people in America clean leaves off the lawn?" A: "Because it's possible it can damage the lawn if you don't in some circumstances."
Simple as that. No idea why people do or do not do it elsewhere.
However, I live in the midwest. We don't have as many trees here as the east or west coasts.
However I also have honeylocust trees which drop loads of these large bean-like seed pods and these stems after the leaves fall which bunch up and can only be best described as like "wads of shaved pubic hair." I also have sweetgum trees which drop these hard, spiky seed pods that I also need to rake up. The mower can turn those into projectiles.
Really the best solution, in my case at least, would be to alter the landscaping in that area to something that would be unaffected by the leaves, but I don't have the time for that now. So clear leaves I do.
There's a LOT of leaves in the northeast. They absolutely NEED to be collected. It would bury the roads here if they didn't.
1. Rural areas where each lot is >1 acre. You might get some weed whacking, but it is not as obnoxiously frequent as fastidious leaf blowers.
2. Move to the desert where there are no trees. Bonus = no mosquitoes.
As someone who was a paid policy and budget advocate in DC on local DC issues for 20+ years, this is a sweet example of activism at its best. Citizens (in the sense of the citizenry, not in the sense of legal status) working together to make a change. Coupled, of course, with an outstanding and effective legislator who is masterful at working with the public and working her colleagues.
The several nonprofits with which I worked had some major wins over the years but it's community-driven efforts that make my heart sing. So please, take action for or against something!
My end goal and what were said are close but not directly in line. I don’t really care if a few crazies manicure their lawn, but it shouldn’t be a forced standard. Everyone doing it is terrible for the environment.
Lifting a ban won't do squat because it only affects a tiny minority. The only reason the laws and HOA rules even exist in the first place is because most people in the effected jurisdictions already kept a lawn and so nobody cared to raise any opposition when the jackbooted types wanted to force the few nonconformists to conform.
Birds, small mammals, and octopuses all groom the area around their nest — getting humans to stop seems unlikely.
Maybe they already know the concept of individual freedom allows them to think and say what they believe?
All that candy needs to be manufactured and transported, and then the waste of the packaging handled, all for essentially zero nutritional benefit compared to other food options.
We should perhaps ban everything that isn't strictly essential for life.
It's like a dystopian wasteland with piles of leaves collecting on the sides of homes and in streets 5 feet high. Leaf piles don't just disappear if left alone - they turn into large piles of muddy mess in the streets and around the edges of homes and will be there next year - and build up year-over-year.
It leads to mold issues, rodent issues, car accidents, and an absolute garbage looking neighborhood. It doesn't have to be perfect - but the opposite extreme never makes sense.
Meanwhile, a 2-stroke leaf blower will last for decades. (Well, probably a decade until the little squeeze bulb on the carburetor goes out. Replace that for $2 and you're good to go for another decade.)
If the leaf-blowers used a standardized battery so the implement isn't discarded with every other battery change I'd see it differently.
Keep up the good work.
Those vile contraptions should be banned globally.
They don’t clean anything, spit out fumes and ultra loud noise like the tiny engines they contain, and spray pollution and dust everywhere, making aerosol out of settled dust.
> In 2017, the California Air Resources Board issued a warning that may seem incredible but has not been seriously challenged: By 2020, gas-powered leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and similar equipment in the state could produce more ozone pollution than all the millions of cars in California combined. Two-stroke engines are that dirty. Cars have become that clean.
It is also much easier to ban 2-stroke motors, which have cheap electrical alternatives than ICE cars in a car dependent US city.