Gasoline powered leaf blowers. I believe electric blowers are still permitted.
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.