Gas-powered leaf blowers: The end is nigh (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Gas-powered leaf blowers: The end is nigh (2021)

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47 pointsmhb77 comments

I have a real beef with gas powered blowers, and it's noise pollution. A neighbor on my block doesn't have a lot going on, but he has his leaf blower, and it's his primary activity. Evenings that would be otherwise sublimely autumnal are instead mind shattering, hours long, symphonies from hell. Other people on the street have tried reasoning with him, even offering to buy him a battery-powered alternative, unsuccessfully.

What's funny is that when I was young someone told me "the laws are so strict in germany they even dictate when you can and cannot operate a leaf blower!" Recently I was thinking about that and actually as you say that sounds really nice!

DC banned gas blowers effective January 2022 & it's been wonderful. It's so much more peaceful.

I do think the alternate version also was compelling, where cities make loud & quiet hours. Part of the really painful hard thing about noise pollution is that it ends up becoming perpetual. There's 10 minutes of peace, then another gas blower starts up someplace else.

Trying to make hours for noise sounds great, but it's also notable that in the US at least, a huge amount of the grounds-keeping is a limited number of roving contractors. It's their full time job to be doing effectively making noise. If we were super advanced we could schedule some kind of roving zone system, changing hour by hour or day by day... but simply getting rid of the really bad noise offenders has proven to be cheap & enormously effective.

Shout out to Seth's Blog, leaf blower parable. May we all collectively find the courage to do obvious easy winning change. https://seths.blog/2022/11/the-leaf-blower-parable/

I live in an apartment complex in SoCal, and frequently work from home. It seems that there is a leaf-blower outside my window for nearly an hour almost every. single. day.. When they're not cleaning actual leaves, they're using gas-powered hedge trimmers, then cleaning that up with gas-powered leaf blowers.

I get blowing occasionally infrequently in the actual fall, but every lose blade of grass does not need to be cleared from the shrubbery every. single. day. They even leaf-blow the whole parking area outside my window. /rant - Low quality comment here, but wanted to add my voice to the chorus against gas powered blowers.

I hear you on that. Leaf blowers and mowers. On any given day, there is somebody mowing lawn (or having it mowed) around my house. It’s never ending.

The worst part is that it feels like someone starts up their mower and it reminds other people to mow. So they sit and finish their coffee, then get changed and go mow, arriving just in time to start their mower right as the previous person is finishing.

Repeat all day during summer weekends.

My one neighbor is retired and obsessed with his lawn. He mows 3x a week easily.

And air pollution. The small engines used in gas-powered lawn tools such as leaf blowers and trimmers are 2-stroke engines, which are extremely dirty engines from an air pollution standpoint. There are still some 2-stroke lawnmowers around, but they appear to all have moved to significantly cleaner 4-stroke engines which is possible because they're larger engines.

I'm looking at going all battery power for my yard tools, save for the mower.

The battery powered blowers are pretty loud too, just FYI. I have to wear hearing protection with it every time.

Lawn and Garden Equipment Sound: A Comparison of Gas and Battery Electric Equipment

https://sciforschenonline.org/journals/environmental-toxicol...

Nice to see proof that, while still quite loud to the user, multiple tested battery blowers fall off to reasonable levels by the time you get to 100-200ft which is a pretty typical distance for neighbors in a lot of areas.

Key takeaway regarding gas blowers: "Noticeably louder to 4 times louder"

Thanks for the link, that’s good info. My model is listed; it seems accurate from experience: way too loud for comfort while operating it, would be disruptive to a bbq 50 feet away.

The gas ones are certainly louder, though.

As I recall, the average electric leaf blower emits around 70 dB, while the average gas blower puts out 80-90 dB (although some advertise themselves as quieter, I am dubious but have not verified by running these tests myself). The electric leaf blowers are noticeably quieter, and what noise they do make is much more concentrated on a smaller set of frequencies than a gas blower, which is kind of all over the spectrum when it gets going.

I do think there's much much more open design space for electric leaf blowers to explore, where-as gas blowers just have terrible conflicts. You can make a quieter efficient 4-stroke gas blower, but it's going to cost a ton, have way more mechanical complexity, and probably weight more than you want. Where-as I think we're really only starting to learn about how to optimize electric leaf blowers for sound.

And I think electric blowers in general do a bit better. The top rated Ego LB5804 is supposedly 65dB, which is significantly quieter. Ryobi Whisper has a professional-grade backpack model that still is 59dB.

It looks like it might need a little more oomph, but random shout out to Moxie Marlinspike (creator of Signal messenger)'s ultra-quiet leafblower. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33324195 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104

> Where-as I think we're really only starting to learn about how to optimize electric leaf blowers for sound.

We could also collectively as a society realize that leaf blowers are low value tools that we could probably just do without. Leafs on the ground aren't harming anything.

The average electric blower is a lot less powerful than the average gas one. When you find an electric with comparable power the noise is similar. You cannot move a lot of air through a small pipe without making a lot of noise, this is physics (there are things you can do to make it better, but they have limited ability).

Old electric just couldn't get the power out of mains or a nicad battery. Newer li ion batteries can deliver more power and thus electric blowers are useful.

Don't get me wrong, gas engines are noisy as well, and so gas blower are louder, the difference isn't that much though.

Full spectrum is less mentally distracting than narrow spectrum.

Not when it's bouncing up and down the spectrum seemingly randomly. The "random" nature of the operator repeatedly gunning the engine but not just holding there is way, way, way worse than if it was just the same spectrum, but continuous.

I bought a battery powered blower (80v pack Kobalt brand product) thinking it would be quieter, but it's a different kind of loud. What surprised me is that it has a tiny propeller (about 4 inches diameter) that spins at ungodly RPMs. I would love to see a product with a large diameter squirrel cage blower with an electric motor.

Yeah I have a Ryobi 40v and it is super loud too. Doesn’t help that I have to run it in high power mode mostly to get the leaves to blow out of the rocks properly.

Why are ya'll even blowing stuff around in the first place?

And to where? I never saw a leaf blower growing up in the UK and we had plenty of trees. I guess the leaves just got mown up if you had a garden or stayed on the ground until they broke down.

No one else is as close as the operator is.

I've become convinced that we will look back at this age where it's acceptable to allow the poisonous exhaust gases from chemical reactions to just flow into the air around us in the same way I read in wonder about how people in 17th century London use the Thames both as a source of drinking water and as a sewer.

My feelings in this regard applies to all in-air combustion btw whether for heating, cooking, transport or any sort of machine.

I get your point, but your “17th century” example isn’t in the past yet

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-60046320

> But these machines persist in American landscaping because they are cheap.

I rarely see pros use cheap stuff. They're paying for Stihl eq and mowers I can't even afford.

2-stroke gas eq is incredibly powerful for the weight. More power, more done, more money.

Battery is catching up quick, and honestly will soon deliver even more power, and that's when I think most will switch. I bet many will pay more for a (more-powerful) battery trimmer. But it's not about "cheap" (imo).

It’s also about lifetime. Internal combustion engines, with a bit of inexpensive maintenance, can be used for many decades.

When batteries catch up on both fronts, the game definitely changes.

I have a battery-powered chainsaw and IT. IS. AWESOME. I pull the trigger and it runs, saws through any tree easily, and probably 20-30 dB quieter. When I let go of the trigger... it -stops- and it's -silent-.

It's easy to think "battery => wimpy, gas => hefty", but it's just not necessarily the case these days, depending on the tool. The only way a gas-powered chainsaw is better than a battery-powered one is that it's fast to refill the gas tank when it's empty, while recharging takes a bit. But if you have two batteries, then the recharge time is about the same as the charge-life, so you can just keep swapping.

I've owned both gas and battery chainsaws, and I can't agree. The 80v battery chainsaw WAS really nice in terms of volume and ease of use. There's simply no comparison in terms of cutting power with a decently powerful gas chainsaw, however (FWIW these were greenworks 80v and a Makita 64cc).

I would say I paid more for the gas chainsaw, but the battery died on the electric one after only a year or two. Buying extra batteries to get a reasonable runtime and dealing with failing electronics more than makes up the difference in price.

Link please!

https://egopowerplus.com/18-inch-chain-saw/

Consumer Reports has a review of it, too, and has done a test pitting it against a gas chainsaw (I'm not a member so can't see the conclusion, maybe they like the gas better?). My personal experience, though, is that for casual/amateur usage, of cutting down a tree or sawing up a big branch that's down, it's fantastic. It's a completely different user experience not having to start the darn thing with a crank and have it turn off the moment you take your finger off the trigger.

And it’s about being able to use it all day. Battery life will be a concern, though most of these tools have swappable batteries so they can just carry as many as they need on the truck.

More fundamentally… why did we stop using rakes? Once the leaves are more than a few inches deep, blowers become ineffective. Rakes keep working.

Where I live they use them to blow leaves, debris, and trash off of a parking lot.

Maybe not a rake, but a broom would be a welcome change. And honestly not much slower.

> a broom would be a welcome change. And honestly not much slower

Having used both brooms and a blower to sweep out my garage, a blower is exponentially faster.

A blower blasts all the crap on your garage floor into the air, and you're now breathing it. A broom does that a little bit also, but not nearly as much.

If you get a wide shop broom, it makes pretty quick work of a garage floor, and gives your arms a little bit of a workout as well.

Broom > Blower for garage. Blower > Broom for uneven concrete sidewalks and surfaces.

Why are these even remotely necessary? I've got a fair sized garden, surrounded by deciduous trees, and half an hour with a rake on a few weekends in Autumn is all it takes to keep on top of things. What am I missing?

For commercial lawn care crews time is money and leaf blowers are much faster than a rake.

Landscaping services offer "mow, blow and go" specials. Anything else beyond that is extra. I was willing to pay extra and couldn't find anywhere that offered anything beyond "mow, blow and go."

In BC Canada.

Pleanty of trees, equals pleanty of leaves everywhere.

Using a leaf blower (I have a plugin electric) is immense time saver. I didn't buy one till this year but every single one of my neighbours has one.

You can't rake a hard surface like concrete, and using a broom is exhausting.

Most people have electric with some people with the commercial gas style.

One of my neighbours do use it excessively and the gas ones the loudest (there is no quiet blower).

Seen them use it in the snow... Why shovel the driveway and car, just leaf blower it LOL ( not joking)

I have an electric blower/vacuum/shredder, which I bought because previously raking could take hours and then having to bag up a dozen or more bags of leaves.

Blowing them into a pile then vacuuming and shredding seemed easier for one year. But I barely even used it last year.

Instead I just mowed/trimmed all the leaves to shreds and that was even easier. No raking, no bagging, no blowing necessary.

Agree with mowing the leaves. I went from raking/blowing and bagging, to using a shredder, and finally gave up a few years ago and just mowed the leaves on the lawn. Very easy, and I like to mow the lawn a last time in the fall anyway.

I had one maple taken down last year, so there are fewer leaves to mow now (just what blows over from my neighbors) - but the remaining tree drops leaves on the sidewalk and street. Nothing for that but to rake/blow (with a corded electric blower) and bag. At least we get 4 "free" leaf pick-up days.

We have a decent yard in Washington, DC. It is not a big deal to rake, but every autumn we talk for a day or two about getting an electric leaf blower. My wife prefers to rake out the garden beds, and rakes can take plants and will take mulch along. So far, inertia has won, and we still rake.

Ever tried to clear a lot of small leaves out of rock/gravel?

No, why would I do that? What practical purpose does it serve? I can walk on leaves as easily as I can walk on gravel so who cares?

The practical purpose is an irrational fear of leaves and an aversion to the thinking that a quiet living environment encourages.

Now quit your whining and let me drive my RAM and use my 500cc TWO-STROKE MONSTER POWER LEAF DESTROYER in peace.

Moxie Marlinspike came up with a powerful yet quiet blower, but I haven't seen anything else about since a he put up a video on Twitter some time ago: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104

He claims he's getting the same power as other models but I think he is comparing it to the lower power leaf blowers that run on drill style batteries, those aren't powerful enough to blow leaves on a lawn, only hard surfaces.

produce more ozone pollution than all of California’s tens of millions of cars, combined

Because cars don't fucking produce ozone. In many cases the concentration of ozone at a car's exhaust is lower than at its intake. I'm so tired of this statement being trotted out in articles about two-stroke engines. It's like saying a single poultry farm emits more rotten eggs than a whole state's dairy farms combined.

Nitrogen oxides and VOC/Hydrocarbons along with sunlight form ozone, its doesn't come directly out of the exhaust. Carbureted two-stroke engines emit large quantities of hydrocarbons compared four-stroke even without emissions gear like a cat. This is due to the the intake and exhaust port being open together for a period of time on a two-stroke, certain amount of unburned fuel goes directly out the exhaust, this is why they are so bad. It's the VOC they are emitting that can then form ozone.

Pointing out two-stroke engines produce dangerous amounts of ozone is great. Using a numerical comparison to cars in order to generate fear in the reader is moronic and manipulative.

It's reasonable to point out that even though they're both gas engines, one produces an absurd multiple of the more volatile pollutants of the other.

Well said. I get so tired of these also.

My town (Boston suburb) just banned them, but the enforcement as far as I can tell is "you pay a small fine", which means that fine just becomes the cost of doing business for the landscapers.

(2021) 47 points, 33 comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28739584

I moved to a two acre wooded lot a few years back, and brought my trusty battery blower that served me well in the city… that lasted one season. I caved and bought a backpack blower last year for about $300 USD. Is it obnoxious? Sure is. Bad for the environment? I am sure. But what used to take me several hours of blowing and recharging now takes me about 20 minutes.

When the electric blowers catch up in power and value I’ll be happy to switch back - but until then it’s a matter of cost and efficiency.

What are you blowing on a two-acre wooded lot that takes so long? I'm asking because a) I'm just curious and b) because I'm on an acre and all I use my electric blower for is to clean the concrete walkways and driveways. One charge is all I need for that. When I hear "two acre wooded lot", my mind doesn't immediately think of a lot of concrete.

Yeah fair enough, if it was just the concrete I could get by with the electric blower. I have some gardens, grass, drainage, and 300' of road to keep tame as well.

I have both an electric and a gas powered leaf blower. I specifically bought the most powerful gas powered one made, as the electric one simply wasn’t powerful enough, and didn’t last long enough. I use the leaf blower to move the leaves off the surface of my pool (way too many trees around my pool) and the electric blower, with the largest battery, can barely get it done, and in four times as long.

There is something about the smell of two stroke engines… if you’ve ever ripped around on a dirt bike you know what I mean. If you haven’t, I guess you’ll never understand…

I think a lot about how I have a lot of fondness and smell memory attached to what are probably carcinogenic vapors. A nostalgic part of me is sad that we are losing the cultural artifact that is the smell of gasoline. We had a 5hp go-kart when I was a kid, and my parents always used gasoline powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers. But obviously in other ways I am very happy we are moving past it.

Yep, we used to love the smell of gas stations growing up. But mostly harmful to breathe I’m sure.

Nothing like the smell of boat gasoline.

Yahh my step mom had a jet boat, I know that one for sure!

Gasoline engines without catalytic converters as well. When I'm on a sidewalk and an old car drives by, the familiar smell takes me back to my youth. Riding in traffic with the windows down, or field trips to some destination in the city full of flatulent traffic. It's the smell of childhood summer when the air was calm and exhaust hung in the air forever.

I was also around dairy farms a lot as a kid. Like the ironically adjective'd "pre-smog" engines, it only smells like nostalgia for a minute or so.

Smells like... cancer.

Pretty sure Gas or Electric, both blow things you shouldn't be breathing into the air. Remove them altogether.

i personally find it easy to get along with everyone, so long as they just agree to ONLY do things I personally approve of. Why cant everyone be as progressive as me?

Not sure where the personal bit came from. They literally blow particulate off of the ground and into your lungs. We have non-smoking areas, but suspending whatever is on the ground into the air is somehow okay and opposing it is being "progressive"? I don't think it's such a progressive idea.

but where does it end? what if I personally take a water sprayer with me and spray the ground ahead of me when walking so as to not hurl dust into the air, can I now demand others do so too?

this planet is a shared resource, and a great many things everyone does affects others to some degree, and there obviously has to be some limits, but I think everyone would do well to hold a bit off on judging others, or demanding laws stopping them, for you may soon see others that will turn the cannon around on yourself.

What if the 1 billion Africans suddenly decided "well lets get rid of the US lifestyle, they consume too many resources anyway, literally hurling particles and carbon into the air", will you cheer for the dismantling of all the amenities you enjoy?

There's no judgement of people in my comments. It's objectively bad. Air and Water are 100% things we should protect with law BECAUSE "This planet is a shared resource".

I dont entirely disagree with the principle, but, at the same time, will you spray water on the ground you walk on?

I don't have a lot of concern for what I walk on. It can be raked or swept, watered if needed on concrete if it's a concern. On grass or soil it just creates more favorable soil. I take my shoes off at the door, so I don't see any issues.

A lot of people who use these machines specifically enjoy the harm they do to others.

got any proof of that, or is it just "redneck combustion engine man bad" ?

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