Leaf blowers are a scourge. Why is it hard to get rid of them? | Hacker News Reader

Leaf blowers are a scourge. Why is it hard to get rid of them?

thehustle.co

62 pointsindigoabstract147 comments

It’s just a symptom of the larger problem of manicured lawns being the number one “managed crop” in America.

Eliminating home lawn is probably one of the singular things that would significantly slow down our destruction of the planet

I’m sure someone will post some reason why their lawn is different somehow

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lawn-largest-crop-america_n_5...

[2] https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/31/this-h...

Even without lawns people will use leaf blowers to blow leaves, off their driveways or xeriscapes or whatever. So we should ban gas powered leaf blowers regardless.

Ban disiguous trees

I think he means that everybody should be made to live in apartments or condos, without any sort of garden, patios, etc. Dense urban living for everybody.

I live in a detached house in the suburbs and I don't own a leaf blower, have never watered the grass, cut it about once a month (and thinking of low maintenance ways to get rid of it so I don't have to own a lawn mower). So no, in fact it's not "manicured spotless lawn or literally shove everyone into apartments".

It's possible to have yards without devoting them entirely to a monocultural monocot crop. See, e.g., https://maps.app.goo.gl/95tVKVU8DAZkKTA6A for some lawn layouts that eschew grass entirely.

Quite frankly, I think such housing areas look far, far better than your typical grassy suburbia.

Not really, but suburban life should stop being indirectly subsidized.

Well, considering that it's illegal to build apartments or condos in most places I don't think you have to worry about that.

That’s a cynical interpretation. I have about 4000 sqft of garden with only about 25sqft with grass. Trees, plants, flowering plants, succulents - all of them infinitely more beautiful and low maintenance than a lawn.

That is not what GP said at all?

This is definitely not what I mean

Having a lawn and having a garden are two different things. You can have a house with property without a giant lawn. Your comment is a disingenuous interpretation of the original poster

I do agree that houses with large lawns and zero food crops are just... wasteful. I rent so I am limited to what I could do, otherwise I would just till my lawn and make almost the entire thing into garden beds.

I dislike seeing those houses that have what amount to prairies and on that grass you see just a few horses or whatever. Such a waste of arable land.

Why people would put so much effort into growing useless grass is astonishing to me. You can grow anything there and you choose grass? Why? I assume it has to do with an HOA? Or aesthetics? Or it’s easier?

I’ve always taken grass as a granted for landscaping in climates that support it. Didn’t know there was so much hate for grass until this thread.

I think grass is utilitarian. It’s carpet for outside. The kids can play on it, you can bbq on it, have a picnic, etc.

As for why you’d want to keep it short? Bugs, utility, etc. The taller you let it grow, the less usable the space is and the more critters move in (critters that bite in the Midwest)

As for why you wouldn’t let stuff rot on top of your outdoor carpet over the winter, vs process it through a compost pile and spread it as fertilizer in the spring…

I don't hate grass, I actually quite like it. But I think a lot of people put way too much effort into lawn care, complain about the effort, and then stand on it maybe 3-4 times a year. At least those in my family do. Then they act surprised when I mention that I don't think I'd bother going though the effort to maintain a lawn. I'm not really interested in adding mowing a lawn every week or two to my chore list.

So, I guess I hate the expectation of a lawn more than the lawn itself.

The utility isn't even that good. Standing/sitting on lawn isn't that nice. It's always got a humid feel to it and will stain your clothes. Much nicer to just have pavers and shade.

If the Internet has taught me anything, it's that someone, somewhere will object to something, no matter how mundane or usual that something is. I guess I can now add 'having a lawn' to the list I'm keeping of the many ways my boring, suburban, SFH, car-owning lifestyle is killing the planet.

It’s important for me to have grass to keep the dogs away from the ticks. Since I like the grass, I put about 2-3 days a year into maintaining it and making it as nice as I think is necessary. And mow 40mins a week. But growing grass can be just as rewarding as growing anything else.

> But growing grass can be just as rewarding as growing anything else.

Well, you can’t eat it. So doesn’t that immediately knock it down some pegs from growing many other, edible things? It’s also not great for pollinators and other important participants of the food chain, so perhaps that reduces its mental rewards?

If you can eat it, then so can a lot of other critters. The rabbits, possums, and squirrels quickly figure out you're the Grub Hub of the neighborhood. The crows will join in, too. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but if you think you're growing food for you to eat then boy are you in for a surprise!

Also, most lawns I've seen will inevitably have clover, unless you're overly aggressive with your herbicides, which most people aren't. The pollinators are supported, not that that really helps anything since they're not commercial pollinators.

> But growing grass can be just as rewarding as growing anything else.

This is true in the general sense, but it's also mostly subjective. There are plenty of divisive yet enjoyable pursuits in the world.

I'm a never-HOAer, but I do like my own lawn for the aesthetics and utility for the kids, dog, for having friends over, and frankly, for the distraction and sense of accomplishment that growing a beautiful and lush, dark green carpet of grass provides.

We grow a small family vegetable garden as well, which is probably substantially less practical than buying the equivalent amount of produce at the best and most expensive organic farmers' market you could imagine.

My lawn has 100s of plants in addition to grass. I’ve never actually seen a lawn that was just grass.

What’s astonishing to me is how deeply some folks care about what I plant around my house for my own enjoyment, and how willing they are to nominate themselves to tell me to change it.

The nice thing about grass is how little effort it takes to maintain. Not everyone wants to be a full time gardener.

Aesthetics, good for kids to play on, easy to maintain. I’m not a fan myself but I get it.

Aesthetics. You want sunlight for a variety of reasons, so you cannot grow trees, passability, so not thick bushes, and you don't want it looking like crap. A lawn is am easy default. Pass any zombie home with unmaintained lawn for even a month in the height of the summer and it's obvious why continual manicure is needed. It's not a happy equilibrium, but it is a stable one.

It stems from the manicured and ornate lawns of European nobility. It became a status symbol to have land that could be used for no practical purpose but aesthetics. In the 50s and 60s effort to industrialize, suburbanize, and add chemicals to everything, cookie cutter neighborhoods could be pumped out with simple no-thought-to-design lawns. They looked clean and required tons of upkeep and fuel and chemicals, and spending to one up the Joneses was a big thing in a newly rich society. In many ways it was the same as the nobility - your neighbor (or someone in a less affluent area more likely) who works two jobs doesn’t have time to maintain a lawn for no reason, so you could feel good about yourself for having a clean, useless front yard sign telling everyone how you’ve made it!

It’s functional. Grass is nicer to walk around on than sticks, rocks, and prickly weeds. Most animals (rabbits excluded) don’t nest as close to the house.

Lots of people do like the aesthetics and perhaps some HOAs are strict about it, but I think most people maintain their lawn because it’s what they think they’re supposed to do.

Personally I think small lawns are great but would love to see more natural landscaping with native plants.

If you have small kids that like to play outside, you would likely have grass, not trees or something else that is more wild.

Ridiculous, kids love trees. But also, rats and therefore snakes love leaves, as does fire. If you live in the woods the kids will love it, but you still have to keep leaves away from the perimeter of the house.

> You would let a small child just run around in the forest?

Plenty of us did as children as recently as the 90s, and even at that point it was less common than previous generations. I wouldn't do it today either, but the reasons are societal and/or emotional rather than any high statistical danger.

You would let a small child just run around in the forest? OP said small. Where I live the woods have bears and mountain cats. A teenager may be able to navigate those dangers successfully but a small child, toddler age, would not do so alone.

> You would let a small child just run around in the forest?

Yes of course! My entire childhood was spent running around in the woods. Bears and mountain lions are rare and most of them are more scared of you than the other way around. No more than a small handful of people are attacked by those across the entirety of North America, the last time a child was killed by a mountain lion was about 25 years ago. There were only two or three fatal mountain lion attacks against kids in the 90s, two in the 80s, and three in the 70s.. there are less than 20 of these kind of incidents in the entire 20th century across all of North America. Why the hell would you bring up such an unlikely risk? And fatal bear attacks are only marginally more common, they're still incredibly rare.

Your kids are many thousands of times more likely die from choking on food than by getting attacked by an animal in the woods, do you ban grapes in your house? How did you become so cowardly? Forbidding kids from playing in the woods is absolutely pathetic, reading your comment left me with a feeling of visceral disgust.

Also, how many early deaths are caused by air pollution from lawn mowers? As I understand it they emit orders of magnitude more harmful particulate matter than vehicles. Something like 1hr / wk being equivalent of driving a modern sedan from New York to Miami.

Lawnmowers also kill people outright, about 90 people a year which is way more than bears: https://www.newsweek.com/lawnmowers-kill-more-people-bears-s...

I actually went to school with a kid who was run over by a lawn mower. He survived but it chewed up the side of his leg and left him with a limp. I think he was lucky he could still walk at all.

What an amazingly useful article for this discussion! Sometimes the internet still manages to surprise me.

Yeah, I searched "lawn mower deaths" on DDG and that was the first result. I had to do a double take, uncanny relevance.

> most of them are more scared of you than the other way around. No more than a small handful of people are attacked

I personally like to think of the stats too, but then again, why wear a seatbelt?

as someone from the uk, I would be terrified of poisonous spiders and snakes more than bears or mountain lions

Some snakes can certainly kill you, but it's rare. Partially because rattlesnakes are courteous enough to warn people who get too close (rattling) and partially because North American hospitals all know what the native venomous snakes are and have antivenom for them. Most people who get bitten by venomous snakes were deliberately messing around with them but there's a small chance that you might accidentally step on one that wasn't rattling. Copperhead bites are more common than rattlesnake bites, probably because they don't rattle as much, but they're less likely to kill.

There are only one or two kids killed by snakes per decade in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_snake_bites_in_t...

Spider deaths are even more rare. Brown recluses are pretty spooky though.

The historical fashion trends behind it are fascinating.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practic...

Originally if you think of Manor house gardens, wasting farmable land to just keep lawned gardens was a sign of wealth.

I guess from there the whole thing evolved to american real estate selling "american dream" aesthetics.

What would you put that is better? Although not perfect, lawns IMO are a good combination of practicality/aesthetic/maintenance.

Sheep, cows and goats were the original reason

> Eliminating home lawn is probably one of the singular things that would significantly slow down our destruction of the planet

This is a city opinion that not many people in suburbia would agree with.

It's also motivated by West coast water shortages, something that those on the East coast can't relate to as easily.

It's a lot like the /r/fuckcars argument. It's a great idea inside a single population of like-minded users, but there's an unspoken silent majority whose lifestyle and entire world doesn't work in the same way.

Pretty sure driving 1-2 ton cars every day and flying planes do a way better job of destroying the planet than mowing the lawn with a small four-cycle motor once a week.

The land use change is a bigger factor than the mowing. Though you're right, we should work on reducing lawns and car usage.

Lawns use ridiculous amounts of water for zero agricultural productivity.

No, they don’t. The vast majority of water is used for agricultural and industrial purposes.

Even if you completely eliminated lawns, you wouldn’t make a meaningful dent in water consumption.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practic... says "Lawns are the most grown crop in the U.S." - would be interesting to see more detailed data on that.

The vast majority of lawns don’t get watered aside from the rain.

That's not the case at all in California. There's thousands upon thousands of lawns and most people water them all year. Many cities still have ordinances requiring lawns be maintained, you can't just let them die or go to weeds lest you be fined. It's expensive to convert them to drought tolerant landscaping so most people just keep grass lawns. HOAs are militant about lawn maintenance and often restrict how lawns can be redeveloped from grass.

It's only in the past decade or so new development has started requiring drought tolerant landscaping. Municipalities have also recently introduced ordinances to limit watering. But this is all a reaction to the serious droughts we've had rather than being proactive.

And yet total residential usage of water is only 10% California’s residential / agricultural / industrial water usage. Agriculture is 80%.

The grass bandaids on commercial lots is not captured by that 10% residential use figure. So all those dumb strips of grass on medians and in front of strip malls get counted in that 80% figure. A lot of that water is wasted by running off into drains.

Grass lawns are a waste of water, gas (mowing/maintenance), time, and effort. Reducing grass lawns in residential and commercial spaces would make for a meaningful reduction in the state's water usage with little reduction in economic output.

No, the 80% figure only includes agriculture. Not grass fields on commercial lots. Consider this: produce is mostly water. Now consider the weight of all the produce in California (including waste like corn stalks or potato plants) to the weight of all the grass lawns. 8:1 would be an extremely generous ratio in favor of the lawns.

This has some merit in the mountain west, but back east nobody waters their lawn, it just comes from the sky for free. (I know some people have sprinklers, but having grown up in Chicago, I can tell you that they're not strictly necessary.)

Chicago lawn here. As a point of principle I don't water the lawn. It sometimes goes dormant for a bit in the summer - I don't mind the yellow look since the park is yellow and it feels like it fits the general hot, dry spell - but springs back to lush and green once the rains come again.

Very important to append: when they are irrigated.

Not everywhere irrigates their lawns.

But I agree with the sentiment. The amount of energy I see in the US being put into maintaining an artificial environment in places that otherwise would be barren is astounding.

Unless that water makes it to a street drain, it’s a 100% renewable resource.

When that water evaporates, it goes up in the air, and then falls back down as water.

The contention is that the usage of groundwater removes it from the ground, which has long lasting effects. Long term overuse of groundwater has caused some serious problems. It's of little use to us in the sky anyhow.

Ah yeah, don’t pump your ground water for agriculture, doesn’t matter if you’re dumping it on almonds or grass. I’m well aligned on that.

But water is not a scarce resource and putting it on plants is not a negative sum game.

The planet recycles water. Grass is 100% sustainable if maintained using the planets natural water cycles.

The water in the sky falls on a water shed which is harvested into a local water supply which comes right back to a tap.

uh, have you never been to a park? that isn't irrigated and looks fine.

> home lawn -> destruction of the planet

Your citations state that lawns consume 60% of household water, implying that this leads inevitably to environmental catastrophe.

But household water usage is a small fraction of total fresh water usage.

In a dry region like California, households consume only 10% of total fresh water [0].

In regions that get more rain, households consume a much smaller fraction than that.

If the government could somehow force every household to convert every lawn into cactus and prevent every resident from bathing more than once per week, would that delay the "destruction of the planet" by any measurable amount?

[0] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/

Close to 5% total water usage being just to keep the vanity ground colorful seems like a huge waste.

Many things are wasteful.

An equivalent amount to grow almonds for export also seems wasteful.

Do either of these wasteful uses of water constitute an existential risk to the planet?

Yes both contribute to the depletion of the freshwater resources available.

This is a well documented problem

Lawns are beautiful and useful. Are we not allowed to expend resources for beautiful and useful things?

Public parks are too. If you've got reasonable access to one, do you need the other? Or rather, is a private lawn something that should be taxed (much?) more heavily where a park is available within 15 mins walk? And should urban planners take that into account, and developments be penalised when they don't?

Sounds like you’d prefer homeowners to be against public parks; I guess you’d rather folks without their own private property not have access to open spaces?

What gave you that impression?

This is proposing to incentivize homeowners to vote against parks or even actively dismantle them to get a tax break. That seems pretty silly.

Ha, within a 15 minute walk? I’m going to guess you don’t have kids.

So parents need to pack everything up daily for their kids to go play (at least for the first N years of life until they’re independent enough to go do a 15min walk on their own) or be taxed for it?

I have a public park across the street from me.

I spent $20k converting the side of my house into a playground for my kids.

The QoL impact has been massive.

It’s gated in by a 6ft perimeter brick wall with a door that we put in that opens from the kitchen.

In the morning, my 2 year old can unlock the door to the side yard and go play before we even wake up.

The side yard lets our kids play without us needing to supervise. It gives them strong early independent play and gives us space to get life sorted out while they are entertaining themselves (chores, bills, etc.).

The park across the street does none of that, it is not interchangeable in any meaningful way.

Comrade guiriduro, I appreciate your efforts to better the community for all by attempting to motivate the behavior of our comrades through tax policy. This sentiment will be noted in your social profile.

I think people should be allowed to have nice lawns. It'd be nice if they expended the resources to do it more sustainably with fewer externalities.

I cut my grass myself using an electric mower and use it to make compost. We would use a leaf blower on our property even without grass for what it's worth. We have an electric blower too, which is a lot quieter than our neighbor's petrol one.

My yard is hardly manicured, but it’s an amazing place for my kids to play. I have to blow the leaves, otherwise they collect too deep to be able to use the yard.

They get blown into he woods on the back half of the yard where the decompose and fertilizer the dirt.

I’ve never seen a leaf blower used for grass up here. Only leaves.

But I also never see the gas powered backpack blowers portrayed on TV so maybe I’m perceiving a different context.

I think the point was, if we didn't have lawns then leaves could remain where they fall and mulch the soil.

Leaves get everywhere and cover sidewalks, roads, roofs and gutters, etc. Over time, they degrade into an unsafe slimy surface.

If it was cheaper, we'd pay someone to rake and broom the leaves around. But we decided human labour is worth more than that, so hey the free market found a solution for you. Maybe you should add a leaf-blower tax to fix that? Maybe similar to carbon credits we can have noise-credits?

Really? More than manufacturing or vehicular emisssion, and agricultural waste? Color me deeply skeptical of that priority...

Right at the very bottom the article suggests the correct way to deal with fallen leaves: leave them alone. They decompose and provide nutrients to the grass.

i tried this with the 50 foot sycamore in my back yard and the leaves didn't decompose at all. they fell and froze. then in the spring when things thawed out, they formed a thick wet mat that suffocated and killed everything underneath.

Your lawn doesn't have a healthy fungal community. Probably because of lack of diversity in you lawn from years and years of pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizer use.

One can walk in an Eastern deciduous forest and see that the leaves never fully decompose, despite the lack of pesticides, fungicides, and fertilizer.

I really don't understand moving leaves unless it's walkways and driveways. Fallen leaves are the ways trees work and have always worked.

One year ago, in November, I bought a house in GA after 40 years in the West, and it's got a bunch of Ents on a 1/2 acre lot. Upon moving in I had no tools to deal with the leaves, and the house had been unmaintained all Fall, so the leaves had piled up everywhere but importantly, on top of the "grass". I have a long concrete driveway also, and the piles of leaves were kind of annoying there. Raking was... suboptimal.

All my life I have hated leaf blowers with all my being, reserving a special place in that hatred for the landscapers working in the middle of the night in Santa Clara on commercial property.

However I have friends who don't share that hatred and as a surprise housewarming gift I received in Dec. a 20V battery electric leaf blower. My gawd that thing works great, and it's not very loud, takes 10 minutes, so problem solved for the driveway, deck, steps etc.

As for the "grass"[1], wherever the leaves had piled up and matted down after the rains, nothing grew. It was just mud. I'm not interested in leaf blowing a half acre so after researching it I got a Honda mulching lawnmower. I mulched for the first time last week. Worked great! This week the leaves have piled up again. I'll keep mulching until the accumulation wanes but I'm optimistic I'll have more "grass", and less mud, next year.

I retain my intense hatred for gas powered leaf blowers. I've got a neighbor across the lake and that mutherfucker likes to blow his deck for I swear to god an hour once a week with a tremendously noisy gas blower. Visions of setting the thing on fire. Maybe I should buy him an electric leaf blower. He also has a very noisy Harley and one of those extraordinarily loud Mustang adjacent cars, so possibly that would be a fail. Oh well.

[1] "grass" Well there's some grassy stuff most places, and it looks like dozens of other species of ground covering plants. All fine with us, what I care about is cover and not growing too fast.

This right here. But then HOAs gotta have lawns which also take mowing most of the times by leisurely ridden gas mowers. The leaves on the lawn obstruct water and sunlight from getting to the roots of the lawn and makes the lawn look not green. So now you have to blow the leaves so you can mow the lawn or just mow the lawn to crush out the leaves. Either way there's double whammy of gas and noise ruining your weekends.

The one thing that helped somewhat is replacing windows on my house - new windows seem a lot better at noise reduction. I am also seriously considering synthetic grass and getting rid of the stupid Oak trees on my lawn - I don't think those leaves decompose soon enough!

FTA:

> shred most leaves with a mower, leaving them strewn on the lawn as mulch.

The shredding is a necessary step. Of course, this too is generally done by power equipment ...

If leaves are just left alone they cover your grass and kill it

Mulching leaves with a mower would deal with them just fine in many cases. The landscaper in the article doesn't need to cancel all of his fall cleanup contracts. Areas with dense oak trees however, might have so many leaves mulching would choke out the grass.

>Areas with dense oak trees however, might have so many leaves mulching would choke out the grass.

Surprisingly not, it's actually pretty amazing how massive blankets of dried fallen leaves will get chomped down into a tiny tiny thin layer of powder when mulching, at least when using a sufficiently powerful mower to do a good job of it. I've got maybe 50 acres, mostly dense forest with lots of oaks/maples and then some lawn (more regularly mowed hay field) around main buildings. Before I had one I used to rake (or eventually blow) up leaves and cart them off leaving only some. Getting a quality mulching setup was a revelation (for leave and grass too for that matter). Better for the environment, less messy, and more convenient. Still use an (electric) blower though to gather leaves onto lawn areas from other places for mulching, and in some cases to help spread the leaves out beyond the areas near forest so that they'll add nutrients elsewhere. But once everything is piled as I want onto lawn can just mulch it, though everything in the hay fields can just sit over the winter of course.

So I think there really is no downside, it's all upside, and it can all be electric as well. Just a matter of putting the pieces together with the right incentives, which is something that looks plenty politically feasible.

If you have a few leaves, sure. If you've got more than 1 tree that shit will pile up, clump together, and form a layer of slimy leaves that won't break down for years.

So does the weed'n'feed I pay for, and it's much prettier.

The official soundtrack of Houston, TX. The noise is so ubiquitous it is almost noteworthy when you can’t hear it. Paradoxically, the better the neighborhood, the worse the noise.

Maybe it's worth rethinking what a "better neighborhood" is to exclude their use. Do appraisers put extra value in manicured lawns having pesticides in them and the leaves blown off? When someone says you can't have X on your property or you need Y there to maximize the value of a property, that's all the excuse people need to act like assholes sometimes, imposing stupid HOA rules or, in this case maybe, polluting & making a racket.

Edit: Seems like I wasn't far off. Stopping homeowners from making bad choices will need to include real estate agents not playing into the idea that a leaf-free, poison sprayed lawn is more valuable.

> Lawn care specialists have claimed for years this strategy leads to better lawns, but it would only work if customers are willing to accept a change to the manicured status quo, a look that real estate agents and landscapers claim boosts home values and that some homeowners associations require in their bylaws.

There actual is a way to define "better neighborhood" (property value or desirability) with data independent of human occupancy and qualitative appearance: count of large trees.

It's the same wasteful, inane absurdity of Irvine, CA over-manicured emerald lawns. My late grandparents were adherents of Orientalism landscaping and interior decorating and on this train of 19th century French aristocracy subsumed by Americana.

Visit somewhere like the quieter residential neighborhoods in Palo Alto where native plants and the natural look is less effort, cheaper, more efficient, and less noisy.

"Paradoxically"

Americans use more than seventy million pounds of pesticide annually to maintain their lawns. That's ten times more poison per acre than all of America's farmers use on their crops: https://progressive.org/magazine/vox-populist-lush-lawn-kill...

If you spend Saturday morning revving multiple 90dB engines in your front yard, the police will come and ask you to stop... unless you're using them to blow leaves around. Leaf blowers don't need to be banned, we simply need to stop treating them as an exception. It seems to me that the best solution would be to enforce existing noise and pollution ordinances and require landscapers to get quieter (possibly electric) equipment.

Well, fact is they're very, very useful. I spent a solid couple of decades poo pooing them. Finally tried one, and was instantly sold. It's not just the time savings either, blowers allow doing jobs that just aren't very feasible otherwise. I can get rid of leaves and debris from stony/leafy surfaces and structures that can't be raked. I can clear snow from rough whole rock paths all winter, and it will completely clear the rocks and get between them unlike snow shoveling, which prevents the snow from getting compacted and turning to ice. I eliminated like 99% of the need to ever apply any sand or ice melt when I switched to clearing with a blower. Feet of snow on cars, my solar panels, etc can be blasted off quickly and effectively with zero risk of surface scratching. The ROI has been high, even though I don't actually use them for leaves on my lawn those I just mulch. But getting acorns and such off the lawn and blowing leaves onto it from driveway and walkways for mulching is helpful.

However mixed fuel ones really do suck, but happily electric ones are finally getting really solid too. I got an Ego 600 CFM as soon as it became available and while air velocity and total volume are somewhat lower than my Stihl it was able to take over a good 70% of the work. For this fall and winter season (about a month ago) I got an upgraded 800 CFM Ego Commercial one that takes double battery packs and look forward to putting it through its full paces, but so far I'd estimate that has closed the gap to something like 90-95%. Maybe even enough to completely get rid of the gas though the winter will be the real proof. But the pace of advancement has been pretty solid. They're far far quieter, they don't produce all the awful fumes, they're incredibly reliable and convenient in terms of instant start.

The remaining flies in the ointment are just lack of standardization in batteries and interfaces and upfront battery cost (when used a decent amount I think the value vs cost of fuel and oil is often positive over lifetime, but that doesn't change the fact that it's hard for many people to plunk down hundreds/thousands upfront vs as opex buying fuel). Both hopefully will get addressed over time. But I think at least the capabilities to match/exceed 2-stroke in raw performance is there for nearly everyone which is a good change and makes it politically much easier for governments to step in and start accelerating the transition.

New electric blower owner here, thanks for the additional detail. Mine has 2 batteries too and I don't come close to discharging them in 15 minutes, so a big win. I don't think I've had to use the maximum flow setting yet.

Yeah, with the largest batteries available (12aH, which is perfectly doable with a decent backpack system since the weight isn't on what you're holding) I've used mine up to 40-50 minutes in terms of continuous run at maximum power, which is extremely solid imo. Another nice aspect about electric is that when you're not actively blowing it's using zero energy, whereas once started a gas one is constantly using some fuel even when you're just walking around. Using a blower on a larger area often involves a fair amount of blowing-then-repositioning in order to herd things where you want them to go. So 30-50min of continuous run time can represent 1-2 hours of actual usage, which is also about as much (or more) as I'd ever want to do without stopping for a break anyway. And then of course can in principle just swap to new batteries anyway, though that increases TCO.

> It's not just the time savings either, blowers allow doing jobs that just aren't very feasible otherwise.

Well I'm sold. How did humanity survive without such a life changing invention? /s

But seriously. What are the things that you couldn't do before that you've suddenly discovered that you can't live without?

>Well I'm sold. How did humanity survive without such a life changing invention?

>But seriously. What are the things that you couldn't do before that you've suddenly discovered that you can't live without?

This is a bad faith logical fallacy, namely an Appeal to Extremes amongst other ones. "This provides value" is not remotely synonymous with "can't live without". "Humanity survived" without antibiotics, vaccines, electricity in general, houses, or Hacker News. That does not necessarily mean we were better off without them or that it's wrong to choose to spend some energy budget on them so long as externalities are accounted for.

I explained how I found it very valuable, albeit without getting into things like slip risk on ice or leaves, increasing numbers of ticks and disease risk from them, difficulties as one gets older etc. How about you explain why electric blowers powered by my solar panels are a bad thing?

You could hire a peasant to do it for instance. Great! Let's go back to that.

I’ve been listening to a leaf blower running for probably the last hour. I was trying to sleep, and it woke me up and has kept me up… it just keeps going. How many leaves can they possible have.

Electric leaf blowers are much quieter and don’t stink.

Like the Whisper Aero: https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/18/whisper-aero-unveils-ultra...

The whisper aero is certainly better, but not available for sale

I don't get leaf blowers really. I'd love to have some sort of paper bag and connector to my lawn mower. I have my bag and just getting it into the brown bag is a little bit of a pain. But man - you just do it once and you don't have to cajole the leaves for 10s of minutes.

Is there a reason you don't just let the lawn mower mulch them up and leave them on the ground? After I mow over my leaves they pretty much disappear into the grass.

I do that to if the leaf cover is less than 90%.

NJ resident who has never cleared leaves in the last 18 years in my suburban home - I just let it degrade over winter and the lawn care companies take care of it in spring.

I don't live in a HOA community, which I think is a bane (one of many) of US living

Where do the leaves fall, and do you use that surface for anything else?

Leaf blowers have always seemed to me like a very inefficient use of technology (when used on grass, not asphalt). I see people struggling all the time to scrape those few leaves at the bottom that just won't move no matter how much air you blow on them.

I've always preferred to use a rake.

When a landscaping company uses a gas leaf blower, enforcement of the ban should be targeted at the property owner instead of the landscaping company. Most cops aren't particularly excited about bullying a hardworking landscaping worker so if you call them they won't even show up in time to give the landscaping company a ticket. On the other hand, if you could simply submit a video of the offense to local officials they could easily tie the offense to the property itself, and fine the property owner. No cops necessary.

Then property owners could weigh the cost of eating these fines against simply raking their yard themselves.

It sounds like the root cause of the issue you describe is cops not doing their job. Perhaps the efforts of the city can be better targeted to the root cause, rather than creating additional bureaucracy, or engaging in collective punishment because it's more convenient.

It also doesn't seem like it would work because most property owners are even less excited than cops about confronting a hardworking landscaping worker, particularly given that it's the cops' job to do so, not theirs.

You actually want cops to police leaf blowers? Are you joking? We won’t even hire enough so they can police petty crime.

> You actually want [police] to police [law breaking]? Are you joking?

If this is what you meant to ask, the answer is obviously yes.

Do you actually want homeowners to police law breaking? Are you joking? It's not even their job, and enforcing the law is literally what we pay police to do, that's why their job is called "policing" and their employer is the "police".

You want to talk about hiring budgets, what's the government-provided officer hiring budget for homeowners? Or do you expect homeowners to solve the problem with $0 while the police receive significantly more than $0 to ignore the problem? I mean, if the police abdicate their responsibilities and burden private citizens with them instead, obviously those citizens should receive the money the police were receiving.

Meanwhile, I see a lot of police sitting around in cars, at speed traps, etc. Are we sure they're doing as much as they can with the resources they have? Are we sure they're directing resources to where we want them to (in terms of both geographical areas and types of crimes)? I think it's fair for them to be able to present a request for more staffing budget, along with reports on their progress using existing resources, on current deployment of resources, on progress towards having public disciplinary hearings and publicly closing out IA complaints, etc.

Siccing police on landscapers using leaf blowers is like trying to get rid of a hornet nest with a napalm bomb. Fining the property owner is far more appropriate.

> Siccing police on landscapers using leaf blowers

Rephrased it in a straightforward, non-melodramatic way: "asking *police* to *police* people who break the law"

What a difference an honest phrasing makes: that's not so outrageous, is it? If we didn't want police to police illegal stuff, we wouldn't have made it their job. If we didn't want the illegal stuff to be illegal, and thus policed, we wouldn't have made it illegal.

Asking the police to do the job they're paid to do is more appropriate than siccing governments on homeowners and siccing homeowners on landscapers without paying any of them.

Even if the police make an earnest attempt to do their jobs well (which is a pipe dream) coming to the scene of a lawn worker using a gas blower will be very low on their priority queue and is unlikely to happen most of the time.

If the homeowners don't like being fined and don't want to do the lawn work themselves, they can specifically hire lawn companies that use electric tools. You still haven't given me any reason why my proposal isn't a good one. The homeowners are the ones paying for these gas tools to be used, so they should be the ones fined for it.

The answer to why people wouldn't accept your proposal is simple: that is part of the job that we pay the police to do, and they aren't paying us to do that part of their job.

You keep falling back to the excuse 'well, the police won't do their job'. If that's the case, that's the root cause of the lack of enforcement, and we need to address it. Who knows what other crimes they won't feel like investigating tomorrow? Domestic violence? Murder? Obviously we can't leave such discretion in their hands, rather than the hands of the people.

The excuses about police workload always inspire skepticism given their petulant tantrums and refusals to do their job in retaliation for being criticized for their wrongdoing.

Honestly, though, I'm just not convinced they're using the available person hours and budget in the most optimal way to achieve what the people want. If the police feel like they truly do need more people to do their job, however: like I said, they can submit themselves to civilian review to determine if they're meeting enough civilian goals to justify increased budget.

> "asking police to police people who break the law"

That would be one way to get many laws changed in a hurry. As well as slashing the funding for police. I expect most people don't realize how often they break the law.

Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. Point is, some places voted for them to do it for 2-stroke leafblowers, so if you think they shouldn't have, convince them to change their mind and hold a new vote.

Until then, we still expect police to do their job, which, again, is what we tell them to do, not what they feel like doing.

DC banned gas blowers. There is one dude left in the neighborhood but everyone else has converted in the neighborhood. It's fantastic.

Especially working from home, it just felt like there were only brief intermissions of relative quiet. It's wild how you can hear that 2 stroke whine from blocks and blocks away.

Now, it's just nice out. (Also a lot less air pollution to boot!) Your city can do it to! We also recently banned right turn on red, another recent submission; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38147864

In Poland, the town where I live, the problem is even funnier. They use these blowers to push the leaves from the pavements and streets onto the lawns every day at 8 a.m. and nobody collects the leaves. When the guy finishes his work, the wind blows the leaves back onto the pavements and streets. When we reported this to the council, no one saw a problem and the cleaner was happy because he had work every day. The leaves are only collected once before winter, when there are no leaves on the trees.

“40% of homeowners with lawns pay for landscaping services”?!?

Wow. I had no idea the number was that large. That seems so … lazy.

EDIT: I should say that I'm biased and think green thick pristine lawns are a blight. (Irony noted.)

Yeah, they cite that, but their rephrasing is a little dubious.

If you follow the link, it is 40% of homeowners have paid for landscaping services in the past year.

So I mow my own lawn, not much work with a reel mower, small lot, the highest setting, maybe twice a month. However, this spring I hired somebody to trim a hedge that I’ve done myself in the past but requires a tall ladder, which I had borrowed from someone who moved. If you have someone come out and look at a damaged or diseased tree, that would also do it I think (unless arborists are separated out)

Higher than that in my neighborhood in Redmond, and it is not even one of the nicer neighborhoods. Myself and a couple others do our own mowing, the rest hire someone. I mean, anyone that can afford to live in Redmond could afford to hire someone, but it would take me longer to write the check than do it myself, because our lots are about 7-8K square feet. IOW, small SFHs on tiny little lots. Half hour of mowing, tops.

My yard guy does more and better quality work in 30 minutes than I could do in an afternoon. I’m happy to pay him to do that while I work on the things I’m good at.

Until my kids are old enough to put to work maintaining the yard, it has been way more convenient to pay someone else.

I’m one of the 40%. It frees up a couple of hours a week, which is all of the hobby time I get. No regrets.

The problem isn't leaf blowers per se. The problem is noisy, polluting, and sometimes exhaust-modified 2-stroke leaf blowers.

Palo Alto banned them. There were a few who switched to electric with a gas generator on wheels, but otherwise it solved the problem of noise pollution.

In urban and suburban areas, it's essential to remove leaves from surfaces used by people and vehicles. There isn't an absolute need to remove them from anywhere else.

What is this article about? If it is getting rid of noisy gas leafblowers im sure we are all on board. If it is about getting rid of beautiful suburbia and replacing it with Magnasanti then I think only a tiny minority want that.

MAGNASANTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU

I'm surprised not to see any mention of bacteria and funghi being blown into the air. Guess we'll have to wait for climate change and valley fever (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37632653) to do their thing.

"California Air Resources Board says a gas-powered backpack leaf blower produces the same amount of harmful emissions in an hour as driving a car for 1.1k miles."

The article mentions two stroke backpack blowers are 75% of the market, with landscape company owned tow behind four-strokes making up the rest.

> some landscapers may charge Montclair customers as much $95 per man-hour for leaf removal, compared to ~$60 per man-hour with gas-powered blowers.

It seems strange to charge more per-hour for raking vs blowing. Per job? Sure, but per-hour seems weird.

They use blowers to move snow around in Canada as well. I was a little unnerving to wake up to what sounded like lawnmowers on my first night in Calgary, Alberta, in the middle of winter.

I wonder if the electric ones are quieter and can still get the job done.

Yes this entire thing is a hullabaloo over a soon to be solved problem.

All ICE devices are more expensive than battery based ones fundamentally, it's just that the economies of scale and battery tech is still a couple notches down. Well, and the battery based devices are "luxury" versions of the "dirty ICE" variants, so they currently command a ridiculous premium.

I keep waiting for plunging battery economics to come to eGo battery packs and they don't. This isn't just someone bitching about prices of a lock-in tool company, lawncare is a MASSIVE carbon and air pollution problem, and switchover costs to non-ICE tools is much less of a lift than a 30,000$ car.

Like ebikes, there should be aggressive incentives for consumers to get electric tools for lawn care, and aggressive pressure on companies to drop battery pack prices.

And like the torque advantage of electric motors in cars for racing off the line, the EV torque advantage typically provides a superior tool.

eh, have you actually used equipment like this? Electric mowers/blowers/etc vs gas.

Never runs out of charge, powerful, reliable, etc. It has nothing to do with the price (in fact, gas equipment is more expensive).

"its a nice warm fall day, I think I'll open my windows"

-- you

"its a nice warm fall day, I think I'll go blow some leaves"

-- your neighborhood

They just banned gas leaf blowers in my town. The electric ones are much quieter.

electric leaf blowers are the solution. much quieter, good enough power. i had one for two years when we lived in a suburban house. it was amazing. i miss it. will probably get another one.

Loud mufflers are a scourge and everyone hates them but we can't get rid of them because companies are making money off of them and they pay the politicians

Mufflers? So there's actually some more nuance to this. Quiet mufflers on ICEs come with some efficiency cost, partly due to weight (for vehicles) and partly due to flow restriction of exhaust, particularly at higher flows, closer to the engines maximum output. Depending on the application, quieter mufflers are not always "better".

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