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Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

I never understood leaf blowers. They just move the leaves but the wind will blow them back. I had a Toro brand corded electric blower that could be reversed to suck and chop the leaves into a bag, that could then be emptied into the compost bin. Much more effective solution.

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It's not very effective as you need to move the nozzle very close to the leaf to suck it in. Meanwhile, a decent hand-held blower moves leaves from 20 feet away. I have such a vacuum and use it after I've piled up the leaves with a blower because, apparently, there is no other compact leaf shredding options.

Even when the leaves are already in a pile it's quite slow and takes about an hour to collect a garden bag of mulched leaves. The thing claims 1:16 ratio but in practice it's closer to 1:6. So it's probably 5-10 minutes to suck in a bag of leaves already piled in one place.

The point is to pile up the leaves so they can be manually collected, put in bags etc. The "suck" solution makes sense if you don't have a lot of leaves, but people with large yards or lot of trees need large bins or even trucks to collect the leaves after blowing.

Why don't you just leave the leaves where they are??

It can ruin the grass.

The main problem is the obsession with grass.

I hate to break it to you but if you don't grow grass then weeds and mud will take over. The weeds bring insects and mosquitos and the mud is well...mud.

Letting leaves kill my grass was a terrible mistake, I'll never make it again.

Why are you monocropping grass?? Plant a meadow. Make hill mounds with grass clippings. Plant a hedgerow.

Seems like we decided arbitrarily on the most destructive form of yard that has secondary effects of causing scientifically proven damage to humans around us with sonic blasts from our leaf blowers.

Oh sure - you can’t just let it go fallow. You have to strategically decide what to plant that provides adequate ground cover, which is NOT simple.

Now, rake, blow, shake, snow, wait. That’s what grass needs and it is easy and looks good.

Or you go with artificial turf or something similar and that has its own issues.

Back when I had a lawn, I'd mow the leaves into the ground. But maybe that only worked well in that locale? (Now I live in the high desert, so no lawn.)

I use a me-powered rake for that purpose.

You can also have me-powered tax calculation and fill out all those forms manually.

For a lot of leaves, it's not a trivial amount of time. If that's your hobby, that's all good, but otherwise time is valuable and finite.

You are supposed to blown them into a stack and then pick them up.

But ye, never understood the need for one. I am using a rake for 2000m2 of garden with 5 leaf trees. None of my 6 neigbours got a leaf blower.

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