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Comment by TOMDM | Hacker News Reader

If these truly sound that much better I'd personally buy every gardener in a 3 block radius one of these myself just to get rid of the bloody gas ones.

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Many affluent areas have already banned gas leaf blowers and it’s incredible how quiet the battery powered replacements are. I was in Palm Springs recently and had nearly walked past a landscaper using one before if occurred to me just how quiet it was - didn’t even interrupt our conversation. I believe it was a Stihl backpack version (maybe https://www.stihlusa.com/products/blowers-and-shredder-vacs/...) but yeah, highly recommend!

It isn't so much the noise that bothers me, what I've never understood about leaf blowers is what are they meant to accomplish? When I watch people use them they either blow the leaves into the street or the neighbors yard. What do they think that does?

Now on the other hand, I do own a very noisy leaf vacuum. But when I've collected a bag full I can just deposit the leaves in my collection container. They are taken off to be composted

generally for landscapers it saves them the trouble of raking, which can put a lot of strain on your back — they'll blow the leaves onto a tarp and then wrap them up for easy removal

in my experience, homeowners mostly dick around with them

I guess that would work, but I have never seen anyone do that.

Only for lack of trying. Most of them do do just that.

My son and I raise money for our Boy Scout troop by doing yard cleanup in the fall. Using leaf blowers and tarps is how the crew worked through 20 acres of cleanup over two weekends.

This thread is like people who’ve never cleaned a yard before saying “I’ve never understood the purpose of rakes and brooms - don’t they just move things around? Surely you need to pick things up to really clean?!”

To be fair, they are very good at removing debris from a front-porch. I fully support banning them, and they are heavily overused in situations when a rake works just as well, but they are superior in some cases.

I guess that makes sense, but I always personally just use the hose for that. The way I am billed, I don't really pay much for the water I use.

They're great for landscapers. I just use a push broom. It takes more time, sure, but efficiency isn't the goal.

Keep in mind; in some towns a truck comes around and collects the leaves from the street with a vacuum (although I guess your town doesn't?).

I have seen (predominately contractors) blow leaves into a tarp to take away on a truck though.

There is a pile of leaves so deep in the street in front of my house that it has an entire ecosystem living in it. At this point they have composted some, insects have begun to live in them and grass is growing from the pile.

In many places that would be the homeowner’s responsibility to clean up. Even if not, it’s often in the homeowner’s best interest to not have a huge pile of rotting leaves clogging the gutter.

there is no gutter, just the curb. The couple times I looked into this, to do maintenance on the street I'd need to have some form of insurance.

Well I guess everywhere is different. That's truly bizarre to me though.

Our town used to do that, then they decided it was too costly and stopped. I am waiting for them to corelate the increased need to clean leaf-clogged storm drains with this decision.

I would think that encouraging everyone to put their leaves in the gutter might also cause clogged storm drains.

A groupof Bay Area condo and apartment owners discuss that they don’t understand leaf blowers. Good thread.

I use mine (electric) to blow leaves from the street and sidewalk back onto my grass so that I can mulch them with the lawn mower. I also use it to blow debris back onto the grass-free perennials area around my tree to get free mulch. I'm weird, but it's really handy for that. The entire reason I own a lawn mower and a leaf blower is because I couldn't find a lawn care crew that would mulch everything in place - everyone around here wants to take your leaves away and then bring in artificially dyed mulch (and charge you for it).

They also work for blowing snow off the sidewalk if the snow is still fluffy.

Wouldn't letting the leaves to decompose be better for the soil instead of constantly removing them? I mean, the tree supposedly uses the nutrients from the soil to grow those leaves, and if you keep removing them away, at some point the tree will simply starve and die, right?

Better for the soil, but it kills off the grass.

Lawn services mostly use leaf blowers to clear driveways and sidewalks of grass clippings.

The leaf blower is used after using the weed eater (String trimmer) to blow all the little bits back into the grass.

Yes, any tool can be used in foolish ways.

I use mine to blow debris from the driveway onto the lawn so it doesn’t get tracked into the garage, or to clean the leaves, sticks, and pollen from our many trees that accumulate on the back deck. The times I’ve had landscapers come they used tarps to collect the bulk of the debris they gathered with the blowers and hauled it away.

I own a Stihl leaf blower and primarily use it to clear debris from the gravel paths in my garden. Because raking gravel also collects the stones. Debris includes leaves, leaf husks, beech nuts, catkins, and a range of other things that drop off trees. I use a big rake to clear the lawn (I actually enjoy the physicality of this task).

All of this stuff is composted over the year in a large pile in a secluded corner of my garden, along with grass cuttings, scarified moss, etc. The volume of stuff usually exceeds the amount I can get rid of using the local council's garden waste collection.

Now that you say that, it makes much more sense. It isn't like I go into my neighbors backyards and monitor them using their leafblower. So all I really see is the yard maintenance guy in the front yard. I'll commonly just see them blowing them into the street. Not all of them do this however.

I use it to remove pollen, pine needles, gravel, debris from clippings, etc from my deck and drive-way. Sometimes I use it to clear out the gutters on my roof. I usually blow it all down into one corner then use a dust-pan and broom to collect it all and throw it in the debris bin. I hate it when people just blow the debris somewhere else; they're making it somebody else's problem and that's wrong.

There are problems with battery-powered tools (at least, leaf blowers) still, especially at the commercial level. For one, they just don’t have the runtime. I briefly had an 80V blower. On its highest power – which is the only way it could come close to a gas-powered model, it was barely able to get all of the leaves out of the yard (we had a tree with leaves that had needle-like protrusions, which made them quite hard to dislodge), and lasted about 10 minutes per charge.

If you don’t have sticky leaves, or are clearing primarily hard surfaces like a deck, then absolutely, battery-powered is the way to go. But if you’re a commercial operator who is driving tools more or less non-stop all day, it’s going to be a hard sell to have to have a minimum of N*2 batteries (at $150-200 each), plus the downtime of swaps, plus having to run a generator on your truck constantly to charge the off-duty batteries.

EDIT: Sibling comment below linked to a Stihl model that appears to offer an hour of runtime at full tilt. It’s also $2400 for the unit / battery / charger, tbf, but it at least has the performance.

A whole hour of runtime would be mean 1C discharge. 80V (which is likely 72V, but in the US it's ok to label the max voltage rather than the actual one) is made of 20 Li-Ion batteries in series. Lets say 2 in parallel, so total 40 batteries. I'd go with 3Ah per battery (could be more for 21700) and around 2Kgs weight. For 1h work that's ~430W of power which is rather under powered.

That fast charger (say 30min to charge) for this thing would be quite a thing to witness with over a kW of power draw.

About Stihl, it uses a 36V battery, so 10 Li-Ion in series. Which is half as powerful. I can't see a capacity higher than 36V/6Ah from Stihl. Now, it possibly uses multiple batteries, however, the issue with charging still remains the same.

Running a generator would be louder than the device, so imo that's a moot point. I'd consider using a massive power bank and/or lots of pre-charged batteries to carry the day but not an inverter.Taking enough batteries to swap and charging them in off-hours seems the only sensible approach (albeit not cheap)

For what it is worth the chargers for tool batteries are almost never fast chargers. So it takes 4 hours to charge for 15 minutes of runtime.

That is battery (li-ion) powered, so it's already quieter to begin with.

In San Jose, whenever someone proposes this (or at least getting the gas powered ones to stop dumping carcinogens), they’re non-ironically branded as racist.

People argue the battery powered ones aren’t good for professional use (short runtimes) but that problem was solved years ago. They also argue they’re too expensive, but that argument falls apart if you include engine maintenance and gasoline in the cost.

Would love to know what neighbourhood you live in so that I dont have to get it for my gardener

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