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Sign me up for the blower hater brigade. I can almost forgive these during leaf season. I hate them being used in place of brooms for landscaping. A ton of n
by uptime 8y ago
Sign me up for the blower hater brigade. I can almost forgive these during leaf season. I hate them being used in place of brooms for landscaping.
A ton of noise to move a very small mass of clippings, etc, creating a cloud for 30 minutes to do a less complete job, often just blowing it all into the street without concentrating it and picking it up. Maddening.
- ModernMech 8y ago> I can almost forgive these during leaf season. Sure, almost. But in the middle of summer? Or winter? Come on now. I lived at an apartment complex that started up leaf-blowers year round at 10am every single Tuesday. What's worse, I worked from home. Even now, having left several years ago, the sound of a leaf blower causes my blood pressure to spike. Destroy them all!
- schwap 8y ago> Or winter? They're very effective and quick for snow removal.
- ModernMech 8y agoI should clarify, this was in California. There was neither snow nor leaves to be blown. As far as I can tell, they were just blowing dust around.
- colanderman 8y ago> 10am every single Tuesday Consider your self lucky… my neighbor's service starts the engines every Tuesday at 7:30 AM sharp. (BTW, if anyone has any tips how to best manage cross-town-border noise complaints, I'd love to hear them.)
- Eric_WVGG 8y agoAs a greenie, there are plenty of things that I think are kind of dumb and misguided (say, automobiles), but at least I understand the thinking behind them, and hope that some day better alternatives (public transit, self driving cars, bicycle and scooter sharing) will make them obsolete. But leaf blowers are unique in that they're not only obnoxious and wasteful, but also stupid to begin with. You’re spending money and time and effort and polluting both the environment AND mental environment to avoid raking, just so the wind can undo your efforts?? Leaf blowers make me profoundly misanthropic.
- taeric 8y agoLeaf blowers are demonstrably faster than raking, though. So... I don't get your point. Even more, it isn't like rakes don't have a horrible sound of their own, as soon as you get a single paved section involved.
- jopsen 8y agoWhen I saw Gardners using leaf blowers in SF, Pacific Heights, they mostly just blew the leafs onto the street.. how that's allowed is beyond me.. With a rake or broom you can remove the leafs/dust, a blower mostly just makes it someone else's problem.
- space_fountain 8y agoI think it depends on the lot, but while you certainly can blow leaves into someone else's yard or the street it's definitely possible to control things enough to blow it into a pile or into the woods
- Broken_Hippo 8y agoSome cities collect leaves and all you need to do is rake them into the street. The city comes around and sucks them up. I know I've lived in at least one if not two that did this - one of those cities also offered free compost to people. I seem to recall them using a street sweeper vehicle to do this with. And honestly, if you already use the street sweepers, might as well do what you can with them especially if you were simply going to have people use special lawn refuse bags for their leaves anyway.
- quickthrower2 8y agoThat's when you swap for a broom. It makes a beautiful sound.
- taeric 8y agoWe have different definitions of beauty. :) That said, I definitely have a push broom I use to finish off the sidewalk. Have to first rake, though, as i am moving a lot of leaves over it.
- grawprog 8y agoAs someone who has worked landscaping on commercial sites and large apartment buildings and been yelled at or treated like shit for using a leaf blower to do it. You go try raking a truck full of leaves without one, making sure you get every corner and crevice underneath bushes and back corners so you don't get yelled at by customers or the boss. Not that you don't have to rake it all after anyway into large tarps or garbage cans that you then drag and carry by hand. Now do this in pouring rain, or snow, or when the leaves are frozen. Trust me it's not fun. Now personally myself. I think it's stupid to remove leaves from a site rather than let them decay naturally and add their nutrients back into the soil. But when you're being paid to do something and you need to make money to keep living in a house. That leaf blower is really handy.
- cix_pkez 8y agoI agree it's better to let them decay in lots of cases. Also, I try to give the benefit of the doubt to the people outside doing this every week, but I'm extremely annoyed. I don't really have a choice; I rent and everywhere one can rent, one has to be a part of this madness. I wouldn't by choice pay someone to do this.
- pvaldes 8y agoSome trees (walnut) have poisonous leaves that can't be left to decay in place and must be treated and removed, but this is the best option in the majority of cases, yes.
- slowmovintarget 8y agoExcept when the leaves form a coating over grass that grows mold, and you are allergic to mold, which will also kill the grass. You don't have to remove every last leaf, just enough to give the grass breathing room. In fact I just spent six hours today doing that... with a rake. We had a window where the snow cover lifted just long enough. It'll rain tomorrow, then freeze and snow again later next week.
- yesenadam 8y ago
- cix_pkez 8y agoEverywhere I've lived with this "service", there's been no respect for potted plants either. They get the full violence of the wind. There was even a group of these guys who came straight up to my door, open except for the screen, and blew right into the house. They arrived early and started blowing in that very spot, which is why I hadn't had time to close the door. Just jerks.
- geraldcombs 8y ago> creating a cloud for 30 minutes I bike to work. During the local dry season (roughly April to November) I need to keep an ear out for leaf blowers on the way to work and adjust my route accordingly. Otherwise riding through one of their dust clouds is like dredging a chicken breast through flour.
- sasaf5 8y agoA few times I had to interrupt my ride and return home for a second shower because of leaf blower dust storms. Luckly they have been banned in my town (together with anything with a 2 stroke engine). And hey, no leaf-apocalypse has happened after the ban.
- brokenmachine 8y agoReally? Where is this paradise you speak of? Maybe there's hope for my area. They really are the most pointless and annoying things.
- etrautmann 8y agoLeaf blowers make working from home surprisingly difficult. I can be attempting to work on a given day in a quiet suburb of Menlo Park and completely unable to concentrate. The sheer pointlessness of it drives me nuts.
- ravenstine 8y ago30 minutes, if you're lucky. In SoCal, one set of gardeners might be done in that time, until another set rolls up another one of your neighbors yards and begins the process all over again. As I mentioned in another comment, this is one of the things that's made it tremendously difficult to work from home.
- cafard 8y agoI don't have one. A few times a year, I wish I did, not for raking the lawn, which can be done quickly enough with a rake, but for clearing leaves out of garden beds--the rake does bring mulch and can bring plants along--and from a short gravel walk.