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A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)
- criddell 4y agoGasoline powered leaf blowers. I believe electric blowers are still permitted.
- joshdata 4y agoRight. And I think subsidies are being offered to switch. (I saw an ad outside yesterday promoting this.)
- koheripbal 4y agoThe issue with the electric ones is that those lawn care companies have crews that run leaf blowers all day long from one house to another. This is no longer possible as they take hours to recharge after each use. It works if each home owner buys a leaf blower of his own, but that's way less efficient from a manufacturing/maintenance perspective. We're just increasing inefficiencies.
- Workaccount2 4y agoMaybe they need to have another truck follow them so they can bag and dispose of lawn clippings.
- rektide 4y agoThese folks can have multiple batteries. That's the real answer, imo. Greenwork's Pro backpack's runtime is 37 minutes at full power on their 60V 8Ah battery (~1/2kWh). Yeah, it's a $300 battery. But with a 4 year warranty, and much longer expected life-time, buying 3-6 for each blower you've got is scary upfront but a drop in the bucket over time. There's some other sub-optimal options, but hopefully we don't see this energy-wasting noise-making cheapening out. They can charge them when they drive in most modern trucks (AC inverters are practically standard for work trucks). Worse, they start carrying around generators or idling their trucks; back to far more expensive (over time), polluting, and noisy. But both ought be better than a small screeching 2-stroke in terms of quality of life for the hundreds of people in the nearby area. We're doing great. This is a huge improvement for quality of life for a huge huge number of people. For far more energy efficient & less costly over time systems, at modest investment cost. Particularly if you are a landscaper, having 6 sets of batteries that last 5+ years (and many many more if you're only cycling batteries once a day) seems like an incredibly minor investment cost.
- count 4y agoThat green works pro battery doesn't take hours to charge either. It's about 30-40 minutes from empty to full again.
- afiori 4y agoThe real solution is not to leaf blow your lawn.
- acuozzo 4y agoI mostly use my electric leaf blower for my driveway, walkway, porch, and deck. I can accomplish in a minute or two what would normally take 20+ minutes with a push broom.
- prepend 4y agoThe lawn crew that I use works 6-10 per day so that’s 9-15 batteries to buy, carry around and charge. And that’s just for one person. There’s normally two people with leaf blowers. Hopefully there’s some industrial version as carrying 20 batteries and charging them five days a week is really expensive.
- banana_giraffe 4y agoMy local lawn crew actually runs a cord to an outlet outside my house to charge their batteries for the next house. They were clear they do this when I hired them, but I'm super happy with it since I no longer need to worry about the noise for calls and the like. Granted, it probably only makes sense for a smaller crew like the one I found, but I thought it was a nice solution.
- rektide 4y ago9 batteries by the numbers I presented runs to 5.5 hours. 15 batteries at 37 minutes a piece is 9.25 hours. I can see that being a possibility for someplace like a college campus where one crew is literally just roving around an limited area for the day to maybe get in 5.5 hours of straight actual use, maybe, if the team is super well pipelined in what they are doing. But it seems like a fanciful/rare/contrived example. How many days of this a year does the crew work? For most lawn-care folks, I tend to think they have a lot of different sites to cover, and there's some transportation, and a variety of tasks other than leafblowing. I have a hard time imagining someone actually clocking 6 hours of actual full-throttle use of a leafblower on any day, much less day after day. Even in exotic uses (unseen in the city in question/my own city, DC), I think adaption is less of a challenge than one might think.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bluefirebrand 4y ago> The issue with the electric ones is that those lawn care companies have crews that run leaf blowers all day long from one house to another. This is no longer possible Why does this matter though? Does this army of leaf blowers that run all day actually contribute anything useful? I get some people like a tidy yard or tidy lawn or whatever. Who cares though? It shouldn't be treated as some inalienable right to have a tidy driveway so leaf blowers must be allowed. > We're just increasing inefficiencies. Yes but it doesn't matter because the job of blowing leaves doesn't matter. It's just control freaks trying to tightly control nature and franky, who cares. They can pay more for the privilege of having someone use a rake or broom to clean up leaves instead.
- donatj 4y agoOutlaw as the author calls them “groomed lawns”. They’re a waste of time, energy and resources that could all be going towards something productive.
- starkd 4y agoImagine the hubris it takes to think you have the right to choose what people can and "should" spend their time on. I'm guessing you have yet to grasp the concept of individual freedom.
- donatj 4y agoQuite the contrary my dude. What I’m against here is the mandate that you keep yards looking “nice” to “not lower property values”.
- computerliker69 4y agoIn your original comment, you seem to advocate for banning groomed lawns, which is different than lifting a mandate in grooming lawns. Perhaps the mandate for groomed lawns could be removed without banning them? I wonder how effective that would be, knowing how ingrained in many cultures a "well-kept" yard is.
- donatj 4y agoTrue. My words were uncareful and flippant response to outlawing one thing with the proposal to outlaw another. My end goal and what were said are close but not directly in line. I don’t really care if a few crazies manicure their lawn, but it shouldn’t be a forced standard. Everyone doing it is terrible for the environment.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoAny communities where you have a critical mass of people with spare fucks to give about their neighbors' power equipment is already rich enough that most people are going to have landscaping far in excess of the bare minimum because they can afford it and they like it or feel obligated by social norms to do it, basically the same bunch of reasons you find 2-child households owning 4Runners and people who barely cook owning a bunch of fancy cookware. Lifting a ban won't do squat because it only affects a tiny minority. The only reason the laws and HOA rules even exist in the first place is because most people in the effected jurisdictions already kept a lawn and so nobody cared to raise any opposition when the jackbooted types wanted to force the few nonconformists to conform.
- _Wintermute 4y agoLiving in Europe, most people just leave fallen leaves alone. I've never seen someone use a leaf blower except for dust etc. Is it a uniquely American thing to obsess over tidying up leaves?
- darkwater 4y agoI live in Europe and I have at least 3 neighbors that vacuum/blow leaves in rotation, with gas fueled leaf blowers, and I hate the fucking noise. I have a small electric one as well that I use once every 2 months at most.
- sparselogic 4y agoSaw plenty of leaf blower usage in Frankfurt, FWIW. So maybe some areas/cultures are just more fastidious about leaves than others?
- nkrisc 4y agoPart of it is because of lawns, if you have a lot of trees the leaves can simply smother your lawn. But even in cities there’s reasons to clean them up. They clog drains, they lump together in the gutter creating blockages that cause large puddles when it rains, they stain the pavement, they decompose on the sidewalk and people track it everywhere in buildings, and more. Maybe you don’t see these as problems that need solving, but people aren’t tidying up leaves just for the fun of it, they have reasons. We’re not simply obsessed with cleaning up leaves.
- chrisseaton 4y ago> Part of it is because of lawns, if you have a lot of trees the leaves can simply smother your lawn. Do you think we don't have trees and lawns in Europe?
- tragictrash 4y agoDo you think they think you don't have trees and lawns in Europe? Why are you acting like this is hard to understand?
- oliveroak 4y ago
- starkd 4y ago
- kingkawn 4y agoIt’s all a problem at this point.
- not_a_sw_dork 4y ago
- elicash 4y agoYou should read the article -- it's really interesting!
- clutchski 4y agoDid you read the article? The article was primarily about noise pollution.
- QuadmasterXLII 4y agoPosting a political cliche that tangentially relates to the article title and has nothing to do with the article content is more of a reddit thing.
- Tyndale 4y agoYou know, those reddit things..
- Markoff 4y agoWouldn't be more efficient to just ban ICE cars? I'm sure they create way more pollution than leaf blowers.
- bjornorn 4y agoHere's a quote from the article: > In 2017, the California Air Resources Board issued a warning that may seem incredible but has not been seriously challenged: By 2020, gas-powered leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and similar equipment in the state could produce more ozone pollution than all the millions of cars in California combined. Two-stroke engines are that dirty. Cars have become that clean.
- Balero 4y agoNo they do not create more pollution, at least on a per-unit basis. As it states in the article 2-stroke motors create a ton of air pollution. It is also much easier to ban 2-stroke motors, which have cheap electrical alternatives than ICE cars in a car dependent US city.
- bradfa 4y agoAs I mentioned in another comment in this, 2-strokes don't need to produce horrible amounts of emissions, you just need to mix the proper amount of oil in with the gas for the given engine load. This can be done (and is done!) today with injected 2-stroke motorcycles. The emissions go down dramatically and you can get as much or even more power than a traditional pre-mix 2-stroke.
- jamal-kumar 4y agoI hate these things and weed whackers with a passion. I don't want to hear power tools first thing in the morning, whoever wakes up thinking "I'm going to start up some LOUD shit at 8am" better be playing bob marley records or something.
- protonbob 4y agoThis has been a benefit of buying electric power tools and mowers for me. Nobody can hear them if they're not pretty close.
- jamal-kumar 4y agoI opened the door recently just to have a tiny rock fly from a weed whacker across the way come RIGHT into my eye, it hurt for over a day. Just hearing those rocks hit against my window is stressful enough but that was enough for me to fantasize about locking people up for using these things if I owned my own small country.
- feet 4y agoHow about banning grass lawns instead? They're incredibly wasteful. We could be using land to grow food or do other useful things
- protonbob 4y agoI think a good benefit of lawns is that it prevents too many bugs from growing in the lawn. However, if you live somewhere where you have to water a lawn I would agree with this.
- feet 4y agoWhy are bugs a bad thing? From a human perspective I can understand the dislike of things like mosquitoes, but we seem to enjoy decimating ecosystems purely for our own benefit.
- GRBLDeveloped 4y agoThat's interesting about the 2 stroke engine being the issue for pollution. "In 2014 a study published in Nature Communications found that VOC emissions (a variety of carbon gases that can produce smog and harm human beings) were on average 124 times higher from an idling two-stroke scooter than from a truck or a car" Though this quote does make me wonder, what about when each vehicle are in transit?
- bradfa 4y agoThere is now fuel injected 2-stroke engines which will pass the current Euro4 emissions rules for dirt bikes and motorcycles. There's no reason that a small 2-stroke can't have lower emissions today. It's clearly more expensive to make a fuel and oil injected 2-stroke engine than a simple pre-mix 2-stroke, but it's possible and then you get all the benefits (and even more!) of a traditional 2-stroke in terms of power output, you just have a little computer and some injectors instead of a carburetor.
- luma 4y agoOne of the major benefits of a two stroke engine is the simplicity of the design, which lowers cost, reduces size, and increases reliability. Your proposal is a net loss on all these factors. A far better solution is to replace these sorts of things with battery powered electric solutions.
- bradfa 4y ago2-strokes output more power. This isn't my proposal, this is a thing which exists in the world today, produced by various different engine manufacturers for sale to the public today in motorcycles. Miniaturizing it to work on a hand-held lawn care device is just an engineering task.
- snovv_crash 4y agoIt needs a high pressure rail with fuel pump, electronic injection and ignition control. This adds considerably to the cost, which when you take it into the engineering optimization problem, starts pointing to electric plus batteries for these small sizes. You need about 100cc before it makes sense to start looking for fuel engines, or some application that requires really high energy density for long endurance at light weight (eg. surveillance drones).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- showerst 4y agoI live in DC, a few bits of info about why it makes sense here, and may not make sense in your home: 1. They didn't ban leaf blowers, the banned _gas_ leaf blowers. Electric ones are quieter, inexpensive, and work just as well nowadays. My building has an electric Milwaukee that was 200 bucks and lasts all afternoon on a battery or two. 2. This isn't about people wanting to manicure their lawns out in the burbs at 7am on Saturdays and using a gallon of gas per decade. DC is relatively dense with mid-rises and office buildings, it's the grounds crews and landscapers running them 9-5. 3. Coincidentally now with the age of work from home it's an extra boon not to have your neighboring building's super blasting a leaf blower below your window at 11am during your zoom meeting. With any policy you have to look at the downsides -- people and companies have to buy new leaf blowers and batteries, what's the cost in money and environment? But I think they're fairly minor compared to the upsides in pollution and peace and quiet. The main people who get hurt by this policy are small business landscapers, who are eligible for a subsidy to help replace equipment, which I think is a nice compromise.
- mhb 4y ago> people and companies have to buy new leaf blowers and batteries It seems hopelessly anachronistic and impractical, but why can't rakes be an alternative? It would take more time, but the landscapers would be paid more if they're working hourly.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoa) Rakes b) Double digit minimum wage c) Being able to afford a landscaper. Pick two. I own a rake and use it my damn self, which shouldn't matter but probably does.
- kilotaras 4y ago> landscapers would be paid more Landscapers with leafblowers would outcompete landscapers with rakes.
- tifik 4y agoI think the point was that since they banned gas leaf blowers, they might as well have banned all leaf blowers, leaving nothing but hand tools. Of course someone could invent a hand-cranked blower or something... would be interesting to see exactly what loopholes in the legal wording people would find.
- LgWoodenBadger 4y agoIME, a big part of the irritation is caused by the irregular throttle inputs by the operator. The continuous revving->idle->revving is what bothers me the most. If they kept the throttle constant, like a lawnmower, it would be easier to ignore and less distracting/obnoxious.
- beeforpork 4y agoI hate these dog poop distribution cannons. Disgusting and loud. Just use a rake if you want to be tidy.
- ipnon 4y agoLeaf blowers are the last frontier of regulatory internal combustion engine efficiency. Your car is required by law to travel 100 miles on a drop of 10% ethanol fuel with minimal smog release. Your leaf blower can be powered by funeral home soot for all the EPA cares, and you can run it full blast right outside little Timmy’s window all afternoon. This was a win for both noise and air pollution, which we should be clear kills many more people per year than the costs borne by landscapers to upgrade to electric machines.
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoActually the EPA does have regulations for leaf blowers. They aren't totally turning a blind eye.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Woberto 4y agoThis is excellent and I greatly appreciate the write-up as it encourages and helps others see how they might accomplish the same in their own cities or districts. I'm literally listening to gas leaf blowers outside my apartment right now while I work from home; it's something I've never quite gotten used to, and this article is great motivation for trying to bring about change and improvement
- susiecambria 4y agoGo forth and advocate! As someone who was a paid policy and budget advocate in DC on local DC issues for 20+ years, this is a sweet example of activism at its best. Citizens (in the sense of the citizenry, not in the sense of legal status) working together to make a change. Coupled, of course, with an outstanding and effective legislator who is masterful at working with the public and working her colleagues. The several nonprofits with which I worked had some major wins over the years but it's community-driven efforts that make my heart sing. So please, take action for or against something!
- Tyndale 4y ago
- ThunderSizzle 4y agoThe way everything else is paid for. The national debt will pay for it.
- culi 4y agoHi, an "illegal" here. Just wanted to tell you go fuck yourself
- arein3 4y agoRude
- matt-attack 4y agoOne thing that really pissed me off living in Los Angeles was the fact that leaf-blowers were technically "banned" but there was zero enforcement. Leaf-blowers are literally everywhere and at all times of the day. The noise pollution is just ridiculous. Especially offensive when I would watch a gardener using them in the street blowing cuttings into a, progressively, smaller and smaller pile, all so he could scoop them up to take them away. Basically the leaf-blower was just being used a a lazy man's broom.
- prepend 4y ago> lazy man's broom. Or time efficient man. Lazy is a really good motivator. This is like saying automating a work form is bad because automation is just a “lazy man’s paper form.”
- clairity 4y agoleaf blowers are low on my list of things to fix in LA, but i don't like them on balance mainly because of your last point. it's almost never faster or better to use a leaf blower over the combination of rake and broom. it's just flawed mental bias that a machine is 'less work' than manual tools. in my neighborhood, laborers use blowers to blow shit randomly into the air and the gutters (and into my windows) rather than being picked up and put in the trash/compost bin. blowers create pollution via that random action as well as via their exhaust, and that pollution combined with their ineffectiveness make them a net negative to me, not the noise. while i don't love noise either, any outdoor labor will produce some noise, so noise is unavoidable, which is why it's limited to working hours by statute (after 8am). car/motorcycle exhaust noise, on the other hand, is entirely artificial, unnecessary, aggressive, and offensive, and should not only be banned, but punished heavily.
- RickJWagner 4y agoMy problem with this decision is the wasted leaf-blower bodies when the batteries die and the user can't find a reasonably-priced replacement. The rest of the leaf-blower goes to the landfill and a new one is purchased, starting the cycle over again. Meanwhile, a 2-stroke leaf blower will last for decades. (Well, probably a decade until the little squeeze bulb on the carburetor goes out. Replace that for $2 and you're good to go for another decade.) If the leaf-blowers used a standardized battery so the implement isn't discarded with every other battery change I'd see it differently.
- batmanturkey 4y agoI woke up to one in front of my window this morning. Keep up the good work. Those vile contraptions should be banned globally. They don’t clean anything, spit out fumes and ultra loud noise like the tiny engines they contain, and spray pollution and dust everywhere, making aerosol out of settled dust.
- batmanturkey 4y agoThe basic premise of a leaf blower is incorrect. They don’t “clean” and they aerosolize what was settled and spray pollution everywhere as a result.
- rektide 4y agoThe #1 thing I think I wish to add, that I missed the first time around, is that I think a lack of standard batteries & chargers is a huge limitation that- if we dont see progress in ~3 years- needs legal action. The 1/3rd to 3kWh battery sizes in particular needs some standard sizes, standard charge/discharge practices. Everyone being beholden to their brand will keep prices artificially high & reduce practical adoptability. Scooters, mowers, backpack leaf blowers should all have some common-norm pack-sizes available for use.