7 ms·

I have a real beef with gas powered blowers, and it's noise pollution. A neighbor on my block doesn't have a lot going on, but he has his leaf blower, and it's

I have a real beef with gas powered blowers, and it's noise pollution. A neighbor on my block doesn't have a lot going on, but he has his leaf blower, and it's his primary activity. Evenings that would be otherwise sublimely autumnal are instead mind shattering, hours long, symphonies from hell. Other people on the street have tried reasoning with him, even offering to buy him a battery-powered alternative, unsuccessfully.

ajhurliman 3y ago
The battery powered blowers are pretty loud too, just FYI. I have to wear hearing protection with it every time.
- foobarian 3y ago
  I bought a battery powered blower (80v pack Kobalt brand product) thinking it would be quieter, but it's a different kind of loud. What surprised me is that it has a tiny propeller (about 4 inches diameter) that spins at ungodly RPMs. I would love to see a product with a large diameter squirrel cage blower with an electric motor.
  - lotsoweiners 3y ago
    Yeah I have a Ryobi 40v and it is super loud too. Doesn’t help that I have to run it in high power mode mostly to get the leaves to blow out of the rocks properly.
- proggy 3y ago
  As I recall, the average electric leaf blower emits around 70 dB, while the average gas blower puts out 80-90 dB (although some advertise themselves as quieter, I am dubious but have not verified by running these tests myself). The electric leaf blowers are noticeably quieter, and what noise they do make is much more concentrated on a smaller set of frequencies than a gas blower, which is kind of all over the spectrum when it gets going.
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    Full spectrum is less mentally distracting than narrow spectrum.
    - RoyGBivCap 3y ago
      Not when it's bouncing up and down the spectrum seemingly randomly. The "random" nature of the operator repeatedly gunning the engine but not just holding there is way, way, way worse than if it was just the same spectrum, but continuous.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    The average electric blower is a lot less powerful than the average gas one. When you find an electric with comparable power the noise is similar. You cannot move a lot of air through a small pipe without making a lot of noise, this is physics (there are things you can do to make it better, but they have limited ability). Old electric just couldn't get the power out of mains or a nicad battery. Newer li ion batteries can deliver more power and thus electric blowers are useful. Don't get me wrong, gas engines are noisy as well, and so gas blower are louder, the difference isn't that much though.
  - rektide 3y ago
    I do think there's much much more open design space for electric leaf blowers to explore, where-as gas blowers just have terrible conflicts. You can make a quieter efficient 4-stroke gas blower, but it's going to cost a ton, have way more mechanical complexity, and probably weight more than you want. Where-as I think we're really only starting to learn about how to optimize electric leaf blowers for sound. And I think electric blowers in general do a bit better. The top rated Ego LB5804 is supposedly 65dB, which is significantly quieter. Ryobi Whisper has a professional-grade backpack model that still is 59dB. It looks like it might need a little more oomph, but random shout out to Moxie Marlinspike (creator of Signal messenger)'s ultra-quiet leafblower. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33324195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33324195 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104
- mhb 3y ago
  Lawn and Garden Equipment Sound: A Comparison of Gas and Battery Electric Equipment https://sciforschenonline.org/journals/environmental-toxicological-studies/article-data/JETS-2-118/JETS-2-118.pdf https://sciforschenonline.org/journals/environmental-toxicol...
  - ajhurliman 3y ago
    Thanks for the link, that’s good info. My model is listed; it seems accurate from experience: way too loud for comfort while operating it, would be disruptive to a bbq 50 feet away. The gas ones are certainly louder, though.
  - Casteil 3y ago
    Nice to see proof that, while still quite loud to the user, multiple tested battery blowers fall off to reasonable levels by the time you get to 100-200ft which is a pretty typical distance for neighbors in a lot of areas. Key takeaway regarding gas blowers: "Noticeably louder to 4 times louder"
- hgsgm 3y ago
  No one else is as close as the operator is.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  Why are ya'll even blowing stuff around in the first place?
  - jemmyw 3y ago
    And to where? I never saw a leaf blower growing up in the UK and we had plenty of trees. I guess the leaves just got mown up if you had a garden or stayed on the ground until they broke down.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
What's funny is that when I was young someone told me "the laws are so strict in germany they even dictate when you can and cannot operate a leaf blower!" Recently I was thinking about that and actually as you say that sounds really nice!
- rektide 3y ago
  DC banned gas blowers effective January 2022 & it's been wonderful. It's so much more peaceful. I do think the alternate version also was compelling, where cities make loud & quiet hours. Part of the really painful hard thing about noise pollution is that it ends up becoming perpetual. There's 10 minutes of peace, then another gas blower starts up someplace else. Trying to make hours for noise sounds great, but it's also notable that in the US at least, a huge amount of the grounds-keeping is a limited number of roving contractors. It's their full time job to be doing effectively making noise. If we were super advanced we could schedule some kind of roving zone system, changing hour by hour or day by day... but simply getting rid of the really bad noise offenders has proven to be cheap & enormously effective. Shout out to Seth's Blog, leaf blower parable. May we all collectively find the courage to do obvious easy winning change. https://seths.blog/2022/11/the-leaf-blower-parable/ https://seths.blog/2022/11/the-leaf-blower-parable/
404mm 3y ago
I hear you on that. Leaf blowers and mowers. On any given day, there is somebody mowing lawn (or having it mowed) around my house. It’s never ending.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  The worst part is that it feels like someone starts up their mower and it reminds other people to mow. So they sit and finish their coffee, then get changed and go mow, arriving just in time to start their mower right as the previous person is finishing. Repeat all day during summer weekends. My one neighbor is retired and obsessed with his lawn. He mows 3x a week easily.
daveslash 3y ago
I live in an apartment complex in SoCal, and frequently work from home. It seems that there is a leaf-blower outside my window for nearly an hour almost every. single. day.. When they're not cleaning actual leaves, they're using gas-powered hedge trimmers, then cleaning that up with gas-powered leaf blowers. I get blowing occasionally infrequently in the actual fall, but every lose blade of grass does not need to be cleared from the shrubbery every. single. day. They even leaf-blow the whole parking area outside my window. /rant - Low quality comment here, but wanted to add my voice to the chorus against gas powered blowers.
taylodl 3y ago
And air pollution. The small engines used in gas-powered lawn tools such as leaf blowers and trimmers are 2-stroke engines, which are extremely dirty engines from an air pollution standpoint. There are still some 2-stroke lawnmowers around, but they appear to all have moved to significantly cleaner 4-stroke engines which is possible because they're larger engines. I'm looking at going all battery power for my yard tools, save for the mower.

ajhurliman 3y ago

The battery powered blowers are pretty loud too, just FYI. I have to wear hearing protection with it every time.

foobarian 3y ago
I bought a battery powered blower (80v pack Kobalt brand product) thinking it would be quieter, but it's a different kind of loud. What surprised me is that it has a tiny propeller (about 4 inches diameter) that spins at ungodly RPMs. I would love to see a product with a large diameter squirrel cage blower with an electric motor.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  Yeah I have a Ryobi 40v and it is super loud too. Doesn’t help that I have to run it in high power mode mostly to get the leaves to blow out of the rocks properly.
proggy 3y ago
As I recall, the average electric leaf blower emits around 70 dB, while the average gas blower puts out 80-90 dB (although some advertise themselves as quieter, I am dubious but have not verified by running these tests myself). The electric leaf blowers are noticeably quieter, and what noise they do make is much more concentrated on a smaller set of frequencies than a gas blower, which is kind of all over the spectrum when it gets going.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  Full spectrum is less mentally distracting than narrow spectrum.
  - RoyGBivCap 3y ago
    Not when it's bouncing up and down the spectrum seemingly randomly. The "random" nature of the operator repeatedly gunning the engine but not just holding there is way, way, way worse than if it was just the same spectrum, but continuous.
- bluGill 3y ago
  The average electric blower is a lot less powerful than the average gas one. When you find an electric with comparable power the noise is similar. You cannot move a lot of air through a small pipe without making a lot of noise, this is physics (there are things you can do to make it better, but they have limited ability). Old electric just couldn't get the power out of mains or a nicad battery. Newer li ion batteries can deliver more power and thus electric blowers are useful. Don't get me wrong, gas engines are noisy as well, and so gas blower are louder, the difference isn't that much though.
- rektide 3y ago
  I do think there's much much more open design space for electric leaf blowers to explore, where-as gas blowers just have terrible conflicts. You can make a quieter efficient 4-stroke gas blower, but it's going to cost a ton, have way more mechanical complexity, and probably weight more than you want. Where-as I think we're really only starting to learn about how to optimize electric leaf blowers for sound. And I think electric blowers in general do a bit better. The top rated Ego LB5804 is supposedly 65dB, which is significantly quieter. Ryobi Whisper has a professional-grade backpack model that still is 59dB. It looks like it might need a little more oomph, but random shout out to Moxie Marlinspike (creator of Signal messenger)'s ultra-quiet leafblower. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33324195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33324195 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104
mhb 3y ago
Lawn and Garden Equipment Sound: A Comparison of Gas and Battery Electric Equipment https://sciforschenonline.org/journals/environmental-toxicological-studies/article-data/JETS-2-118/JETS-2-118.pdf https://sciforschenonline.org/journals/environmental-toxicol...
- ajhurliman 3y ago
  Thanks for the link, that’s good info. My model is listed; it seems accurate from experience: way too loud for comfort while operating it, would be disruptive to a bbq 50 feet away. The gas ones are certainly louder, though.
- Casteil 3y ago
  Nice to see proof that, while still quite loud to the user, multiple tested battery blowers fall off to reasonable levels by the time you get to 100-200ft which is a pretty typical distance for neighbors in a lot of areas. Key takeaway regarding gas blowers: "Noticeably louder to 4 times louder"
hgsgm 3y ago
No one else is as close as the operator is.
jackmott42 3y ago
Why are ya'll even blowing stuff around in the first place?
- jemmyw 3y ago
  And to where? I never saw a leaf blower growing up in the UK and we had plenty of trees. I guess the leaves just got mown up if you had a garden or stayed on the ground until they broke down.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

What's funny is that when I was young someone told me "the laws are so strict in germany they even dictate when you can and cannot operate a leaf blower!" Recently I was thinking about that and actually as you say that sounds really nice!

rektide 3y ago
DC banned gas blowers effective January 2022 & it's been wonderful. It's so much more peaceful. I do think the alternate version also was compelling, where cities make loud & quiet hours. Part of the really painful hard thing about noise pollution is that it ends up becoming perpetual. There's 10 minutes of peace, then another gas blower starts up someplace else. Trying to make hours for noise sounds great, but it's also notable that in the US at least, a huge amount of the grounds-keeping is a limited number of roving contractors. It's their full time job to be doing effectively making noise. If we were super advanced we could schedule some kind of roving zone system, changing hour by hour or day by day... but simply getting rid of the really bad noise offenders has proven to be cheap & enormously effective. Shout out to Seth's Blog, leaf blower parable. May we all collectively find the courage to do obvious easy winning change. https://seths.blog/2022/11/the-leaf-blower-parable/ https://seths.blog/2022/11/the-leaf-blower-parable/

404mm 3y ago

I hear you on that. Leaf blowers and mowers. On any given day, there is somebody mowing lawn (or having it mowed) around my house. It’s never ending.

bluefirebrand 3y ago
The worst part is that it feels like someone starts up their mower and it reminds other people to mow. So they sit and finish their coffee, then get changed and go mow, arriving just in time to start their mower right as the previous person is finishing. Repeat all day during summer weekends. My one neighbor is retired and obsessed with his lawn. He mows 3x a week easily.

daveslash 3y ago

I live in an apartment complex in SoCal, and frequently work from home. It seems that there is a leaf-blower outside my window for nearly an hour almost every. single. day.. When they're not cleaning actual leaves, they're using gas-powered hedge trimmers, then cleaning that up with gas-powered leaf blowers. I get blowing occasionally infrequently in the actual fall, but every lose blade of grass does not need to be cleared from the shrubbery every. single. day. They even leaf-blow the whole parking area outside my window. /rant - Low quality comment here, but wanted to add my voice to the chorus against gas powered blowers.

taylodl 3y ago

And air pollution. The small engines used in gas-powered lawn tools such as leaf blowers and trimmers are 2-stroke engines, which are extremely dirty engines from an air pollution standpoint. There are still some 2-stroke lawnmowers around, but they appear to all have moved to significantly cleaner 4-stroke engines which is possible because they're larger engines. I'm looking at going all battery power for my yard tools, save for the mower.