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

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.