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Students invent quieter leaf blower
- jkonline 2y agoFirst, it's an attachment that could fit on nearly all blowers. Second, it dampens the noise while retaining all the force. If this works out, it will be amazing! Kudos to the student teams!
- ranger_danger 2y agoLooking forward to being put on a list for purchasing a leaf blower silencer.
- euroderf 2y agoNot to mention the 3D print files.
- stubish 2y agoPatented and licensed, so not coming to a neighborhood near you unless mandated by local government. Because while people want their neighbors to use it, in enough cases they won't pay the extra and rationalize it somehow.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- kd5bjo 2y agoMinor nitpick about the reporting: > The team reduced the overall leaf blower noise by about two decibels, making the machine sound 37% quieter. While a 2 dB reduction in noise does represent a 37% reduction in acoustic power, our perception of sound is logarithmic so this is extremely unlikely to "sound 37% quieter"-- Assuming the reduction is from 50 dB to 48 dB, it will sound about 4% quieter. Much more significant is the 12 dB reduction in the "shrill and annoying" frequency range. While the 94% reduction there is probably also overstated for the same reason, the initial power level in that range will be only a portion of the overall noise output-- I wouldn't be surprised if there's a 50-75% perceived reduction of noise in this range.
- cuttysnark 2y agoIn the video, we see the students briefly rotating the model in the CAD software—with translucency on—it looks like the one main stream is divided into many spiral chambers which then exit distributed along the rim of the attachment's opposite side. With that in mind, I wonder how much, if at all, the reduction would be if the entire nozzle were designed this way, instead of just the end bit.
- hinkley 2y agoThey probably should look at this for server cooling as well. At 2u or smaller those things are leaf blower loud, and there’s a lot of depth in those cases that could be sacrificed for decibels.
- soperj 2y ago60db is normal conversation/background music level. I don't know why you'd assume a leaf blower would start at 50db?
- gumby 2y ago> Much more significant is the 12 dB reduction in the "shrill and annoying" frequency range. Those higher frequencies travel farther than the lower frequencies, so cutting them has a bigger perceived effect (and this is all about perceived effect, I believe, not the health effects of the operator). Just agreeing with you that acoustics is complicated and non unidimensional.
- alistairSH 2y agoIs leaf blowing a worldwide nuisance or an American thing? I hate it. And it serves no ecological purpose.
- brokenmachine 2y agoWorldwide. Sucks to be an earthling trapped here with leaf blower jerks.
- jeromenerf 2y agoFrance. I know my city workers use them to clean the streets in autumn. Wet leaves are slipery. Then people mostly use rakes AFAIK, or the lawn mower. Though I know some tools, such as branch shredders are regulated in some residential areas, but I don't frequent those.
- glxxyz 2y agoI blow the leaves off my gravel driveway that winds through woodland. I got 2 Ryobi electric leaf blowers free with different cordless tools and so I dual wield them as I walk down the driveway a few times every fall. I don't care about leaves on the lawn.
- toast0 2y ago> And it serves no ecological purpose. At least from my experience, it's not done for ecological purposes. It's primarialy done to clear pathways for safety, maintenance, and aesthetics. Some people do blow a whole lawn, but that never struck me as useful. Cleaning up the path is nice though, and depending on your paths, makes plenty of noise already.
- alistairSH 2y agoSafety on paths makes sense, but in many neighborhoods, that’s doable with a rake in a few minutes vs an hour to do the lawn with a blower. My neighborhood has a landscape crew do the leaves in the common areas 3x season. If we just had them do the paths and parking lot, it would be half the time (or less) with blowers.
- theGnuMe 2y agoHonestly I expect to see a Dyson Leaf Blower.
- alucardo 2y agoI didn't know of electric-battery-powered leaf blowers! Here in France i always suffer gas engine blowers which are so annoyingly loud and smelly.
- brokenmachine 2y agoI'm in Australia and someone near me has an electric one. Although quieter than the gas ones, it's still far from silent and the noise is still annoying but higher pitch. Like a high-pitched vacuum cleaner noise. Most people have the much louder gas ones though, they're the worst, and anecdotally the people operating the gas ones seem to rev them up and down more which makes it even more annoying. Every time I hear one, I have nothing but negative thoughts about the person using them, and disgust for the society that allows them to ruin the environment for such minimal benefit. A rake works almost silently... but then you can't irritate everyone within a kilometer radius.
- NovemberWhiskey 2y agoThe problem with electric leaf blowers is that they're no good for people who need to blow leaves all day; and most of the leaf blowing is (in my experience) contracted out rather than done by home owners. I have an electric blower that I use for getting leaves off my decks (you can't rake a deck and it's actually a remarkable pain in the ass to brush leaves off a deck) but if I got a contractor in to do my garden (which I don't, they just get mowed over) then they would certainly have a gas blower.
- xutopia 2y agoDewalt has battery packs that are quickly interchangeable and pods with rows of batteries that can be recharged inside a car or truck while on the go. I'm hoping this becomes adopted more and more as the tech is already here.
- itsoktocry 2y agoProprietary batteries with a format that changes subtly from model to model are not the answer.
- KingOfCoders 2y agoAfter reading all comments, not rushing to the comments, I have to say, I have a quiet leaf blower to, it is, as mentioned in this thread somewhere else, a rake and I would appreciate if more people would use one.
- jasode 2y ago>a rake and I would appreciate if more people would use one. Most of the leaf blower noise in neighborhoods is cleaning up tiny grass clippings off of driveways and sidewalks instead of handling the Fall season's dead leaves, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak5VoB-ceeU&t=0m06s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak5VoB-ceeU&t=0m06s Rakes don't help with grass cuttings. People could use brooms to sweep up the grass but homeowners and lawn crews don't do it that way because -- like the rake -- it requires more work and takes a lot longer than using noisy blowers.
- fullstop 2y agoAnother option is a hose, but that may be considered more wasteful. I have a leaf blower, and I use it for about 5 minutes a week in the summer to clear grass clippings from walkways after I mow. I don't like being "that guy", so I pretty much run around the yard with it in order to finish as quickly as possible. I know that the electric leaf blowers are quieter, but my neighbor's makes a high pitched squeal which bothers me more. I think that she has some sort of condition, because she's literally using the thing for about three hours a day. I don't know how many battery packs she has, but she runs it until it dies, swaps the pack, and gets back to it. It's not a huge yard, maybe 1/3 of an acre, but she is compelled to get every blade of grass off of her driveway.
- collinvandyck76 2y agoThere's a guy in my neighborhood (who uses a backpack blower) and this is his main hobby. I really don't understand the appeal of doing what is a pretty monotonous task for such a long amount of time, given that in mere hours much of the pristine front yard moves back into "chaos". I understand the satisfaction from being meticulous about things like this, but i don't understand the extreme end of it.
- giogadi 2y agoCongrats to these students for producing a clever solution to a real practical problem! I hope that the students will own the patent, and not the university. Many schools have a way of taking ownership of absolutely anything their students come up with. That said, I prefer just raking up leaves manually. It makes no noise, it's quiet, and it's good exercise.
- ansmithz42 2y agoI agree completely! My favorite weed killer is my own two hands and a weeder. Having said that, I live in Arizona and the dominant landscape design here is trees and bushes planted with rocks for the ground cover. A leaf rake is real good at picking up both the leaves and the rocks. I wish there was a leaf rake that didn't pick up the rocks. I have grudgingly bought an electric leaf blower because of the rocks :-(
- rootusrootus 2y ago> That said, I prefer just raking up leaves manually. It makes no noise, it's quiet, and it's good exercise. I think a lot of folks in these discussions think only of lawns. That's a pretty small portion of where leaf blowers get used, in my experience. The lawn mower takes care of most of the leaves on the lawn, the blower gets used around bushes and other places a rake won't work at all.
- rgrmrts 2y agoA few years back Moxie (of Signal) put up a video[0] of a quiet leaf blower which was pretty sweet. His design appears to be quieter than this one. Either way this is great, as a person highly sensitive of sound I support all technologies that reduce excessive noise. [0]: https://x.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104 https://x.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104
- Workaccount2 2y agoI can't help but notice in that video that it's really not moving the leaves too much, and that's on the most ideal surface you could have.
- rootusrootus 2y agoThat's a good observation. Making a quieter leaf blower by greatly reducing its output is pretty easy. But the professional landscaping crews getting paid by the hour won't choose a tool that makes their job take 5x as long.
- Terr_ 2y agoRandom thought: Would it be beneficial if residentially-annoying equipment was required to fall into certain standard frequency/harmonic pprofiles? Would that make it easier and cheaper to design absorptive or anti-noise measures? In other words, a world where you could buy super-cheap earbuds guaranteed to nullify all leaf blowers.
- hinkley 2y agoFigure out what ranges of sound are attenuated well by foliage, siding, wall insulation, gypsum board. Though it’s probably windows most of the sound comes through so what frequencies are lowered by double pane windows.
- hinkley 2y agoHmm. They claimed they didn’t reduce the thrust. Maybe the vortex is screwing the blowing-ness or they are measuring it wrong.
- whicks 2y agoDupe from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40377201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40377201 (400+ comments)
- chrsig 2y agoThis is perhaps the most practically useful thing to come out of academia since the technology that allowed for the leaf blower. They're the worst. A noise pollution posterchild.
- elzbardico 2y agoLeaf blowers are probably one of the most annoying inventions ever.
- not_good_coder 2y agoCan someone explain why it's going to take 2 years to bring a piece of plastic to the market?
- genman 2y agoDirect link to noise comparison in the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISgHpUDeLBw&t=64s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISgHpUDeLBw&t=64s
- amelius 2y agoCan we apply this to vacuum cleaners too?
- jononomo 2y agoI watched the demo video, and, IMHO, even the muffled version of the leaf blower is way too loud.
- akjetma 2y agoThis is great. I live in a dense suburb and the weekend is just a cacophony of deafening noise from leafblowers, table saws, pressure washers, lawn mowers, etc. My neighbor had a team of people grinding and cutting stone slabs for their patio from 9-5 last weekend. Wish people would chill out. As a side note, leafblowers aren't just disruptive to the sound environment: https://twitter.com/touchmoonflower/status/1724232111144775777 https://twitter.com/touchmoonflower/status/17242321111447757...
- goda90 2y agoI haven't put any leaves out on my curb the last two years, but I still use my electric leaf blower. Early in the season, I use my mower to mulch some of the first leaves to fall into the lawn(which consists of grass, clover, violets, dandelions, etc). But eventually there are just too many leaves to mulch, and they would smother everything, so I blow them into big piles. Then we take the dogs out to play in the piles. Then we scoop them up with tarps and spread them all over my veggie garden beds. In fact I went and "stole" some leaves from the piles my neighbors put on the curb to get even more coverage of my gardens. Now in spring, the leaves have smothered a lot of weeds, and the ones that do grow are easier to pull because they have to push through the leaves and the dirt stays moist longer. I see a lot of insect life living in the leaves as I go about weeding. I hope the ecosystem is strong to balance out pests on my veggies.
- seper8 2y agoOne thing i never understood: Why a blower instead of a vacuum type of device...?
- rootusrootus 2y agoSpeed, mostly. There are blowers that also act as vacuums. It works okay, but still pretty slow, if you blow it all into a pile first. You could do better with a wide device that worked like a lawn mower, but that would only be useful for a fraction of the areas you are trying to clean up.
- cwmma 2y agothey exist, I have a one that works both ways, it can blow leaves and it can suck in and mulch the leaves into a bag. Some reasons you don't see it as much include 1. mine jams extremely easily when sticks or wet leaves get into it 2. their ability to actually move leaves is significantly less when in suck mode vs blow mode, this is not specific to moving leaves, try sucking sugar throw a straw vs blowing it, blowing moves stuff MUCH more.
- cwmma 2y agoIt's mentioned in the article but easy to miss, this is an improvement on the already much much quieter electric leaf blowers that are readily available. The ones you are thinking of are two stroke gas powered ones which are loud as fuck and terrible for the environment, anyone using one of those could have gotten a quieter electric one but chose not to, which means they definitely aren't going to use this improved electric one.
- jdc0589 2y agoYou are right, and I agree with the last bit for the record. But, keep in mind that "just going electric" isn't a good option universally. It's MUCH more expensive to put together an electric setup and the number of batteries necessary to do any significant amount of work than it is to buy even a mid range backpack 2-stroke blower. Especially if you do what a lot of people do and look for used equipment to save a ton of $. If you have a small yard or are only ever doing stuff like blowing off a deck/patio/sidewalk/driveway: battery 100%. if you need to do any significant amount of leaf management in a larger area: good luck. I have an m18 electric, and gas Echo backpack. If im cleaning off a sidewalk/patio, cleaning gutters, etc.. im 100% using the electric. Otherwise....not so much. I don't even clean up grass clippings, mulch and cut frequently enough that they aren't an issue.
- bhandziuk 2y agoI use a corded electric blower (it's also the motor for a shop vac). It works very well for the driveway, blowing out the garage and, for the very rare times I've done it, leaves on grass.
- jdc0589 2y agocorded ones can be great. I moved to a battery powered one for cleaning gutters because eventually the cord was going to trip me on the roof and cause a fall. obviously less convenient than gas or battery, but they can be good for stuff reasonably close to your house.
- aftbit 2y ago
- MarlonPro 2y agoIf I had the financial resources, I would buy every yard service company that serves my immediate neighborhood, specifically those that love to do their work at 7 AM on Saturdays.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoOnly one minor thing wrong; it's still a leaf blower.
- covercash 2y agoHow does it compare to the ultra quiet electric leaf blower that was on HN 7 months ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932971
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoAbout 10 years ago, I remember seeing someone using an electric leaf blower connected by extension cord to a Honda generator strapped down to a furniture dolly to circumvent the gas-powered leaf blower ban. It was still pretty damn loud and annoying, but less than the oft muffler-less, 2-stroke modified leaf blowers most gardening crews use unconcerned with emissions or noise pollution.
- brvsft 2y agoSo shitty neighbors can be slightly less loud. :)
- insane_dreamer 2y agoI really hate leaf blowers. They are the main generator of noise in our neighborhood and they don’t conserve that much energy in most cases than a rake (and in some cases are less efficient). I’d be happy if they were banned in residential neighborhoods. Edit: not the mention the pollution from the gas powered ones which most are.