7 ms·

Won't help much until these are mandated by law, or.. we just wait for a couple generations to die out. There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It'

Won't help much until these are mandated by law, or.. we just wait for a couple generations to die out. There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. Over time, the next couple generations may hopefully adopt more battery powered outdoor stuff (mowers, blowers, etc) because of environmental concerns, or... goodness - maybe actual sound concerns. But it's going to be another couple decades, I think. Yes, I live in a rural area in the US. Things ain't changing here any time soon.

HPsquared 2y ago
Generally being a nuisance can be illegal, depending on the circumstances. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance If there's a quiet option and someone deliberately uses a noisy one, could that be considered a nuisance?
- lowercased 2y ago
  Not in rural areas. People shoot guns at 1am and... "god given freedoms" and "piss off back to the city y'all" and all that are trotted out anytime a complaint is made. Again, it may change in another couple generations, but it'll be slow.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - twoquestions 2y ago
    I'm genuinely sorry you have assholes for neighbors. If it's any consolation, not every rural area is like that, at least around here people just want to be left alone. Personally I'd buy one of these in an instant, I like being able to enjoy the peace and quiet!
  - delichon 2y ago
    I lived in cities for four decades and rural areas for two. Hearing late night gunshots was routine in cities. I think it's happened once in hearing from my rural home. My neighbor is a state biologist who put down a sick coyote. Or course it can happen a lot if you get the wrong neighbors. But that's more of a risk in the city where you have so many more neighbors.
    - alamortsubite 2y ago
      Wow, which cities? I've lived between cities and the sticks in the U.S. almost my entire life and while I've never once heard gunfire in a city, in the country it's a daily routine (occasionally, if rarely, even fully automatic).
      - spike021 2y ago
        I lived in downtown San Jose for ten years and someone was shot to death right behind my apartment. San Jose isn't all that unsafe either, relatively speaking.
      - batch12 2y ago
        You had some pretty well-off rural neighbors if they shot guns daily. Ammunition isn't cheap. I've lived in a rural area for a long time, and, yes maybe once a week or month a neighbor will practice their marksmanship, but thankfully it isn't a daily occurrence.
        alamortsubite 2y ago
        The neighbors in rural places I've lived haven't been terribly well-off, as far as I could tell, but they clearly have had different priorities.
        delichon 2y ago
        It gets massively cheaper when those priorities include reloading your own ammo. My most well off neighbor is the most prolific shooter I know. He shoots targets almost daily with his .22, and I don't hear it at all from 1/3 mile away. He doesn't use a suppressor, but some kind of quieter round. I guess that means slower.
  - batch12 2y ago
    Shooting guns here at 1am would get you a phone call to see if you're okay.
- adolph 2y ago
  Making something officially transgressive often makes the thing more attractive. Is one supposed to avoid purposefully releasing diesel particulates by rapidly increasing engine speed? Yes and people sometimes still do it for whatever reason.
NullPrefix 2y ago
[flagged]
goda90 2y ago
I was out weeding my garden yesterday evening and there was some pleasant bird song around me. And the droning of a gas mower a block away. And someone zooming back and forth on their crotch rocket on the main street in the other direction. At least the mower sound probably wasn't intentional...
- iwontberude 2y ago
  You should hear my electric makita, it’s loud as hell and sounds like a banshee from Halo.
  - lttlrck 2y ago
    Still quieter than gas. More like a very loud hair dryer.
Aurornis 2y ago
> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. That’s an awfully uncharitable projection. The lawn business people I know would love to adopt full electric fleets of gear. They aren’t sending their teams out with gas engines because it’s a “fantasy escape world”. They do it because gas engines are currently the only reasonable way to keep the crews running all day without spending thousands of dollars on batteries over and over again. Current battery tech is hit or miss. The packs should be protected from over-discharge and last for hundreds of cycles, but in practice they got a lot of early failures. They also need extra packs to rotate while others are charging. At $100-200 per battery, they might be spending $1000 on batteries to operate a machine for a season, which would have bought them two gas powered machines and gas to operate them. There’s also the issue of charging throughout the day. Getting a reliable charging setup that works on a truck inverter and getting crews to perfectly manage batteries throughout the day, including spares, is significantly harder than just filling up a gas tank. Projecting all of this on to “fantasy escape world” is silly.
- n2e 2y ago
  Assuming “a section of folks who enjoy loud engines” was meant to apply to your section of lawn business people who don’t is also uncharitable.
- lowercased 2y ago
  You are talking about people working in a business. I'm talking about neighbors living in rural/suburban areas. EDIT: We have a lawn care guy. He does our half acre in under 30 minutes. Our neighbors who do it themselves - same half acre size - typically take 90-120 minutes. They'll just sit on a riding mower and let it idle for minutes, while looking up stuff on their phones. Or let it idle and go inside for a drink, while leaving it running. They enjoy riding around with a loud engine underneath, like a really slow motorcycle. This is not speculation, it's from talking to them. The business people have an incentive to get in and out quickly - they can do more lawns that way. The people who like loud engine noise have no such incentive. They have an incentive to have a lazy afternoon of lawn mowing.
prmoustache 2y ago
> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. That is the only reason leaf blowers exists.
- eru 2y ago
  No. Some commercial folks also use leaf blowers, and those people just use them, because they get paid to clear some leaves.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
kristofferR 2y ago
I don't understand this, isn't most of the noise coming from the air and not the engine in the leaf blowers?
- dmd 2y ago
  No. Nearly all of it is the engine.
  - xxs 2y ago
    I don't believe that part - the ones shown in the picture/videos are brushless motors, quite efficient (90%) and really silent on their right own. The noise comes from the need to move air (and the noise is just air waves), along with certain vibrations. A brushless motor is super silent if you exclude the fan(s) cooling it.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Electric doesn't have engine. It has a motor. Gas has an engine.
    - dmd 2y ago
      https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/whats-the-difference-between-a-motor-and-an-engine/ https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/whats-the... by the way...
    - dmd 2y ago
      Which is why I said engine, not motor.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        The topic is an electric leaf blower though. While a gas leaf blower is louder the difference isn't as most of the noise is the blower.
- alamortsubite 2y ago
  It's both. This design focuses on quieting the airflow. From TFA: The team started working last September. They hoped to improve an electric or battery-powered leaf blower, which is already much quieter than the notorious gas-powered ones, where the sound can carry over an average suburban block.
iwontberude 2y ago
Leaf blowers are already mostly electric, and they are annoying as hell. People will take time to replace them, but I assure you they aren’t loved at all.
- brequinn 2y ago
  Curious - why dont people love them? I assume just not as powerful as gas?
  - iwontberude 2y ago
    They chew through batteries so fast and they have a really high pitched sound ~16kHz that gives me tinnitus when I use it without ear protection. I suppose the same would happen with a gas one, but I was hoping to avoid wearing ear protection.
spike021 2y ago
I don't think this is nearly the same thing as people being obnoxious with their motorcycle or car exhausts. What I'd really say is maybe we should rethink if blowers are even useful or necessary at all over the old broom and scoop. Many times I see landscapers use them to simply blow dust and leaves everywhere, including into busy streets, rather than using them to try and collect all detritus into a single pile for collection. If that's more commonly the case, then why use them at all?
kortilla 2y ago
This is a shitty take. Everyone I know who refuses to use battery powered landscaping equipment absolutely hates the noise and dealing with the gas engines. The problem is that the battery stuff doesn’t compete on price/power if you’re doing basically anything more than a lawn measured in square feet.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Battery stuff is just fine on the power aspect. However price weight kill you. Gas is light for the amount of runtime you get, while a battery is very heavy. A contractor will need more than $1000 worth of batteries to get through a day per person or $4 worth of gasoline.
haunter 2y ago
We have a 1 acre garden. Electric gardening tools are just toys for this size. I'd love to use electric but nothing comes close to gas.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  A higher end robomower can handle an acre
- reustle 2y ago
  You just aren't looking at the full set of options available then. The Stihl electric line is used by contractors and cities all around the world, and are incredibly reliable / strong.
ModernMech 2y ago
These were my neighbors growing up. Chain saws, quads, backhoes, bulldozers, fire engines, school busses -- anything with wheels and big motors they would be running all day long. Every day during the summer I'd wake up at 8am to 3-4 quads being driven around outside my window by the neighbor kids, and that would go on all day long until sunset. That actually wasn't bad though compared to moving to San Francisco, where they decided to carve a narrow chunk out of the side of a solid-rock hill right below my window. Jackhammering all day from 7am until 5pm. I bought a sound meter and complained several times that they had exceeded the sound limits but no one cared. It really affected my wife, we had just moved to SF and she had no where to go while I was at work. She tried libraries and parks and such but there were too many homeless there and they harassed her. She has trouble sleeping due to mental health issues and she usually sleeps from 4am to 12pm, but she couldn't do this due to the jackhammering outside of our window that started at the crack of dawn. This meant she didn't sleep at all for months, and she ended up having a psychotic break, for which she was hospitalized. She was sent to a hospital in Santa Clara, and I drove there every day to see her. Anyway, all of this is to say that noise issues are serious to some people, and there's really no limit to how much noise someone can make. You can complain but nothing happens.
- philbin 2y ago
  Earplugs really do work! Pay the money to get good ones.
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    Respectfully, no, earplugs do not work when they are jackhammering a mountain outside of your window. I shouldn't have to dull my senses just to live in society because some people have no consideration of making others uncomfortable in their own homes.
techdmn 2y ago
As a car-person, gear head / petrol head, etc., this has always been somewhat baffling to me. I've always been in it for the speed, the exciting sensation of your body moving through space. Lots of things end up being kind of cool by association: fat tires, wings, loud exhaust, a lopey idle. But to me they were only interesting because of what they implied, something that can go fast. Some people add those things without being able to go fast, which I've always found distasteful, a thing frequently derided as "all show and no go". It took me a while to accept that some people really are in it for the noise. I can't really knock it, I'm getting a sensory experience that I enjoy but can't quite explain, and I suppose they are too. But keep it away from my house. ;-) Once I was riding my motorcycle to work, and another guy rode passed me on his motorcycle. His exhaust was so loud it gave me a headache almost instantly. I can't imagine how much it must hurt to actually ride the thing.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

HPsquared 2y ago

Generally being a nuisance can be illegal, depending on the circumstances. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance If there's a quiet option and someone deliberately uses a noisy one, could that be considered a nuisance?

lowercased 2y ago
Not in rural areas. People shoot guns at 1am and... "god given freedoms" and "piss off back to the city y'all" and all that are trotted out anytime a complaint is made. Again, it may change in another couple generations, but it'll be slow.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- twoquestions 2y ago
  I'm genuinely sorry you have assholes for neighbors. If it's any consolation, not every rural area is like that, at least around here people just want to be left alone. Personally I'd buy one of these in an instant, I like being able to enjoy the peace and quiet!
- delichon 2y ago
  I lived in cities for four decades and rural areas for two. Hearing late night gunshots was routine in cities. I think it's happened once in hearing from my rural home. My neighbor is a state biologist who put down a sick coyote. Or course it can happen a lot if you get the wrong neighbors. But that's more of a risk in the city where you have so many more neighbors.
  - alamortsubite 2y ago
    Wow, which cities? I've lived between cities and the sticks in the U.S. almost my entire life and while I've never once heard gunfire in a city, in the country it's a daily routine (occasionally, if rarely, even fully automatic).
    - spike021 2y ago
      I lived in downtown San Jose for ten years and someone was shot to death right behind my apartment. San Jose isn't all that unsafe either, relatively speaking.
    - batch12 2y ago
      You had some pretty well-off rural neighbors if they shot guns daily. Ammunition isn't cheap. I've lived in a rural area for a long time, and, yes maybe once a week or month a neighbor will practice their marksmanship, but thankfully it isn't a daily occurrence.
      - alamortsubite 2y ago
        The neighbors in rural places I've lived haven't been terribly well-off, as far as I could tell, but they clearly have had different priorities.
        delichon 2y ago
        It gets massively cheaper when those priorities include reloading your own ammo. My most well off neighbor is the most prolific shooter I know. He shoots targets almost daily with his .22, and I don't hear it at all from 1/3 mile away. He doesn't use a suppressor, but some kind of quieter round. I guess that means slower.
- batch12 2y ago
  Shooting guns here at 1am would get you a phone call to see if you're okay.
adolph 2y ago
Making something officially transgressive often makes the thing more attractive. Is one supposed to avoid purposefully releasing diesel particulates by rapidly increasing engine speed? Yes and people sometimes still do it for whatever reason.

NullPrefix 2y ago

[flagged]

goda90 2y ago

I was out weeding my garden yesterday evening and there was some pleasant bird song around me. And the droning of a gas mower a block away. And someone zooming back and forth on their crotch rocket on the main street in the other direction. At least the mower sound probably wasn't intentional...

iwontberude 2y ago
You should hear my electric makita, it’s loud as hell and sounds like a banshee from Halo.
- lttlrck 2y ago
  Still quieter than gas. More like a very loud hair dryer.

Aurornis 2y ago

> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. That’s an awfully uncharitable projection. The lawn business people I know would love to adopt full electric fleets of gear. They aren’t sending their teams out with gas engines because it’s a “fantasy escape world”. They do it because gas engines are currently the only reasonable way to keep the crews running all day without spending thousands of dollars on batteries over and over again. Current battery tech is hit or miss. The packs should be protected from over-discharge and last for hundreds of cycles, but in practice they got a lot of early failures. They also need extra packs to rotate while others are charging. At $100-200 per battery, they might be spending $1000 on batteries to operate a machine for a season, which would have bought them two gas powered machines and gas to operate them. There’s also the issue of charging throughout the day. Getting a reliable charging setup that works on a truck inverter and getting crews to perfectly manage batteries throughout the day, including spares, is significantly harder than just filling up a gas tank. Projecting all of this on to “fantasy escape world” is silly.

n2e 2y ago
Assuming “a section of folks who enjoy loud engines” was meant to apply to your section of lawn business people who don’t is also uncharitable.
lowercased 2y ago
You are talking about people working in a business. I'm talking about neighbors living in rural/suburban areas. EDIT: We have a lawn care guy. He does our half acre in under 30 minutes. Our neighbors who do it themselves - same half acre size - typically take 90-120 minutes. They'll just sit on a riding mower and let it idle for minutes, while looking up stuff on their phones. Or let it idle and go inside for a drink, while leaving it running. They enjoy riding around with a loud engine underneath, like a really slow motorcycle. This is not speculation, it's from talking to them. The business people have an incentive to get in and out quickly - they can do more lawns that way. The people who like loud engine noise have no such incentive. They have an incentive to have a lazy afternoon of lawn mowing.

prmoustache 2y ago

> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. That is the only reason leaf blowers exists.

eru 2y ago
No. Some commercial folks also use leaf blowers, and those people just use them, because they get paid to clear some leaves.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

kristofferR 2y ago

I don't understand this, isn't most of the noise coming from the air and not the engine in the leaf blowers?

dmd 2y ago
No. Nearly all of it is the engine.
- xxs 2y ago
  I don't believe that part - the ones shown in the picture/videos are brushless motors, quite efficient (90%) and really silent on their right own. The noise comes from the need to move air (and the noise is just air waves), along with certain vibrations. A brushless motor is super silent if you exclude the fan(s) cooling it.
- lupire 2y ago
  Electric doesn't have engine. It has a motor. Gas has an engine.
  - dmd 2y ago
    https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/whats-the-difference-between-a-motor-and-an-engine/ https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/whats-the... by the way...
  - dmd 2y ago
    Which is why I said engine, not motor.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      The topic is an electric leaf blower though. While a gas leaf blower is louder the difference isn't as most of the noise is the blower.
alamortsubite 2y ago
It's both. This design focuses on quieting the airflow. From TFA: The team started working last September. They hoped to improve an electric or battery-powered leaf blower, which is already much quieter than the notorious gas-powered ones, where the sound can carry over an average suburban block.

iwontberude 2y ago

Leaf blowers are already mostly electric, and they are annoying as hell. People will take time to replace them, but I assure you they aren’t loved at all.

brequinn 2y ago
Curious - why dont people love them? I assume just not as powerful as gas?
- iwontberude 2y ago
  They chew through batteries so fast and they have a really high pitched sound ~16kHz that gives me tinnitus when I use it without ear protection. I suppose the same would happen with a gas one, but I was hoping to avoid wearing ear protection.

spike021 2y ago

I don't think this is nearly the same thing as people being obnoxious with their motorcycle or car exhausts. What I'd really say is maybe we should rethink if blowers are even useful or necessary at all over the old broom and scoop. Many times I see landscapers use them to simply blow dust and leaves everywhere, including into busy streets, rather than using them to try and collect all detritus into a single pile for collection. If that's more commonly the case, then why use them at all?

kortilla 2y ago

This is a shitty take. Everyone I know who refuses to use battery powered landscaping equipment absolutely hates the noise and dealing with the gas engines. The problem is that the battery stuff doesn’t compete on price/power if you’re doing basically anything more than a lawn measured in square feet.

bluGill 2y ago
Battery stuff is just fine on the power aspect. However price weight kill you. Gas is light for the amount of runtime you get, while a battery is very heavy. A contractor will need more than $1000 worth of batteries to get through a day per person or $4 worth of gasoline.

haunter 2y ago

We have a 1 acre garden. Electric gardening tools are just toys for this size. I'd love to use electric but nothing comes close to gas.

CalRobert 2y ago
A higher end robomower can handle an acre
reustle 2y ago
You just aren't looking at the full set of options available then. The Stihl electric line is used by contractors and cities all around the world, and are incredibly reliable / strong.

ModernMech 2y ago

These were my neighbors growing up. Chain saws, quads, backhoes, bulldozers, fire engines, school busses -- anything with wheels and big motors they would be running all day long. Every day during the summer I'd wake up at 8am to 3-4 quads being driven around outside my window by the neighbor kids, and that would go on all day long until sunset. That actually wasn't bad though compared to moving to San Francisco, where they decided to carve a narrow chunk out of the side of a solid-rock hill right below my window. Jackhammering all day from 7am until 5pm. I bought a sound meter and complained several times that they had exceeded the sound limits but no one cared. It really affected my wife, we had just moved to SF and she had no where to go while I was at work. She tried libraries and parks and such but there were too many homeless there and they harassed her. She has trouble sleeping due to mental health issues and she usually sleeps from 4am to 12pm, but she couldn't do this due to the jackhammering outside of our window that started at the crack of dawn. This meant she didn't sleep at all for months, and she ended up having a psychotic break, for which she was hospitalized. She was sent to a hospital in Santa Clara, and I drove there every day to see her. Anyway, all of this is to say that noise issues are serious to some people, and there's really no limit to how much noise someone can make. You can complain but nothing happens.

philbin 2y ago
Earplugs really do work! Pay the money to get good ones.
- ModernMech 2y ago
  Respectfully, no, earplugs do not work when they are jackhammering a mountain outside of your window. I shouldn't have to dull my senses just to live in society because some people have no consideration of making others uncomfortable in their own homes.

techdmn 2y ago

As a car-person, gear head / petrol head, etc., this has always been somewhat baffling to me. I've always been in it for the speed, the exciting sensation of your body moving through space. Lots of things end up being kind of cool by association: fat tires, wings, loud exhaust, a lopey idle. But to me they were only interesting because of what they implied, something that can go fast. Some people add those things without being able to go fast, which I've always found distasteful, a thing frequently derided as "all show and no go". It took me a while to accept that some people really are in it for the noise. I can't really knock it, I'm getting a sensory experience that I enjoy but can't quite explain, and I suppose they are too. But keep it away from my house. ;-) Once I was riding my motorcycle to work, and another guy rode passed me on his motorcycle. His exhaust was so loud it gave me a headache almost instantly. I can't imagine how much it must hurt to actually ride the thing.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]