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Help Is On the Way In the War Against Noisy Leaf Blowers
HughPickens.com writes: Perry Stein writes in the Washington Post that the fight against noisy leaf blowers is gaining momentum, in part, because residents are framing it as a public health issue. Two-stroke engine leaf blowers mix fuel with oil and don't undergo a complete combustion, emitting a number of toxins, like carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide, which their operators inevitably inhale. Municipalities throughout the country have moved to ban them. "You find two-stroke engines in poorer countries because they're cheap," says James Fallows citing a 2004 National Institutes of Health study showing that two-stroke engines on two- and three-wheeled vehicles in Delhi, India, account for a significant amount of air pollution. "You don't find them in richer countries because they're so dirty and polluting." In Washington DC leaf blowers can't exceed 70 decibels as measured from 50 feet away. (A normal conversation is typically about 60 decibels.) Haskell Small, a composer and concert pianist who is helping to lead the leaf-blower battle in Wesley Heights, describes the sound as "piercing." "When I try to compose or write a letter, there is no way for me to listen to my inner voice, and the leaf blower blanks out all the harmonic combinations."
But help is on the way. A new generation of leaf blowers is more environmentally friendly as the emergence of battery-powered leaf blowers takes us closer to the Holy Grail of equipment that is both (1) powerful and (2) quiet. Fallows supports the notion of a kind of trade-in program, where loud, old leaf blowers are exchanged for the less offensive kind. Ted Rueter, founder of Noise Free America, facilitated one such scheme. In the heat of his front lawn dispute with his neighbor, he offered a solution. "If you agree to use them, I will buy you two new leaf blowers," Rueter told his neighbor. "The offer was accepted and the noise level in his front yard was restored to a peaceful level," says Lawrence Richards. "When it comes to the balancing act of protecting landscaping jobs while reducing noise and emissions, it helps that someone was willing to pay for progress."
But help is on the way. A new generation of leaf blowers is more environmentally friendly as the emergence of battery-powered leaf blowers takes us closer to the Holy Grail of equipment that is both (1) powerful and (2) quiet. Fallows supports the notion of a kind of trade-in program, where loud, old leaf blowers are exchanged for the less offensive kind. Ted Rueter, founder of Noise Free America, facilitated one such scheme. In the heat of his front lawn dispute with his neighbor, he offered a solution. "If you agree to use them, I will buy you two new leaf blowers," Rueter told his neighbor. "The offer was accepted and the noise level in his front yard was restored to a peaceful level," says Lawrence Richards. "When it comes to the balancing act of protecting landscaping jobs while reducing noise and emissions, it helps that someone was willing to pay for progress."
First World Problems.
What a fucking inane submission. Why the fuck is this on Slashdot?!
Leave the goddamn leaves on the ground. Or if you really must collect them, just use a fucking rake.
Holy shit, this submission makes me pine for the days of Roland Piquepaille. At least his submissions had some relevance, no matter how small.
I already have an environmentally friendly, much much quieter leaf mover called a rake. And best of all it is cheap to own and maintain.
"You find two-stroke engines in poorer countries because they're cheap,"
No, you find two-stroke engines in applications where you need high power but extremely low weight. Their cheapness is simply a byproduct of their simplicity (hence, weight savings). There are plenty of applications where a 4-stroke engine simply wouldn't work because it would weigh too much (leaf blowers, chain saws, etc) or would be too bulky (mopeds, model airplanes, lawnmowers, etc). Sure their efficiency needs some work, or replacement if a viable alternative is created, but at the moment there are several applications where 4-stroke engines or battery power simply wouldn't work.
...the emergence of battery-powered leaf blowers takes us closer to the Holy Grail of equipment that is both (1) powerful and (2) quiet....
and (3) runs for only 10 minutes before the battery drains down.
.
True, the weaker battery-operated leaf blowers can have battery run time that is beyond 10 minutes. However, if you're looking for a battery-operated leaf blower that as powerful as one with a two-cycle engine, then you're looking at leaf blowers with a useful battery life of around 10 to 15 minutes.
Note: when the manufacturers rate the battery run time of leaf blowers in their advertisements and on their websites, they usually rate the battery life with the leaf blower running on its lowest speed. That's how they can say the battery lasts for an hour or more.
If you're just looking to blow the leaves off your patio or sidewalks, then the battery operated ones are fine. But don't expect to clean any reasonable sized yard of leaves..
It's called a rake you lazy Americans!
This is part of the same general trend as battery technology gets better: we don't need fossil fuels for nearly as many things as we did previously. To some extent this one is a bit of a no-brainer, because leafblowers are not technologies where one has to worry terribly about being stranded if there's no nearby recharge station or if the range isn't far enough (which helped hold back electric cars). It will be interesting to see how far this goes. Some optimists (such a Elon Musk) think that we'll eventually have boats and airplanes which use batteries, thus relegating fossil fuel use to essentially some rockets which require the very high energy density, plastic and other petrochemical derivative production (which will take a lot longer to find alternatives for), and energy in the grid. Note by the way that because large generators like power plants are more efficient than small ones, as long as one has decent batteries and doesn't have terrible power plants on the grid, that's still a net gain.
However, I'm pessimistic about this sort of trend for a few reasons. First, many countries are still producing coal power plants, and although a natural gas or oil plant is often cleaner than a car or other device burning gasoline, this is often not the case for coal plants. In some developed countries, like the US, the total percentage of power produced by coal is going down but the total amount of coal production is roughly constant and projected to remain so for at least a few decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States. While newer coal plants are more efficient and cleaner, this is only by a comparatively small degree. Of course, if do eventually get cheaper nuclear (such as with more modern reactors or maybe even with thorium reactors) this situation may change- right now the fact that nuclear is held to much higher safety standards than fossil fuel plants is a large part of its very high cost.
More seriously for the very long-term hope of making batteries handle all transport technologies including ships and airplanes, it isn't clear that battery technology will improve that much over time. The primary thing that matters is energy density, which has two forms, energy per mass and energy per volume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density Both need to be much better than they are today for electric airplanes to have any chance (lifespan and and number of cycle uses also need to improve but that's in some ways less of a barrier.) Energy density of batteries by both metrics batteries has increased by 5%-10% a year depending on the exact metric and choice of examples https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-battery-energy-density-improves-5-8-per-year which is exponential growth ( but with a much slower doubling time than something like Moore's Law. One has a doubling about once every 8 or 10 years.) Jet fuel has an energy density of around 45 MJ/kg, The most efficient batteries have a little under 1 MJ/kg. So one needs at least about 5 doublings before batteries can reasonably compete which will start to occur if they have an energy density of around 32/ MJ/kg. Similar remarks apply to energy density measured by joules per volume. However, there are technical reasons to think that batteries will stop doubling before that (see theabove quora link for details which argues that we can't make batteries much than four times as efficient before we start running into serious theoretical limits). At around 20 MJ/kg, one maybe could run planes practically but they would be much less convenient and practical than today's jets and that would be at the very upper end of the plausible limits. So it is likely that we will still see fossil fuels used for jets for the next 40 or 50 years.
This. Fucking Americans creating problems to complain about.
When spring rolls around will he be handing out electric weed eaters to replace our loud 2 stroke weed eaters?
You find two-stroke engines in poorer countries because they're cheap
I have a Stihl trimmer. Bought because it is decent German build quality (albeit Made in Brazil), thus being much more expensive (but also needs much less adjustment, repair and eventually replacement) compared to the Chinese models available where I'm at. (As an aside: The dealer that sold it to me had ads up on lampposts the other day: "Buy once" - with various products of this company displayed. Although he also carries other brands.) It also has a very noisy (wearing ear muffs together with eye protection) 2-stroke that emits some nasty-smelling stuff and gets hot enough that you have to be careful not to get it too close to your arm under which it is used.
That said, I for one can hardly understand the first world's fascination with leaf blowers. I do have a fairly large property (around .36 Ha or 1 acre) with quite a few deciduous trees. Leaves do need to get picked up, else they form a dense lawn-chocking mat. But this gets done in any case when the lawn mower runs over them and picks them up together with the lawn clippings. This nice mixture then goes to the compost pile, where it automatically gets turned into wonderful growing medium for my vegetable garden - thus saving me a run to the municipal dumping site for garden refuse and later on another run to buy fertilizer, and eventually lowers my need to go grocery shopping. So I get extremely fresh and organic food, and save carbon emissions at the same time as saving money. When I do go to the shops, these days it's usually by bicycle with a smallish backpack, so I also save on gym fees and still having health that's much better than a few years ago. I think they call it an integrated systems approach.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
The issue, as I understand it, is that demand and margins on these products are too low to allow research into making them cleaner. That is, existing designs are good enough and consumers are not willing to pay for redesign.
Regulation can fix this, but it will also make these products more expensive.
What the hell is the point of leaf blowers anyway. All you are doing is carrying around a loud heavy pollution generator and annoying people.
Why not use a leaf rake instead?
- Operating noise volume 15 dB
- Weights ~1 lbs
- No toxic exhausts.
- Precision scales intuitively from moving thousands of leaves at the time all the way to moving a single leaf.
- Available in all natural wood & steel and carbon fiber.
- Physical requirements for use are minimal.
- Promotes good posture and reduces stress.
etc.
...but in some chinese backyard?
Look. I'm all for "green progress". But just pushing things to where environmental laws are cheaper ain't fair. And thinking we can keep up our perceived "standard of living" (two leaf blowers for one household? hello?) while staying whithin our sustainable envelope is just criminally naive.
"You find two-stroke engines in poorer countries because they're cheap..."
Maybe they have these blowers there because they "want" them...or because of some other reason. Not because they are poor, but just happen to be poor.
Why does this attitude persist? Is there anything we can learn from these "poor" countries? I know of Americans that have left this country for the so called poor countries - for good. Question is: Why?
Too many people use them to blow their leaves onto public roads and neighbor's properties. I.e. they just pushing their mess elsewhere. $1000 per incident caught on video would be an excellent alternative to these regular litter-bugs.
I wish I hadn't thrown away my login account years ago, because this is an elegant post, worthy of up moderation.
I had a neighbor that could not stand the sight of a single leaf on his lawn or driveway. He'd patrol his yard three times a day with his leaf blower running until the last leaves fell off his oak trees. All the neighbors hated him because you couldn't complain about the noise, it was legal, etc.. People tried to convince him that a few leaves were not a problem - could not get through to him. We all really wanted to stuff his shirt with leaves, douse him in 2-stroke fuel mix, set him alight and fan the flames with the leaf blower.
He finally fucking died of a heart attack...while blowing leaves. Not a life well spent.
With a rake, he would have been the nice quiet old man next door who liked to exercise by working in his yard, and everybody would have some peace. With a leaf blower, he was the asshole/lunatic that everybody wanted to see dead. There are certain technologies like leaf blowers that seem to throw personality disorders into sharp contrast and are simply obnoxious. Nobody seems to think about noise pollution when designing and marketing (and buying) these things, they just assume everybody won't mind 2-strokes running all damned day. I don't know what the solution is, but it is getting harder and harder to find quiet in the world because of stuff like this.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
That's like saying don't use a car, instead take a bicycle to work.
Commercial landscaper here... Companies/people using leaf blowers are wasting everyone's time and money. Period. Blowing around leaves that you can easily rake up is simply an idiotic, colossal waste of energy, and quite frankly a pain in the (r)ear, and as multiple posters pointed out, disturbs your thought process with the loudness. The crew using leaf blowers instead of rakes or brooms is quite ridiculous! Every time I see a crew blowing around leaves instead of taking the time to rake them up, it simply makes me laugh! Fools.
user@host$ diff
Of course, there will be the inevitable rejection of such SJW concerns like clean air and low noise.. looking forward to leaf blower nutz and seeing guys with giant smoke stacks on their backs so they can "burn coal" at all the eco-blowers. MURRICA!!
It's called a rake you lazy Americans!
but most leaf blowers in the US are operated by Mexicans!
*yawn*
Health concerns are universal, and public. In addition to the pollutants and lack of exercise mentioned, there are also concerns for allergy sufferers. Like many, I can react to mold, mildew and pollen. Many times I've had to hold my breath and pray I can make it past maintenance crews into work or shopping, without having an allergy or asthma attack from the blast cloud. Raking and sweeping are more considerate to others.
Fuck noisy gardening equipment. If your gardening approach requires regularly polluting the whole neighbourhood with noise (and organic compounds), please stop.
I dream of a place where you can walk in city and suburbs and not have to raise your voice to be heard over fossil cars, busses and whiny gardening equipment.
What's the problem with riding a bicycle to work? Seems like a perfectly valid solution to a simple problem.
Raking leaves isn't even hard work. OP is right, you people are lazy as fuck.
It's called a rake you lazy Americans!
but most leaf blowers in the US are operated by Mexicans!
Even better. For the price of a battery-powered leaf blower you can get a half-dozen Mexicans with rakes.
DHI, i guess there must be some sadistic enjoyment from your end, killing this once great publication.
this is not news for nerds, this is pathetic.
Real nerds don't give a fuck about leaves, blowers and rake, they are living in the basement below the leaves anyway.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Most people in the world do take the bicycle to work instead of a car... Or the bus.
Yes. Why don't you cycle to work? I work in several locations across a 60 mile patch of central Scotland. I cycle to the train station, take the bike on the train, and cycle to my destination. It's frequently quicker than driving, cheaper and keeps me fit, plus I can do useful work on the train.
I used to spend hours sitting in traffic jams getting stressed. Then I worked out a solution.
So, why don't you cycle to work?
...the fight against noisy leaf blowers is gaining momentum, in part, because residents are framing it as a public health issue. Two-stroke engine leaf blowers mix fuel with oil and don't undergo a complete combustion, emitting a number of toxins...
Don't fucking do that. If you hate leaf blowers because they make a giant fucking noise that makes the quiet enjoyment of your property impossible, then pass a law that bans making giant fucking noises in a residential neighborhood. Don't try to ban leaf blowers by coughing like a sad little passive-aggressive Chihuahua every time you hear one and then climb into your Land Dominator SUV and go vote down the latest mass transit initiative in favor of knocking down a forest and putting up a football stadium instead.
I've never used a leaf blower to blow around leaves...
I have used one to clean out my car though. Open both doors, stand on one side, blow shit out the other... lot easier than vacuuming.
When did NO and CO become toxins?
The hedgehogs will thank you (and eat the snails).
Not for long. What most American voters don't realise is that Trump has invested heavily in leaf blower manufacturers, deporting Mexicans is simply a way of boosting sales.
Blank until
The only reason for two cycles engines is price. They pollute and they are loud. The easiest way to handle the problem is to outlaw them. There are lawnblowers with 4 cycles engines selling today. The electric/battery power lawn blowers are usually weaker. They are fine for smaller properties. But for larger properties only a gasoline powered lawn blower will do.
Huge problem is not enough power in electrical leaf blowers. They just simply don't have the volumetric air output of gasoline powered leaf blowers. Tried and tested by myself countless times :-(
They just issued a press release about a leaf blower powered by a diesel engine that is not only very quiet, but also with a negligible emission of pollutants. Oh, wait...
Ok, everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon that leaf blowers are noisy and evil. Same people never complain about the noise of lawn mowers in the summer. Leaf blowers are used two or three times a year while lawn mower use is weekly from mid spring to mid fall. Lawn mowers are actually much louder. The people who do the most complaining are those who hire lawn care services to mow lawn and clean up leaves during the da when no one is at home to hear it. This is a form of snobery because only the low class would do their own lawn work. As long as no one is making noise during sleep hours this complaining is just stupid. So those of you who don't like leaf blowers can kiss my a$$.
I live in a place with something called "seasons". In the summer I'd die of a heatstroke and in the winter I'd get hit by a snow plow. There are also no straight or flat roads in this part of the state. My 25 minute drive to work would take hours on a bike.
Someone in my neighborhood (or rather xer gardener) uses an electric blower and it drives me nuts. With a 2-stroke blower the noise is loud but constant as once started, the motor is on full time. Electric blowers stop and start constantly (to save battery life) and sound like an obsessive/compulsive autist trying to make a polystyrene ice sculpture with a Black & Decker drill.
The best way to minimize noise pollution is to maximize the power of the blower. If the nanny state has to ban anything, ban under-powered (and electric) blowers.
Leaf blowers just blow the Crap elsewhere and the wind will put it back. Don't have one and don't want one.
That aside there are things that help...
* Electric is way better, both from a maintainence and noise perspective
* Like our physical servers (remember them?) and the latest whisper jets... The larger the fan diameter the quieter the noise.
no more leaf blowers. Period. They are far more likely to blow up dust and thus cause respiratory issues than a rake or broom. These crews could put more people to work if they had to use brooms or rakes. It would be a quadruple win: more jobs, less noise, less use of electric or combustion energy, and less of huge clouds of dust being raised where the blowers are.
captcha: litigant
Part of the fun of running a leaf blower is the huge noise. oh oh oh ohoh oh
seriously, if they could get a muffler to work on them i would use it so long as it wouldn't kill the power. my back unit doesn't seem overly loud to me, but I don't run it at times that people should be quiet. I live near an interstate. There is always noise. If we could get solid wheels for our cars that would help reduce noise everywhere.
Anyone ever heard of a rake?
What's this train thing you speak of?
Many (most?) places in the U.S. don't have public transportation and there are a multitude of reasons why people require cars to live in the U.S unless they live somewhere like San Francisco or New York City.
I think this ruling about the horrible 2 cycle leaf blowers is fantastic! It clears the market for my new (patent pending) product, the valveless pulse jet leaf blower. With the ban of those horrible 2 cycle gas engines and their thrashing pistons, we will replace them with the ultimate simple machine (no moving parts) and its 160 dB of leaf moving action!
And don't worry about what I'm using to clean it.
There are also no straight or flat roads in this part of the state. My 25 minute drive to work would take hours on a bike.
Your bike cannot get round bends? It needs flat roads? And take hours?? - are you using it the right way up?
When I commuted in London it was faster by bike than by car - and that was in the outer suburbs. In the countryside of Southern England my average bike speed (17mph) was about half that of driving a car if not on motorways. The long-term average speed currently displayed in my car is 36 mph (there are only country roads in my area).
Let me know when you have a backpack leaf blower that puts out 750+ CFM, runs for 3 hours straight, and weighs 20 pounds or less - for $500. Until then, no thanks.
Seriously, my neighbors will run gas mowers in the early am. Loud. Very loud. Worse, they are heavy pollution. So require that all lawn mowers below say 6 or 8 hp to be electric.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
As on that operates a small lawn care business, I have to agree that two stroke are used in the applications you mention. One item that you may not be aware of is that leaf blowers and string trimmers are operated in conditions that would seize and melt the rings in a four stroke because of lack of oil flow. It is common to operate these tools upside down and sideways.
Not only do I use leaf blowers, I also use leaf vacuums. I find your use of a rake to be a colossal waste of time. Blow the leaves out of the areas the leaf vacuum will not fit into and then pick the leaves up with a vacuum and mulcher.
Leaf blowers are more properly used to to blow off sidewalks after cutting grass.
Motorized vuvuzelas
Because you still need to collect the leaves afterwards. Get a leaf sucker that does the work for you.
I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I don't get it. What's the problem leaf blowers pose? You know they have electrical ones, right?
I don't personally use a leaf blower, but I've never been bothered with the noise from two-stroke petrol leaf blowers. It's just a part of fall. Next you're going to tell me that four-stroke petrol little trucks with snow plows are also a noise problem. What about the big diesel snow plows?
However, the noise from HughPickens.com might need some remedying...
ever wonder how a leaf blower is even legal-its SOLE purpose is tp blow organic trash aka dead leaves and other landscaping waste onto a neighbors property or into the street? Why can they make a leaf vac instead and the person generating the trash ends up with having to deal with their own waste.
I used to fill my full-size cargo van with about 80 bags of leaves on the way to work. A couple of weeks, different routes on different trash days, and I had a nice pile of fertilizer for my garden. Can you imagine, people throw that stuff out??!
I'd do it still, but I got rid of the van, and got tired of the broken glass, rocks, and dead cats. Every leaf, pine needle, twig, and tree trunk that falls on our yard still goes in the garden.
The subject, noise from leaf blowers, leaves out debris blowing, some said that above. Leaf blowers also can cause erosion. Considering how they are used, who uses them, and for what purpose, they will and do cause erosion. Leaf blowers on a driveway don't cause erosion. but leaf blowers on ground remove mulch, and if there is not much ground cover, soil.
I live in a rental. Every rental around here has Latino immigrant (referenced above) gardeners give the yard a blowjob, whether it need it or not, 2-5 times a mont. On my property I have seen the topsoil slowly getting blown away, about 1.5" down compared to the concrete walkways since 2008 when I moved in. On hillside areas they can be a major cause of erosion. By major, I mean contribute to flooding and rain run-off damage. On the property I live on I predict in 10 or so years the owner will find they have to replace the concrete walkways, and a stone fence may start to crumble. Seriously. Google "leaf blower erosion."
All of this so that some idiots can have what they consider a neat and clean garden. And idiot landlords just do what is normal and expected of them. Shit.
This is absolutely fucking asinine!
Leaf blowers that emit less pollutants and noise are a wonderful idea. Unfortunately these benefits come at a rather drastic cost. The blowers are less effective or even ineffective at blowing leaves. What is the point of a fucking leaf blower that can't blow leaves?
See also: high efficiency washing machines that don't clean clothes well. And my favorite: phosphate free dishwasher soap that doesn't clean as well and reacts negatively with aluminum, causing etching and blackening.
If you want to save the planet; fucking kill yourself.
I never got the point of a leaf blower. Isn't the intent to remove the leaves from the overmanicured lawn and walkways? In that case a leaf sucker is way better, ideally one that jam packs the leaves into the paper leave bags automatically without having them rip open. Even better advise: just leave the leaves where they are. It's nature, they are good for the soil, and just go with the idea that instead of a lawn you will have grass that is home to nice little flowers that bloom in all kinds of colors, grass that does not need artificial fertilizer, grass that grows on soil that isn't poisoned with endless masses of chemicals to kill off even the last strain of dandelion. Mow once a week the most and live a happy life! As for walkways, plain old table salt every three months dumped onto the cracks is all that is needed. Works as well as the expensive stuff with the spray nozzle and the gazillion warning labels on it.