I have a 80cc 2-stroke gas leaf blower, two plug-in electric leaf blowers, and I've tried a buddy's battery leaf blower.
All of the electric ones are basically toys compared to the gas powered one. Gas unit's 1100 cfm and 220 mph rating is substantially higher than the electrics and it shows in performance. The electrics can barely move a small pile of dry leaves. The gas one can lift sheets of wet, mucky leaves and move them around effortlessly.
On the other hand, I love my battery string trimmer. That's a device that seems perfect for electric as the power requirement is quite low and there's no carb to get all gummed up. The electric works every time and a battery pack easily does my entire yard trimming twice over, so there's no fiddling or stopping required.
My 16 tine rake has 45 spm (strokes per minute) with a 300 gr flying capacity, or a 25 kg capacity when rolling a pile. I decided to upgrade this year to the nylon fibre collection bag, which has sweet dual handles.
I use animal skin gloves for that authentic feel, though I've tried synthetic and bareback, and that's fine too.
I've found my emissions are lower with this setup, unless I ate lentils for lunch.
There's pluses and minuses to everything. As a lot of commenters pointed out, there have been many local ordinances that already do this, and many landscapers ignore them; as do the folks that hire the landscapers.
Where I live, I don't think that we have ordinances like that.
As I work from home, it sucks. Those two-strokes are loud.
> All of the electric ones are basically toys compared to the gas powered one.
That's what they used to say about cars, too. Innovation and technological advances will find a way, especially with the economic incentives created by this legislation for an enterprising startup to build a better battery blower.
> That's what they used to say about cars, too. Innovation
Yet I can still drive 500 miles hauling 2500lb (8000lb gross weight), or haul 40,0000lb (80,000lb gross) over 2,000 miles without refueling / recharging.
No electric vehicle can do that, still today.
Let me know when an electric vehicle will be able to haul 100,000lb of grain all day long by -20C, then we'll talk.
You can put all the money you want to increase the speed of light, and you will certainly see a lot of snake-oil startup promising an increased speed of light, and their share of Kool-aid drinker here on HN, but the speed of light will never increase...
Actually, you are technically wrong, to be pedantic about it with an anecdote. Borrowed a plug in leaf bower that is from maybe the 90s or 2000s. That thing easily blows around 1 to 1.5in crushed granite. Leaves smeaves, real blowers do granite and I’m not talking pea gravel. Oh but it sounds like a jet engine and is as loud as or maybe louder than a gas one.
Anyway you’re right about the average *current* battery powered ones.
Have you used one? I have a 20v and 60v dewalt blower. The 20volt blows, but it's not very strong. It works blowing out the garage and with minor clippings on the sidewalk / driveway that's about it. The 60v works better, substantially more power and it moves leaves. Both have horrible battery life when all is said and done. We're talking 20 minutes or so with 9AH batteries, and in the case of the 60v I get about 30 minutes on a 12ah FlexVolt.
Then theres the whole buying batteries, longevity of batteries, the power to charge etc. I would bet that the damage to the ecosystem from using gas blowers / trimmers isn't that big a difference and if equated in measurement of power and life, the gas far outperforms it.
Also, the Electrics are just as loud in most instances. Are they going to ban gas pressure washers next?
Neither of mine plug in, the only adapters available are third party on amazon and a few have less than stellar reviews. Namely, they short out and cause fires. I'd also be required to have a substantial amount of electrical cord length at our farm, like 1000 feet cables, which simply isn't feasible. I suppose I could throw the generator in the truck when doing stuff out there but I feel like that defeats the purpose.
The electric ones are not just weaker in performance, but have other significant problems.
These batteries really will not age well in both common scenarios. The professional landscaper that uses this thing every day, possibly for a extended period of time will kill the battery very fast. The casual home owner that may use this thing once a weak or so will kill the battery with inactivity as it sits around in the garage 99% of the time.
The entry-level models don't even have exchangeable batteries. Basically throwing a perfectly good device away because battery is dead, producing huge amounts of e-waste.
Gas mowers and garden tools are just bad in general. But they are the backbone of a lot of immigrant small businesses. Banning without providing a path or incentive to electric seems very radical to me. Relevant facts on gas-powered tools: https://www.peoplepoweredmachines.com/faq-environment.htm
More generally, lawns seem to me to be a net negative environmentally relative to any of many other landscaping options. I'm not quite for banning them, but maybe we could stop mandating them.
Well, I'd go further, and propose to void all rules that mandate landscaping choices, which have non-trivial maintenance cost (rule of thumb: if you need to do gardening more than once a year, it's not negligible).
Or just have the rules convert to "must not look abandoned", as long as that doesn't conflict with other existing rules. In case of conflict, the "must be lawn" rule would just disappear with no replacement.
Electric garden tools are great as long as you work quickly. I have a walk-behind mower and it has a TON of torque even in super-tall grass. I cannot imagine someone running a landscaping business with them, though. You'd have to double or triple your hauling load just to carry all the batteries you'd need to power them in a workday.
They don't charge all that quickly and I don't think customers want people plugging in battery chargers at their homes, at least I wouldn't. All it takes is one bootleg charger from amazon, or one bootleg battery from amazon (of which there are plenty of examples) and boom nasty battery fire. I would place money on that being a magnitude more likely than a spontaneous fire from combustables in the back of a truck.
EDIT: Let's downvote instead of actually having a proper response. I can't wait until the bubble some of you live in pops and all of this nonsense goes away.
I have a Stihl electric polesaw/weed eater/brush/… combo with a backpack battery. That battery outlasts my ability to use it in a day. Multiple small batteries is an extremely doable solution for a professional.
Also, what you add in battery charging, you easily make up with reduced maintenance of the tool.
Most dont, sans a third party adapter that replaces the battery. It's also implying that a power outlet is readily available, which I imagine with a lot of landscaping it isn't.
You've never seen landscape crews making their rounds?
New theft target when each one has to carry $8k worth of batteries in the truck/trailer to have enough juice to perform their normal task, which could have been performed by two 10 gallon jugs of gasoline.
They did just that when they were mowing the lawns near my house when I was a kid. They would come to the school, plug in (and unroll partly a big portable extension cord), mow the lawn, move to the upper lawn, plug at a different outlet over there, etc.
If at least they do it everywhere it's possible, that would already be great. Most of the time when I am distressed by the pollution and sound of a blower/mower there is an electrical outlet handy.
Not necessarily, we're talking about lawn care / outdoor maintenance. A lot of the maintenance I see invovles medians, communal areas etc. None of them are powered and would require substantial distances to outlets. When there is an outlet you then have to deal with Whom owns the outlet and pays the bill.
For a single family home, this is fine. For townhomes, larger lot, commercial properties, this isn't as clear.
A friend of mine ran a small landscaping business through college. You'd be surprised how many property owners would not let landscapers in the house to plug in extension cords, use the restroom, etc.
They also never took off because the power you can get from the wall just isn't quite enough. They work, but if you compare to an engine or battery they obviously are lacking. I pull out my cordless drill for the biggest holes I need to make because it has more power (for a minute until the battery goes dead...), though there isn't much room between not enough power from the wall and needing a drill press on a more powerful circuit anyway.
This is the way.
Having one installed outside changed so much for the better. The noise and dust that I tend to create is much better dealt with by having doors and windows closed.
That seems odd. In the early 1990s where I grew up in the Midwestern United States corded electric weed eaters (that's what I grew up calling them) and lawn mowers were quite common.
They are out there but a lot of them have moved to batteries due to market demands and more so, building an ecosystem. All the major power tool vendors sell yard tools with their battery compatibility.
I imagine you can get some things corded still. I use battery and corded all the time, but I have gas powered as well.
In a small home (less than 1 acre) I can work around it, on the farm. It's almost all gas. Things like the blower, lawn mower, chainsaws, etc. had bad electric alternatives. We also don't and can't run, 1000 foot electrical cords all over the property.
Corded will always be the better option though. With the drills on the farm, corded offer way more torque! Just make sure you've got isolated circuits for exterior and aren't loading them down or you're popping breakers with a couple of the electric tools plugged in.
Most vehicles produce power and many work trucks can be easily modified to produce more. Simply making a bank of batteries that recharges as you drive should suffice for anyone serious enough to need it.
There's always a drop cord and non-battery options for almost every tool, which I prefer to the inevitable battery degradation (so that makes my leafblower coal and hydro powered). I have an electric leafblower and 2 dropcords. When trucks are electric, problem solved, this can run off the accessory power.
Yep. That new Ford with the big inverter and battery will be a good model to follow; and of course no doubt companies like Milwaukee who have been pushing all sorts of electric stuff lately will come out with good options to add on.
Hell, even just running a 4-stroke generator will be far less polluting.
The charger for the Kobalt mower and grass trimmer from Lowes charges the batteries faster than I can use them. However, the batteries are only good for 30 minutes or so, and the equipment is hardly commercial-grade. The batteries can also be palmed with one hand, so there's room for an upgrade for commercial use.
The operator needs to charge them in the truck, and many trucks come with power points.
My neighbour is a builder and he laughs at the guys with big batteries as they lug them about. He carries two or three small ones and switches them out regularly.
The businesses will just pass the cost on and be fine.
The guy who uses the $100 Home Depot weed whacker to do his own lawn is the one who gets screwed because he now either has to wrangle a cord everywhere or spend much more for equivalent performance from an electric.
(on second thought string trimmers are low enough power that a cheap battery one should work for a homeowner but for blowers, chainsaws and most other landscaping power equipment my point still stands, you gotta spend big bucks on the 36-48v stuff that performs about the same as the ICE powered $99.99 special)
My electric trimmer was not much more expensive than the gas one, and it's much quieter and the battery can be used in any of my other Ryobi products (chosen deliberately for this purpose). The battery easily lasts for my entire yard, but if I had a bigger lot (like my parents, around 1 acre), I might need a second battery.
For everything under ~4hp electric is definitely "nicer" in every way but only if you pony up for "nice". The 18v trimmers and chainsaws that are comparable in cost to the low end 2-stroke stuff aren't nearly as good (yet).
I’m a huge fan of Stihl and their range of battery tools.
One weird little idiosyncrasy is that while their battery range are interchangeable, they don’t work as you’d imagine. The bigger batteries have more charge, but the biggest one also gives more power/torque (when used on a chainsaw). It’s something to do with the cells being wired in parallel or something like that. The difference is very noticeable.
Batteries experience a drop in voltage when a load is applied. The magnitude of this drop varies based on the design and chemistry of the battery, and the load per cell is obviously lower if there are more cells.
I wrangle a cord. It's honestly not that bad at all. A couple techniques like tying cords together help a lot. It's honestly not a big hassle; and if the law mandates it, then all of these businesses will adapt.
Sounds like a clear market opportunity for a startup to step in, invent a better electric weed whacker, get into YC, and then be acquired by Tesla. Why question the system?
The big weed trimmer companies already make battery powered trimmers. Some of them even have batteries that can be worn as a backpack and can run all day, compared to stopping every 15 minutes to put more fuel in. (as a user this is a mis-feature - (I need that rest, but I supposed the boss likes it, and the people who use these should be in better shape than me)
This is the least persuasive argument against regulation I hear. Businesses eat the cost of replacing equipment on a regular basis and know it's not in their own interest to punish their customers. If a business owner is so indifferent to externalities or so tight fisted that they can't or won't move to a cleaner options, they will be replaced, and good riddance.
It would be great if larger cities setup some kind of trade-in program where one can give up their gas powered tools for vouchers, etc. that they can use to buy replacement electric ones.
Making the lives of poor people miserable in the name of virtue points is one of the bedrock principles of left-wing governments around the world. For example, European cities banning diesel vehicles.
It's funny how everything is a matter of perspective. I'd say that European governments are pretty "center" on average, given that they mostly range from social democracy to liberal conservatism.
But anyway, in most medium to large European cities there is little reason to drive. The restrictions on vehicles are overwhelmingly positive for residents' quality of life and the environment.
> For example, European cities banning diesel vehicles.
At least in Paris, poor people are not often the ones driving into Paris for work, they're mostly taking the metro in from the suburbs.
Paris has some moderate air pollution problems, often among the worst European or American cities (of course, globally there's much worse), and that effects everyone's quality of life and long-term health in a myriad of ways that we don't fully understand yet, as well as in some obvious ways that we already understand.
Of course there's always a bit of political show-boating with these things, and so the French left-wing do this with their pet issues, namely environmental issues. But that show-boating doesn't diminish the tangible positive effects of the policy...
Guess who is physically harmed the most by using two stroke powered lawn equipment? Those same "poor" operators who run it all day every day. What is the upgrade cost vs asthma, cancer, neuropathy, and permanent hearing damage? Even from a completely selfish perspective electric is a no-brainer.
Your comment is way off the mark. You completely ignore the very real environmental and quality-of-life issues with small two-stroke engines and call it virtue points.
Is the threat of overnight destruction for many small businesses a reasonable way to approach this problem? I can easily imagine that not a single person passing this change ever thought about that.
Whether it is virtue points or an important issue is irrelevant, the way it was handled was appalling and harmful.
EDIT - If you're downvoting consider this: If you and your family were running a small landscaping business and need to replace thousands of dollars of equipment, you might feel differently. Be empathetic towards those people and consider other ways to accomplish the goal. We could just as easily have banned the sale of these after a future date. There are always options to mitigate the pressure on the affected persons.
Your point is undercut by lying about “overnight destruction”. If you read up on this issue, the effect in the real world is that businesses buy electric blowers. A bunch of them started calling it “organic landscaping” and charging more along with dropping chemical fertilizer / pesticide use.
> If you read up on this issue, the effect in the real world is that businesses buy electric blowers.
I wonder, between the two of us, who has spent more time actually making money by doing landscaping.
A large portion of these 'businesses' are 1-2 people who scraped together whatever they could to get the equipment to make a living. Many are low income. Many sacrifice heavily in their personal lives to be able to make ends meet.
The lie here is the notion that the bunch that go the route of 'organic landscaping' are representative of the entire group.
A business doesn’t fail overnight when they say “to comply with local ordnance, we’re charging 5% more to replace our equipment”.
This complaint is brought up for every single environmental improvement, and it misses the concept that the risk is an imbalance, not a change which affects everyone. For example, you used to not be able to see across the street in LA on bad smog days – and I remember plenty of people insisting that doing anything about that would devastate the economy, and yet California seems to be not exactly an impoverished wasteland.
I doubt it's overnight destruction of the business.
It likely means selling some of their amortized equipment to buy different equipment. They've likely had notice for a long time. Especially if they participate in their government.
> It likely means selling some of their amortized equipment to buy different equipment.
Many run their business with the tools they can afford. Upon inspection, you would find that many such businesses have little to no resale value to lean on to make such an upgrade.
> They've likely had notice for a long time. Especially if they participate in their government.
What percentage of people laborers have the time to actively participate in government? I don't know the answer to this but I suspect it's shockingly small.
The higher end electric stuff isn't priced exorbitantly compared to the higher end ICE stuff that businesses tend to use.
The problem preventing commercial adoption is that if you want commercial user amounts of uninterrupted run time you wind up spending a fortune on batteries.
That equipment only lasts so long anyway. If you drove your care as much as the pros drive their lawn mowers you would be putting around 75,000 miles a year on the car! If the law doesn't take effect for 3 years then all equipment will have been replaced by the normal cycle.
Of course if you are a homeowner that equipment will last a lot longer. (home owners buy a cheaper grade of quality in general, so you can't compare lifetimes with pro grade equipment)
> If the law doesn't take effect for 3 years then all equipment will have been replaced by the normal cycle.
I have personally seen such equipment remain in use for 15-20 years. When I was young the lawnmower we used was a monstrous Craftsman that was originally built 20 years prior. It was used year-round for that period for everything from snow removal, lawn mowing, and hauling landscaping supplies (retaining wall blocks and the like).
You would likely be surprised at the level of care and maintenance some small business owners put in.
Bigger equipment lasts longer. When weight is an advantage you don't feel bad about putting in bracing to make things last longer.
We are talking about hand held stuff here though. While pros need equipment to last longer than home owners, there is a limit to how much mass they can deal with for something that is hand held.
You've changed your argument. Now you're saying "forget half of what I said".
I agree that second-order effects need to be considered, certainly. That is the point of phase-in periods, which this measure had.
Is it long enough, or substantial enough? Should small businesses be able to apply for exemptions, or interest free loans for new equipment, for example? Perhaps.
It should be uncontroversial given the facts and experiences with these engines that they are awful pollutants, terribly aggravating to communities, and that the world would be better without them.
> You've changed your argument. Now you're saying "forget half of what I said"
My only point is that the way you implement change matters and that this implementation will adversely affect the worst-off population.
> It should be uncontroversial given the facts and experiences with these engines that they are awful pollutants, terribly aggravating to communities, and that the world would be better without them.
I can easily imagine that not a single person passing this change ever thought about that
I can easily imagine they did. Who's right? People have been raising this issue for years, the idea did not just fall out of the sky. I'm unclear why the people who have been putting up with the problem for a long time need to coddle the people creating the problem any longer.
This is pure flamebait, attributing malice for its own sake to administrators and dismissing the externalities as 'virtue points' - equivalent to saying you don't care about people who are bothered by noise or heavy gasoline fumes.
I'm happy to see changes like this as it's something I've complained about for years; multiple properties in my area used these sort of services, and I'd frequently have to deal with the dust and dirt from their property being blown onto mine, along with noise and bad smells. I also felt bad for the operators who were exposed to that every day. So I am one of those people who has spent years nudging for a regulatory change.
Why, exactly, should anyone support a business model that can only be profitable by dumping its weaknesses on to other people? I mean, if you want to use a potentially dangerous product and the risks fall only on you, you have an absolute right to do that. But you have no right to accrue benefits while dumping the risk onto someone else.
Right, which is exactly why we should have banned them 20 years ago already. Just look at what happened with combustion engine scooters: we have been grandfathering these shitty, loud things for 30 years straight now. Now there are hundreds of electric scooter manufacturers in China and basically none serious in the western world.
It's just a bandaid that needs to be ripped off. Like RoHS getting rid of lead solder; that was never gonna happen without regulatory intervention.
We could just give them money, but that idea is too taboo for the vast majority of Americans who believe the only purpose of government is to make the individual suffer.
Electric equipment already exists, no "path" is needed.
And this isn't going to harm immigrant small businesses, because everyone's in the same boat. It's not like non-immigrant businesses get to continue using gas blowers.
Price will go up a little bit for consumers as everybody switches over to electric.
But we're not even talking a massive capital investment here. Weed whackers don't cost $50,000.
Electric mowers and garden tools are limited to small jobs. Being unable to get more that 1.5HP of mechanical work reserve electric tools to small casual jobs. At 5HP to 10HP, now we're talking, but power cords for 240V, as it's translates to 20A to 40A...
Well, assuming that those businesses are paying taxes (hmm?) then purchases of this amount would typically be fully deductible in the same purchase year as opposed to required some sort of complex depreciation schedule, so that would reduce the burden significantly.
And since pretty much every vendor would have the same cost increase, it wouldn't be a competitive disadvantage from a pricing point of view. Likely the cost increase would mostly be passed on to the customer.
I’m ambivalent about this. On the one hand they are LOUD as hell, but the electrics just don’t blow as good. The gas powered blowers just work better, especially for large jobs.
For what it's worth, the 2008 article OP references specifically mentions technology to significantly reduce the pollution from 2 stroke engines. This technology has since been widely adopted in the scooter industry. Modern scooters pollute less per mile than the average single occupant car.
https://www.motorscooterguide.net/do-scooters-pollute-more-t...
When I lived in Cambridge, there was a guy in my neighborhood with a 1970s 2-stroke Saab. I figured every time he started it up, he undid all the non-polluting that every Prius ever sold in MA was responsible for.
I feel really bad for the people who have to use the gas ones because they're breathing in exhaust the whole time. Small gas engines, especially the 2 stroke cycle ones, don't burn nearly as cleanly as the ones we find on most cars. And the people who operate those things are doing it professionally so they're likely to be expose to the exhausts all the time. The noise bothers me but I only hear them once in a while. I just feel bad for the people who have to deal with them all the time.
Yes, this. The people most harmed by these leaf blowers are the people using them. Arguments that "electric ones don't work as well" rather miss this point.
You really need to get the wired ones if you want decent performance, in my experience. Having that power extension cable is a pain, but the battery powered ones barely do anything by comparison
Cynical, but... the great thing about the wired ones is that you can run them from a portable generator. Reading the text of the legislation, it seems that this will be an acceptable workaround.
The generator will be 4-stroke and probably running at a mostly constant rpm so it should at least be less polluting than 2-stroke. Extra points for a propane generator!
None of the reviews I've read have had any complaints. If crews do find these electrics aren't as good, hopefully the market can respond & build better ones.
I have no reservation about saying that the societal good far outweighs the bad.
This corrects this imbalanced market where 99% of stakeholders are held captive by old, polluting, loud, ultra-obnoxious, all-downsides-heavily-externalized persistent disturbances. Mandating electric options was evidently what it's going to take to get any change, to start to do the right thing.
The market, now that it was to do the right thing, can begin to adjust it's approach as to how it wants to do the right thing. It can improve it's designs, &c.
Why do you say they don't blow as well? I replaced my gas blower with an electric one a couple years back and it blows even better than my gas did. I also can't think of a technical reason why this would be the case so I'm curious what you mean by this.
Depends on the style. An plug-in electric leafblower is constrained to around 2HP max (746W/HP) while drawing 12A from a 15A circuit. A handheld gas one will have a 25cc engine and can probably do 2HP max. But the backpack style gas leafblower that landscaping crews often use will have a 50 or 60cc engine that would put out 3 or 4HP, so will be able to blow more strongly.
The standard to compare isn't some gas blower, it's a STIHL blower. Commercially, these don't work as well as commerical gas blowers (which is probably where most of the market actually is).
We are one of the few families in our neighborhood who still use rakes. Nearly everyone else hires landscaping crews who use the gas powered models. A few homeowners have electrics, which are quieter but take far longer to finish the job - sometimes hours.
Rakes are so much more efficient, I find. And an opportunity to just chill. I don’t understand the leaf-blowers. In the US, I’ve seen so many so many lawn service guys just blowing leaves around in the wind - just because they’re paid to do it once a week. Nuts.
Comparing the commercial EGO systems to the commercial Husqvarna systems, both produce ~600cfm of air movement in a backpack system. The battery life on the EGO systems is sufficient (60 min+ runtime peer battery, in my experience, more than enough for several large yards during mowing season).
Yes, a landscape crew would need to carry several spare batteries per electric device, likely with some sort of charging station on the truck. Expensive up front costs, no question. But, probably worth it in the long run for emissions and nuisance gains.
I live in the forest and we routinely need to blow off the roof. You aren't supposed to sweep it because it degrades the shingles (according to our roofer).
So, we have an electric one for that, and for various other tasks, like clearing our steep driveway of debris that makes it difficult to receive deliveries or get our cars up. Blowing takes 30 seconds, where sweeping would take 5 minutes.
If it's been a couple years since you tried electric, I would try again. The state of the art in cordless electric landscape tools really has improved a lot over a fairly recent period. If you stay within one brand the batteries are all interchangeable too, so if you just have two and keep one on the charger you can pretty much eliminate battery charging headache. Some vendors offer a backpack-type electric blower that uses multiple batteries for better runtime.
I used to begrudgingly use expensive four-stroke tools because they were less irritating than two-stroke and electrics weren't up to snuff, but more recently I've replaced everything but a leaf mulcher with cordless electric and I'm really happy with them. I'll probably replace the mulcher eventually as well, I don't doubt that the cordless equipment can deliver, it's just that it still works and where I use it trailing an extension cord is fine.
Good riddance. When I lived in Oakland the noise from these things was constant in my neighborhood. They were running every single day. It was intolerable.
That doesn’t fit any electric blower I’ve ever heard. The overall volume is notably lower and the frequency isn’t too different - slightly higher but even a hair drier with a smaller diameter isn’t a “high-pitched scream”.
It's notably quieter, because it's notably less powerful. In the best case, you hear the noise for a multiple of the time because the work is done more slowly and/or by more people using blowers together to move debris.
Battery powered blowers exist and are just as powerful. A cord (as others have noted) can't deliver enough power for the job and so they have to run it longer. However a battery can deliver just as much power as an engine, for only a little more weight.
I looked for a 2500+W battery blower before buying my Echo gas blower. (I'd tried two different corded ones that were underpowered and went looking for something that would actually work.)
I couldn't find one (at the time, probably 4 years ago). Most everything I could find was 1/4 of the equivalent power.
Look again. Battery powered equipment is advancing very quick right now. The market of 2 years ago was different from 4 years ago, which is different from today.
Though I will admit to not being sure exactly what you will find.
I will look out of an engineer’s curiosity, but as a customer, I already have one; I have no need nor want for a second one.
In 5 minutes of googling for "commercial battery leaf blower" and "backpack battery leaf blower", it looks like they're mostly still in the 500-600W (2/3 HP) range with a couple hitting around 1000W, even for the backpack units.
My gas blower is 1100 cfm @ 220mph. I can't readily find the HP rating, but it's the 5-6 years ago equivalent of the current 79.9cc Echo. Mine is on the mid-range of the commercial blower range.
I just went to Stihl's site out of curiousity (and because most backpack blowers I see out in the world are orange) -- their biggest professional 4.4hp gasoline backpack blower is 912cfm @ 199mph avg.
Most of the ones in the middle of the product lineup are 500-600cfm
Yeah, I wouldn't use my battery powered one for commercial purposes, but that is due to runtime and 120v charger. Unless you have a thick mat of wet leaves, 600cfm is more than enough for a homeowner.
The number I got for a 3hp model was based on a husqvarna I saw from a quick google search, I think... almost certainly a residential model.
The commercial grade stuff is similar power and I have zero evidence supporting the claim that it’s less effective since I see the same crews taking roughly the same time in my neighborhood.
High-pitched screams are less carrying though? They used to clean this parking lot next to my house and this one guy always spent an entire hour with his damn leaf blower (doing bugger all most of the time, blowing 6 leaves with it, I always suspected he just used it to avoid having to do actual work), and the noise was so pervasive in the entire apartment that I just had to leave and go get groceries or something because I found it completely unbearable and ear plugs don't block out low-frequency noises all that well.
Don't hold your breath. I've found out in this thread that they've been banned in LA already for some time now. The landscapers do not care and neither does the LAPD.
DC passed a combustion leaf blower ban in December 2018[1], but it's only coming into effect January 2022, another 10 months.
I saw my first electric leaf blower ~3 months ago & chatted with the crew some; they'd only picked their new gear up the day before! They were happy with it. The wearable one was much quieter, but there was also a ground-based unit that was still loud as all get out, alas.
I've also asked other property management crews (probably
7 at this point) if they knew about the ban, & so far, no one even knows about it, other than the one crew I'd met who'd just gotten their electric gear.
I am very curious to see, long term, how powering these systems works out. Will a work crew simply buy a bunch of 40V or 80V batteries? How many will be enough? How many crews will turn right around & buy a generator they'll leave running a good part of the day? Longer term, perhaps hybrid work vehicles like the F150 & their built in 2.4 & 7.2kW inverter could become a crucial capability. Alas, it seems probable one way or another that combustion based energy, albeit less dirty & radically less obnoxious than these gas tools, will be used.
Anyhow. This ban can't come soon enough. Another year of these noise devices is going to be obnoxious. Unlikely to ever happen, but I wish cities would have designated noise hours, say 3 hours a day, 5 days a week (whatever) where noise was allowed (without special circumstances permit). It seems like such an obvious civic good to coordinate, to try to steer us away from all causing loud riotous noise all day long.
WRT the ground-based blower - at some point, moving air makes as much noise as the engine, so this isn't surprising.
For charing, many newer trucks come with robust power systems for running electrics. Obv not an expense to be taken lightly, but we're getting there. Ford has the most compelling options right now - right up to 7.3kw system (I believe that's with the engine idling). I believe that with the hybrid drivetrain, you can use a not-insignificant amount of electricity with he truck engine off.
They're already banned in LA but landscapers still use it all the time anyway and just ignore the law. Really annoying to have a loud engine right beside your window, doesn't seem to really help with the work anyway just blows the leaves around in circles and they rake it anyway.
according to a neighbor who looked into it, you can just report them, but the inspector has to see it happening to issue a citation, so you'd have to get them to come at the right time.
i'm personally not sympathetic to the noise argument, since we accept the constant noise of much more plentiful and sometimes-quieter-but-sometimes-louder 2-ton vehicles all over the place. blowers/trimmers are also usually used during business hours where it has to be acceptable to make some noise for work purposes.
in contrast, the pollution argument is quite salient, as @porb121 details[0], and reason enough for the ban. the exhaust pollutants can be smelled surprisingly far away (dozens of feet) and can enter homes through windows and linger. and with blowers at least, raking and sweeping are likely as efficient in most cases and doesn't really save labor/exertion.
Blower noise is way louder than cars if that’s what you were referring to.
The reason I’ve been hesitant to complain is it feels wrong to go after the (mostly working immigrant) landscape companies the Palo Alto NIMBYs have all hired to do their landscaping.
I assume a lot of them are probably commuting from far away.
depends on the vehicle. in my neighborhood, we have plenty of (intentionally) loud cars, motorcycles, and trucks. but the point is that work machines that come with unavoidable noise should be allowed to make that noise during working hours (unlike most vehicles, except perhaps delivery trucks, but they should be using primary thoroughfares, not neighborhood streets).
i also don't report landscaping companies for that reason.
A jackass on a straight-pipe harley is obnoxious, but they are around for like 30 seconds. But a jackass on an industrial zero-clearance lawn mower is going at it for at least 30mins.
These things don't need to be so loud that operators need to wear hearing protection.
I dislike both forms of noise. Getting rid of one doesn’t necessitate getting rid of both. Noise is known to be hazardous to mental health and we definitely make more than we need to. This is especially so with yard equipment.
i also dislike the noise, but it's sometimes required to get stuff done (like repairing the pavement or mowing a lawn), and we should, as residents, accept that necessary tradeoff at appropriate times. noisy vehicles, however, aren't really so necessary (anymore), with the growing move toward hybrids/electrics.
Most front lawns are unused space that people pay to maintain because “that’s how it’s supposed to be”.
And heavens forbid leaves build up around plants, we must remove all compost like that because it will contaminated the soil, it’s so unnatural.
In a front lawn or landscaping that no one uses, it should be low maintenance native plants that are adapted to the weather so they barely need water and will benefit by letting the leaves decay. Send the leaves through a shredder if one really hates the sight of leaves.
no argument there. i love desertscape yards, and like trees more than lawns (though trees are more water-thirsty). what i don't like are fake plastic lawns as used in a few places around me.
for sure, i get some of that too. but moreso for me is getting black soot dust inside, largely from vehicle exhaust and tires (along with other particulates from cooking and pets).
Blowers and weed wackers shift from throttled to idle all over the place and are a lot harder to tune out than mowers at least for me. Road noise likewise is pretty background and largely from tires, not engines, anyway, unless you have a lot of commercial trucks, bikes, or tuners around.
unfortunately it’s a lot of the latter in my case.
however, i’d point out that lifting the noise floor, as road noise does, contributes to lifetime hearing loss, as we make everything else louder (it also negatively affects attention, concentration, stress and anxiety in subtle but meaningful ways). it’s the kind of long, low externalized cost that our short-term-oriented brains tend to evaluate and address poorly.
That's why leaf blowers should not be banned, but _outlawed_. An outlaw, in the traditional sense, is a criminal who is placed outside of the protection of the law, so that he can be killed with impunity. Similarly, anyone who sees a leaf blower in operation should be legally allowed to destroy it (without hurting the operator, of course).
This was in the context of downtown businesses not complying.
And if a neighbor refuses to comply with noise ordinances because they want faster/cheaper lawn care, they already kind of hate you. They're just being subtle in how they show it.
Yep. My town (Encinitas, ca) also did it a while back. It went into full effect the beginning of last year. I would say at best there is 50% compliance i.e. half the gardeners are using electric, the other half gas. On the other hand I do think I'm seeing more electric blowers now which are quieter.
Used to live across the street from a neighbor who got his yard cleaned up by a crew with a gas blower twice weekly. They were already banned in that town, but it was never enforced. The noise would wake me up and the fumes—like standing next to a 1960s Mustang with a cold engine—would drift into our apartment and linger for 15-20 minutes. Gas blowers are gross and their time passed a while ago.
My apartment is across the street from a shopping center, and they have all maintenance work done at night. This includes using leaf blowers to clear off walkways. The noise is absolutely ridiculous to have at 3 in the morning.
Twice weekly seems excessive, but I only ever see them in the peak of fall when the leaves are falling. I blow my yard maybe 4-5 times all year combined.
...but I see them much more frequently in Florida. I suppose frequency of blowing is very biome dependent.
Huge fan of this. Gas-powered blowers are responsible for a disturbingly large portion of US air pollutants. Something like 10% of all CO, 5% of VOCs come from gas-powered lawn equipment, and they produce >30%* of the non-car pollutants.
Traditional American lawn maintenance is a horribly unsustainable (and in my opinion, ugly) practice. We should encourage alternatives.
See: Banks, "National Emissions from Lawn and Garden Equipment"
Please consider cribbing off of Oakland's ordinance and championing it where you live. The more locales where banned, the faster manufacturing of gas powered lawn implements dies off.
Yes. I am a big fan of corded electric lawn gear. Maybe it doesn't work if you have to mow an acerage, but for a normal suburban environment corded blowers, trimmers, and mowers are all totally reasonable to use. No batteries to worry about, powerful enough, never have to fill up gas, often lighter than other options.
There's still plenty of use cases for gas units but if we could get them banned from everywhere but rural areas it would be a good step in the right direction.
Some folks go too far and say "nobody should have a lawn!!!" but they clearly don't understand the zenlike experience of avoiding one's family, drinking cheap lager, listening to a podcast, and working the lawn in the sunshine for a couple hours on a Saturday morning. Kept me sane last year more than anything else did.
There are high-performing battery electric mowers and trimmers now, that use the standard battery packs from power tool manufacturers, so they are really easy to find and easy to charge. No need to risk running over an extension cord.
Corded electrics are not powerful enough. A 15A, 120VAC circuit at 80% load can supply 1440 Watts of power or just under 2 HP, assuming all the power went to mechanical energy and none was lost to heat.
Commercial leaf blowers are over 3 HP. 1-2 horsepower doesn't seem like a big difference, but it's literally 50-100% more power.
My (small) push mower is 5.1 HP, over 250% of the max power I could get from a corded unit. It can still bog down in heavy, damp grass, especially while mulching. Take away 60% of its power and it's not going to get better.
Battery trimmers are awesome; I'll give you that one.
I don't know how much grass you have to deal with, but before renting, I had a small-to-medium sized lawn to mow, and I just didn't mow in heavy, damp grass. The electric I had supplied way more than enough power to mow everything I had to cover without a hitch.
I can definitely see it becoming in issue on larger areas, with larger weeds or, in less dry weather, if you really _have_ to, like landscaper services, maybe. But for the average suburban lawn maintenance?
My lawn is on the small side (I can mow it all in 40 minutes, even if bagging). But it's a thick Kentucky Bluegrass and needs to be mowed 2-3x a week during the cool, wet spring and mid-fall. If we go away for a week-long vacation somewhere in the spring, that's a thick, high mess of grass that I need to mow when we get back.
You're not wrong, but a mower can fit a 4-stroke engine; the law would make more sense to ban 2-strokes first.
The real solution here is to mow more often, and on dryer days. Never had any issue with my corded units as long as I keep the lawn short. When it's long, you have to move in a few passes to get a nice cut without clogging things up. Mulching long grass is gross anyway, you'll get way too much grass detritus out of it; I know it's good for the lawn, but again, it makes more sense with a weekly mow and fairly short grass, rather than letting it grow into a field and mowing it once a month or something like that. You get out what you put in.
Obviously that makes more sense for homeowners who do their own work as opposed to lawn companies; I'd be okay with exceptions for businesses, with 4-stroke only.
This is probably the best outcome. Home users limited to electric, commercials pushed to 4 stroke where possible, and then set hours of lawn care noise during the day. Though you'd need carve outs for the size of property for homes, which starts getting into confusion territory.
A sample of leaf blowers sold in the UK [1] shows power ratings of 2500-3000W. They will use the standard 240V power supply.
Don't most American houses have at least one 240V socket in the garage, for use with garden/garage equipment? (Otherwise, where do you plug in an electric car if you're visiting relatives, for example?)
No. Most US houses have, at most, a single 240V outlet in the laundry room for an electric dryer. Literally everything else is 120V. There is almost no household equipment other than drying machines that is sold taking a 240V plug.
Electric cars may change this. They haven't yet, at least not much.
(The important thing to note for non-US-dwelling folks is that your average American simply never deals with plugs other than 120V except for rare circumstance, like appliance replacement or adding a car charging portal.)
Most gas-powered leaf blowers and trimmers have 2-cycle engines where you mix the oil and fuel together and pretty much directly exhaust the combustion. Can't be good to burn that stuff...
The IC engines used for lawn tools have significant weight and cost constraints and less regulation compared to the IC engines used in transportation which makes them much more polluting. Similarly, motorcycle engines are more polluting than car engines by an order of magnitude.
Can you provide data on motorcycle engines? I do believe this to be true for 2-strokes and older motorcycles, but for modern Euro-4/5 regulated street motorcycles I very much doubt it.
Bikes didn't require catalysts for a long time. And they often used less-precise fueling systems, like carburetors. But that has changed or is changing in a lot of places more recently.
Carbon emission has an almost direct relationship to the amount of fuel burned, so assuming single occupancy, even older motorcycles do fair better than most cars in that respect.
Particulate and NOX emission, not so much.
Practically this incorrect. When a car is in single or double occupancy (which is majority of cases) it will pollute more than a motorcycle one. Yes, a filled bus or car might be more efficient, but the average utilization on an auto is very low since most people drive them alone.
You might be talking CO2 emissions where a car emits more than a bike.
Pollution is a different matter though. Even the big 4-stroke tourers have worse emission control than cars; the 2-stroke motorbikes are exponentially worse in SOx/NOx/CO/particulate emissions (which hurt your lungs rather than the climate).
The two stroke engines they use are terrible. I mean you mix oil into the fuel so it just burns off. No surprise that it's polluting disproportionately.
I don't know about the 10% figure, but regardless of whether you pick numbers from the high or low end of the range of estimates, the impact of lawn equipment is still staggering. 4 cycle engines make a huge difference, as do things like catalytic converters and scrubbers. 2-stroke engines, on the other hand, are both a horribly inefficient design to begin with, and also typically come fitted with absolutely no pollution controls.
Also, it's not just leaf blowers. It's also lawn mowers and other gas powered lawn equipment.
Cars and Trucks have catalytic converters for a reason. If we were serious about this we would have mandated the same for lawn equipment (at serious expense mind you).
Now I think everybody is quietly waiting for the revolution of battery powered lawn equipment to make this moot.
The revolution is obviously coming. The big manufactures probably support this as it will force their customers to replace working equipment with their new battery lines.
Oh yeah, it's already here. The money to be made is huge. Used to be you'd go buy a Honda mower and it would run with practically zero maintenance for 20 years or more. Now you go get a cordless mower and replace batteries every two or three years, and the whole thing becomes obsolete pretty quickly. It's a lucrative market.
Gas mowers are definitely not zero maintenance, at least not past 10 years. I've replaced my fair share of gaskets & spark plugs, cleaned out intakes, and spent 20m screwing with the choke to get the damn things started.
I went pure electric 5 years ago with no problems. Starts up every time with the push of a button and since I bought a set, it came with multiple batteries so I can swap them out before fully depleting one for extended life.
Ethanol in gas has had a seriously deleterious effect on lawn equipment. So many carbs full of gooey nasty rubber residue. My local Home Depot has started carrying cans of ethanol free gasoline because there are literally no gas stations in the county that carry it anymore.
It's bad when you're looking at some piece of equipment and are relieved to discover that it has been sitting with gas in it since the 90s. At least there is a hope the rubber bits are intact.
On the other hand, this is so common now that the aftermarket carb business has become a mass market. You can buy chinese knockoffs carbs with all of the hoses and plastic bits for like $10 on Amazon now.
Closest one to me according to pure-gas.org is about an hour away, a couple of counties over. There are literally none in the county. I don't know if that's local law or market forces in action.
That isn't ethanol. That is the cheaper grade of gas they use with ethanol rotting faster. (Ethanol is high octane, you cannot use the same molecules in non-ethanol gas as you can in ethanol) So yes, ethanol free gas lasts longer, but it isn't because it is ethanol free, it is because the gas is better quality.
Aftermarket carbs are cheap because carbs are cheap. You can buy a lawn mower at WalMart for $100, and everyone has to make a profit. That means the engine can't cost more than $20, and the carb must be less than that. The Chinese make a nice profit selling new carbs for $10, even though most carbs still go to the engine manufactures who pay a lot less in quantity.
Ethanol has been common enough in gas since the 90s.In the early years there were problems with it attacking rubber. That rubber hasn't been used in fuel systems for years though.
I guess everyone has a different experience, then. I made a sport out of trying to kill an old Briggs & Stratton lawn mower by doing no maintenance at all. Running old gas, never changing the oil or anything else, just didn't care. It wouldn't die. Well, except for the self-propelled part, that was always a nuisance. But the engine was indestructible [0]. I finally retired it after 20 years due to rust, but the engine was still going fine.
I have my share of electric battery-powered lawn equipment, but I've already gone through one generation of batteries which rendered the old equipment obsolete. And the markup on batteries is on the order of 500% compared to what a generic battery of similar chemistry would cost. It's an excellent racket, very profitable.
I wonder about the people here on HN buying Ryobi stuff... maybe they're onto something. Normally I wouldn't touch Ryobi with a ten foot pole, because it's trash. But OTOH, it's cheap, so maybe the quality of the tool will match up with the expected availability of batteries so the TCO isn't as offensive.
[0] If you haven't seen those old videos where B&S demonstrates why the Slick 50 demos were BS, you should. Lawnmower engines are way overbuilt, mostly as an artifact of their small size. They're hard to kill.
The revolution is already here. I had gas powered weedwackers as a kid. Nowadays I own an 18v brushless Makita. It's fantastic, almost as powerful as the gas one was...and they also make 36v and 80v versions that are beyond powerful enough for any job.
Those higher voltage weedwackers are very impressive. I've used one that was somewhere north of 40v, and it was closer to a brush-cutter than a weedwacker. I had to turn it down to a lower setting to prevent damaging the things I was trimming around.
I own a mix. I absolutely love my electric leaf blower and electric chainsaw. But I own both an electric and a gas-powered string trimmer. The electric one is every bit as powerful as the gas one, and it's much nicer to use. But it doesn't have the runtime to do the large steep slope further away from the house. For the big jobs I tend to dual-wield, using a blade on one and a string on the other. If I hadn't inherited the gas-powered one, I'd probably just have more batteries for the electric one.
Emissions controls for cars, and semi-trucks started becoming a thing in the mid 1970s, and standards have got stronger over the years. There are a few collector cars around, but for the most part anything in actually use is pretty clean, emitting CO2 and H2O. (Of course CO2 has issues, but short term nothing nearly as harmful as what small engines produce)
Small airplanes have not kept up (they still use lead fuel!), and so are overall worse than lawn equipment. However there is a lot more lawn equipment. (I don't know anything about modern jet engine emissions)
In 2011, approximately 26.7 million tons of pollutants were emitted by GLGE (VOC=461,800; CO=5,793,200; NOx=68,500, PM10=20,700; CO2=20,382,400), accounting for 24%−45% of all nonroad gasoline emissions. Gasoline-powered landscape maintenance equipment (GLME; leaf blowers/vacuums, and trimmers, edgers, brush cutters) accounted for 43% of VOCs and around 50% of fine PM. Two-stroke engines were responsible for the vast majority of fine PM from GLME.
Note that the above is not talking about CO2. Pollutants other than CO2 are typically heavily regulated for on-road vehicles and power generation, and they have expensive systems that prevent a very significant amount of those pollutants from being emitted.
For example, your cars catalyst prevents a lot of pollutants from being emitted -- but your lawnmower doesn't have this device at all.
CO2 is a different story all together -- because it's the primary byproduct.
They are extremely wasteful. Auto manufacturers are always improving emissions on their engines but thats not the case in lawn equipment. Passenger flights and leaf blowers are two largely western luxuries that are absolutely horrible for our environment.
I recall reading somewhere a gas powered leaf blower emits as much CO pollution in 15 minutes as a full sized SUV does over a 1000 mile cross country trip. They are insanely dirty in comparison.
Yeah it seems nonsensical. My 2-stroke lawnmower burns maybe a pint of fuel three or four times a month or so. My car burns gallons a day. Granted the car exhaust is cleaner, but it's so much more total hydrocarbon burned.
Lawn equipment tends to have proportionally huge non-CO2 pollutant emissions because they are meant to be portable and thus have been exempted from emission standards. From what I've read, it seems like lawn equipment manufacturers do not consider pollution as a parameter when designing their equipment.
Electric lawn equipment has only become viable in the market in the past decade or so due to improved batteries. Now that electrification is feasible (and often nicer to use than gas-powered), seems great to ban or at least disincentivize combustion engine equipment.
As others have pointed out, not CO2 but other pollutants, mainly. Because of 2 stroke engines. They literally throw oil particles into the air, and burn oil mixed in with the gas. Lightweight, mechanically simple, and variable torque, but absolutely environmentally awful. And noisy.
"The hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor," said Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor at Edmunds.com. "As ridiculous as it may sound, it is more 'green' to ditch your yard equipment and find a way to blow leaves using a Raptor."
"The tests found that a Ryobi 4-stroke leaf blower kicked out almost seven times more oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and 13.5 times more carbon monoxide (CO) than the Raptor, which InsideLine.com once dubbed "the ultimate Michigan mudslinger." An Echo 2-stroke leaf blower performed even worse, generating 23 times CO and nearly 300 times more non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) than the Raptor. "
10% does seem mind bogglingly high, but then when you consider just how big the efficiency gap is, and start thinking about how many people have leaf blowers, weed whackers and the like... maybe it's possible?
Not only that, but the dudes with gas leaf blowers outside my apartment seem to always make 3 or 4 passes by my apartment if I'm in the middle of a conference call.
They seem to only make a single pass if I'm not having a call.
As much as the environmental impact is significant, I'm mainly enthused because I really dislike the impact of the noise pollution. Having worked from home for a few years now, the worst part to me is the frequent landscaping noise throughout the day. Even if the gardeners all come by your block at the same day every week, they may show up to nearby blocks on other days of the week and create noise that's audible from far away. An hour of hearing overly loud landscaping equipment ruins my day, and I'm otherwise not a very neurotic person. I don't even get why gas powered lawn equipment has to be that loud; I attached a 2-stroke motor to a bike once with a cheap muffler and even that didn't sound as loud as most lawnmowers.
> I attached a 2-stroke motor to a bike once with a cheap muffler and even that didn't sound as loud as most lawnmowers.
I'd guess a combination of inexpensive underpowered engines and a spinning blade. I have an old mower with a big engine that doesn't really seem to work too hard, and it's only a little bit louder than my electric mower.
The worst offenders are 2 stroke engines which are smaller per hp than 4 strokes that would live on your lawn mower where size matters less. 2 stroke engines burn oil as a feature and are irritatingly loud. Ive a mix of battery/electric and gasoline lawn tools and a relatively large plot of land.(5ish acres) I cant use electric without a fleet of batteries charged and ready.
I'm pretty protective of my batteries, but one time my wife accidentally ran one to empty and now it's a $120 paperweight. Battery prices are a big sticking point for me as my budget is just a little too small to be ok spending so much on one, and this incident made me reconsider staying electric in the future.
Makita puts the protection/charge control circuitry in the battery pack, instead of in the tool or the charger. That makes their batteries more expensive, but you can't kill them by running them dry or through overheating in use. The pack itself will cut power to the tool. Makes them much more robust than the other common consumer/prosumer brands (not sure about pro brands like Hilti and Fein).
This is epitomized for me by the one guy in Santa Clara who I saw blow a single leaf an entire block rather than pick it up. I was already annoyed by their incredibly loud and inefficient landscaping and that just took the cake.
Blows my mind how many shops in Western states water their sidewalk daily with a hose with the state of the water supply over there. It would be so simple to fine these shops.
Can't speak for all of the Western states, but in SF it's basic hygiene to get piss off the sidewalk so that your store doesn't smell like it. Maybe there is a less wasteful way though, not sure.
"Can't speak for all of the Western states, but in SF it's basic hygiene to get piss off the sidewalk"
This cracks me up. As someone who lives in a Eastern state I sincerely hope that doesn't speak for all western states, I've never heard of that.
In LA you would think it would be for the piss too, but it seems mostly to get off small leaves and dirt from the sidewalk that might take you ten extra minutes to sweep instead up, and you see it both in areas with encampments and without.
It shouldn't as the vast majority of water is wasted growing fruits and vegetables in what is basically desert/semi-desert areas. Watering lawns and sidewalks is small potatoes in comparison, yet very few people complain about the 80% problem and preach to their neighbors about the 20% issue.
If you live in a suburban area like I do, practically every day one of the neighbors has these running. And half the time it's just blowing it to the street to later land on someone else's property.
Yeah, it's gotten a little better recently(dunno if it's just because of weather), but there was a long stretch where every day I would go out to my backyard and, on any given day of the week, there was someone mowing or weed whacking nearby. Weed whacking is almost worse because people love to "rev" the weed whacker constantly instead of just holding down the button. But yeah, it almost entirely ruins the suburban experience for me because there are so few moments when you can just sit outside during the day without having some obnoxious motor running somewhere.
Then again, I'm also averse to the lengths people go through to maintain landscaping. Landscaping is necessary, but so many homeowners care so much about property values that they want everything to constantly appear uniform. Some neighbors even rat on each other to their HOA if one person went an extra week without mowing.
> because people love to "rev" the weed whacker constantly instead of just holding down the button.
With at least the weedwhacker I have, there's not really an option. If you hold the button down, it overheats. If you leave it up to long, it shuts off. As a result, any time I'm walking across pavement, or in between patches that need weedwhacking, I have to rev the stupid thing.
I agree with everything you've said though. I don't have a choice right now, but the way suburban/urban landscaping is done is a nightmare.
I hardly ever see a user of a blower actually blow stuff into a pile and pick it up. This is the part that makes me crazy. The wind is just going to blow it right back to where it was!
I've seen that happen right before a hurricane. Wind was already gusting, roughly at tropical storm levels. The full force of a category 3 was just a few hours away. There was my neighbor, blowing leaves from his driveway.
No way, there is a SIGNIFICANT difference in noise between a gas powered weed whacker and an electric one. The only thing you hear in the latter is the bzzzzzzz which is a lot easier to deal with than a screaming 2 stroke.
It's both. Obviously, electric leafblowers will be quieter than 2-stroke leafblowers, but that doesn't make them quiet in any way. Just like electric cars are still loud at high speed and freeways will always be loud, because wind and tires make way more noise than any normal car engine crusing at 2000 rpm.
It's not the same, because cars have mufflers, and are MUCH quieter than your leaf blower during operation. Of course you're not going to eliminate all noise, but they are significantly reduced without an engine. Can't really compare a freeway to your neighborhood lawn care.
The electric ones also move significantly less air. I say this as the owner of a top of the line electric blower that will never in a million years own a gas one. The gas ones are far superior for actually blowing large amounts of leaves or large areas, but I'm totally content to pick up most leaves on the lawn when I mow and use the blower just for hard-to rake areas. That works very well.
I’ll refute yours. I own an electric. It’s insanely loud. I don’t need hearing protection for my blow dryer but I certainly do for my electric leaf blower.
Anyone who sincerely believes electric leaf blowers are - on average - even close to as loud as gas-powered blowers has to be arguing on the smallest of small sample sizes or bad faith. They're not comparable, there's a reason community-driven pushes to ban leaf blowers focus on those with combustion engines.
Can an electric leaf blower be as loud as a gas-powered one? Sure. I'm sure under the right circumstances a Prius can make noise comparable to Corolla too. Electric leaf blowers aren't silent and are often loud, but not aggravatingly loud. They won't make your next-door neighbors lose their mind, much less your neighbors two doors down.
The above poster isn't saying electric models are quiet, just that they are quieter than a similar gas model. Which makes sense when you think about it. Both of them probably have similar air turbulence noise of the blower part, but an electric motor is almost always way quieter than a bunch of pistons rattling about and having fuel-air mixture detonations.
I'm not the previous person, but I assume they mean that not everything about life should be regulated. There are actually some real practical problems with this, because life is complicated and has an endless list of edge cases that can't possibly be captured in law.
Every law your government passes is another nail in the coffin of personal freedom, so they must be carefully considered. Every liberal democracy will eventually die but we don't have to hasten it by making every new law "for the public good". I'm not saying what Oakland is doing is good or bad, but every new law should be carefully considered and I think that a lot of people forget that everytime the government makes you do something that means you lost another bit (or chunk) of freedom. See the Patriot Act for instance, we may never recover from that it severely damages and continues to damage individual rights and privacy as the primary cudgel the US government uses to justify unconstitutional surveillance of Americans.
Its like passing a law prohibiting farting in an elevator or wearing too much perfume. Fundamentally who is going to enforce it? Do we want to have police out there chasing people with blowers and wearing so much perfume you can smell them from half a block away?
Yet people do these things which are infuriating and intrude on those around them without a thought.
I own a battery operated trimmer and blower, and unfortunately, they’re not much quieter (I hear my neighbors, too). In fact, they almost seem more annoying as they seem to emit a different frequency.
Agree with things to reduce noise pollution, but don’t feel like this will help much in that regard.
The electric ones i've seen are still damn noisy. If you want to make a fan worth a damn to move leaves and debris, you are gonna make some noise no matter how it's powered, evidenced by the fact that it's recommended to wear ear protection still with electric lawn care equipment.
The bigger issue imo is that we incentivize the wrong things. Money and time instead of quality and a job well done. It's faster to blow loudly than to rake silently. A silent landscaping company powered by reel mowers and rakes would clear less properties per man hour, but maybe there is in fact a market there for that premium, nearly silent service.
"All Nonroad sources account for approximately 242 million tons of pollutants each year, accounting for 17% of all VOC missions, 12% of NOx emissions, 29% of CO emissions, 4% of CO2 emissions, 2% of PM10 emissions, and 5% of PM2.5 emissions."
What's "Nonroad" isn't clearly defined here, so I assume it's quite a lot more than "Gas-powered blowers".
Great! Let’s hit the most protected group of all - small immigrant independent gardening contractors. They have piles of money lying around to buy new less effective equipment.
That's definitely a relevant point to this discussion for sure, but I guess as much as I hate technocratic solutions, I would still prefer some dumbass Neo-liberal subsidies ("cash for clunkers?") for upgrading than allowing continued use.
You're especially right to be wary as these policies tend to ultimately penalize lower income workers, and I would prefer a larger discussion about solving housing access & other necessities that could make these structural changes way more equitable.
If their customers can afford them now, they certainly can afford the $1/hr increase it would take to offset new equipment. This impacts home owners more.
Also, just because it's inconvenient, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
As a home owner I have. Corded blowers are fine. Battery trimmers are fine. There exists commercial grade electric stuff.
Regulation costs money. Making a safer car was more expensive and it took tons of political legwork to legislate mandatory seatbelts/airbags/backup cameras. Doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
Lawn maintenance is extremely expensive, and toxic, and polluting. Used to live in suburbia proper, and I used to have the worst lawn, my neighbors hated me, but I DGAF.
When I rented a single family dwelling in the Central Valley in CA, I simply let the weeds / grass mixture take over while using a push-reel mower to keep it as a lawn, then let the lawn die during the summer and fall.
Virtually no noise, no pollution, and even a brown lawn after being well kept didn't look terrible.
The really crazy thing is that in many places you are required to maintain your lawn in something like the traditional manner. Not just in crazy Southern states, either. In my own town in Massachusetts, I remember a controversy about someone letting their lawn revert to a proper meadow, neighbors complaining that it harbored pests which destroyed their lawns, etc. It was crazy and hypocritical, but also exemplary of a common reality across the US.
Water use from watering your lawn is pretty insignificant when put up against other aspects of daily American life, or things like industry. I hate this sort of consumer side rhetoric for climate change. Change all the lawns in America to gravel you want, ban all the straws, none of that will make an impact when the biggest impact by a mile is from industry protected by a profitable regulatory environment their own lobbyists have designed. Better to go straight for the jugular when you need to kill Goliath than to try hitting him with a Nerf Dart.
We still have a gas mower. Climate change has reduced our grass-cutting climate impact. In the past few years, our grass is dried out and almost dead by July. If we cut it after that, it becomes really dead. If we don't, it hibernates until the fall rains. So lately we don't cut our grass for two months out of the summer.
And particulate matter. The lawn maintenance workers come to neighbouring houses and just blow the stuff onto the street and towards the other houses. Then another crew comes in and blows it back. It eventually all ends up at my house. Clogging up my cpu fans...
I cannot believe they are actually banned, the leaf blower is like the state bird over here (maybe right after the ever present LAPD helicopter). Seems like a stupid easy ticket if the LAPD decided to spend the literal 10 minutes it takes to find one of these guys operating daily in absolutely every single neighborhood, but such is the nature of law enforcement in CA (Not to mention Chief Moore probably hires some guys with gas powered blowers for his place too).
Having just moved to the suburbs during the pandemic I feel like I am taking crazy pills. So we all have lawns that we dump thousands of gallons of clean water on, then everyday from 9am-11am gardeners trucks pour into the suburban neighborhoods, make a huge racket mowing and blowing, and then an hour or two later they all flow back out. And the end result is all these neat squares of grass in front of everyones homes that serve no purpose. It is really baffling.
Like a lot of things in life, it does serve a purpose, but only a social one (the social pressure of having a well manicured lawn), whether it's because of a HOA or a need to suck up to neighbors. Which makes it even more obnoxious than serving no purpose at all to me! Just another chore.
It does serve a purpose, though, it's parkland ultimately. People use their lawns to host events that might be larger than what their home could host, they are a safe area for children to play unsupervised, it's an area where you can produce food for yourself without having to spend earned income to feed yourself, livestock and pets can roam it, etc. Plus, many cities in the U.S. are park poor and the only greenspace really is what is available privately.
It depends on the local regulatory environment. You can do these things in your front yard where I live (based on what I've seen among my neighbors at least).
Plants, grass, and trees are pretty. People tend to feel good looking at them rather than just concrete, asphalt, and plastic. Lawns attract birds and bees and butterflies and bugs. I don't think there's any real mystery about why people like lawns.
The grass part of my yard feeds many rabbits and birds (grass and worms, respectively). Other than when covered with snowpack, it’s rare to go two days without seeing a rabbit and birds are feeding every morning, especially after rains (that bring the worms higher). This is in a small city yard that’s mostly grass.
Sure, rabbits are happy enough with mowed grass, but if you asked them, they'd probably rather you didn't cut the tender tips off all the time. :) And the species of birds that hunt worms in the ground are a very small subset of what you could find in a city. (I would venture you're mostly seeing robins.)
that's an argument for a nice garden you find in the British countryside, but the manicured American suburban lawn looks like something ordered out of an ecommerce store, factory produced. Actually urban concrete jungle is more interesting.
Unless you've got an HOA or a city or county law that requires you to water your lawn, or are in a place with very low rainfall, it should be safe to skip watering the lawn most of the time.
A lawn should be able to go 4 weeks with no water in the summer and not die. It will go dormant, and once the water starts again it will green up quickly. A dormant lawn will be brown and you shouldn't walk on it much, but if you don't need to do things on it and aren't bothered aesthetically by it, it's fine.
Once it goes brown, water it maybe every 3 weeks just to make sure it doesn't go from dormant to dead if you don't get enough rain.
I've always hated lawns too - house after house with the same kind of pointless, perfectly manicured square of green. The waste of all the water and energy, all the chemicals used to keep out anything but grass. I mean, it may as well be astroturf given it's always kept looking like it!
I fully agree that some vegetation looks nice, and is good for insects and birds. But I'd much prefer some variety at least - different grasses, wildflowers, moss, clover, local plants, and not kept permanently trimmed 3mm off the earth. I mentioned this to my wife a few years back, and she looked at me like I'd gone crazy, and I've had the same aghast looks from others too.
Actually, I'd like to see some proposals for regulation around this. Homogeneous lawns are just such a colossal waste.
That's only what happens in the bougie suburbs. Literal teams of professional staff making putting greens in front of stately homes, because keeping grass that thick and low takes a lot of regular work. Most places that aren't a desert or Mediterranean climate in the US don't need their lawns watered, rain is frequent enough, and grass might only need to be cut 1-2 times a week if that, depending on the rains. Overall, even in places that need sprinklers like CA, sprinkler systems don't use much water relative to other strains on the water system such as industry. It might be foolhardy to grow a lawn where the heat is regularly exceeding 100*, however, because you will practically have to water multiple times a day to keep up with the hot ground baking out the water.
I hear you and agree with your intended outcome, but we should be legislating outcomes, not the path to reaching them.
In this example, reasonable legislation would limit the noise and pollution from blowers, without specifically banning any particular technology.
The US had sealed beam headlamps for years after better lighting technologies were invented because US law required them instead of mandating some technology-agnostic standard [0].
Or more recently, we've banned the use of phones while driving. I ask: is it legal to play harmonica while driving? If we agree that it shouldn't be, the law should be written to ban both using a phone or playing harmonica while driving without specifically mentioning either, except perhaps as examples.
Unlike the sealed beam headlamps however, this law isn't requiring any particular technology. It's just outlawing a known harmful one.
In some ways this is nicer because a company doesn't need to do specific emission and noise testing certifications to comply with a single municipalities regulations. So people in Oakland can have potentially more choices while achieving a reduction of combustion emissions.
But it's still subject the same issues for the same reason. I can build a gas powered generator which feeds electricity to my electric blower and poof it's legal now. But in terms of noise/emissions/etc the problem is the same.
So the lesson is that Government really shouldn't get in the game of trying to regulate specific technologies rather than whatever harmful side effects are created by the technology. Regulate noise and emissions, and let the engineers find the best ways of meeting those targets.
No one's going to do that other than maybe an insane hobbyist. It would combine the worst aspects of gas and electric blowers. A law doesn't have to stop every possible bad outcome to be worth having.
Right, like auto makers would never put a phone style interface right into their cars, so that people could avoid "distracted driving" by hooking their phone up to their car and using the car's touch screen legally instead of the phone's. Only insane hobbyists would do that, as it combines the worse aspects of the requiring human touch and distraction to operate with the slow technology release cycle of auto manufacturers.
> the law should be written to ban both using a phone or playing harmonica while driving without specifically mentioning either, except perhaps as examples.
Slippery slope arguments shouldn’t apply to specific provisions in the law that target likely scenarios.
Let’s say you said that the driver shouldn’t drive distracted. You have now outlawed listening to radio, music, or others talking in a way not conducive to giving full attention to the car, perhaps even while the car is being driven automatically, if there is any chance of the driver needing to drive manually such that they must be ready to drive.
That said, I agree that the method of generating the outcome need not always be defined. For example, in some legislation, companies/vendors are named specifically, which may lead to de facto support by the government of some private institutions, which seems anticompetitive.
We do indeed see infotainment systems in cars that are the direct analogues of cell phones and cause distracted driving. They even connect to the phones and give similar touch screen apps.
These systems are legal but using the phone is not, so this really is a great example of trying to regulate technology rather than outcomes. All that happens is vendors put ports in their cars and route the phone interface to the driver in a fixed screen rather than in the phone's screen. Regulation bypassed.
Setting emission thresholds means needing to get out there and perform spot checks in the field. It's specialised, expensive and in practise means many people just flouting the law and getting away with it. Pointless law.
Simply banning ICE strimmers and blowers means any enforcement officer can easily cite rule breakers, confiscate equipment, etc.
And per sibling, not the same as mandating one technology, at all.
New design: there is a piston engine, similar to the type that runs off of compressed air. It is powered by proprietary cartridges that contain compressed exhaust fumes. Cartridges are available in several different scents: 2-stroke, bunker fuel, trash-to-energy, coal, car fire, 100LL, tobacco, crematorium, etc.
You also have to legalize other options than having a well-manicured lawn. Often, you'll get fines or the city will just come in and do things for you (and charge you!) if your lawn grows above a certain point.
Exactly. If it's a noise ordinance, set time limits during the day. If it's a pollution issue, look at the problem from a wider lens and then slowly introduce standards as we have with improving emissions in cars. This is simply a knee jerk feel good law that won't solve the problem. The 60v blowers are just as loud, the generators just as loud.
I think it's not unlikely that they might be charging their equipment off of a truck mounted generator (or the truck itself) which is good news - since most generators and all cars are far more efficient and generally better muffled than leaf blowers.
Leaf blowers churn out a bunch of monoxide due to the generally poor motor design.
Could be. Until better battery alternatives come up. I don’t think a battery can be charged very quickly. Even with an on-site generator. So they will have multiple batteries. At which point it might be better off charging them overnight.
It will reduce noise across yards. It will increase efficiency. It will cause more ewaste. And it will definitely raise prices.
> Landscaping companies will be running gas powered generators to charge their batteries...
Which, even accounting for charging losses, will be less polluting than backpackable two-strokes, and less close to where workers breathe, so, mission accomplished, whether the pollution concern is environmental or worker health or both.
Fantastic, as I'd rather listen to the even the cheapest Harbor Freight open-frame generator over a two-stroke leaf blower any time you care to ask me. That set up will pollute less, too.
I’m not opposed to this. They are noisy. They often come early on weekends!
But that said, I hope they compensate current owners with vouchers or grant some trade in value and not outright ban them without compensation. That would be wholly unfair to current owners.
This is the thing, doesn't even need to be battery powered, houses usually have external accessible power points (at least in the US and certainly in Oakland).
Houses are a small part of landscaping maintenance around a city. I bet there aren't as many outlets available as you think. You also have to deal with consumption and ownership of the outlet, how do you re-imburse someone with external outlets in a townhouse situation?
While people usually complain about the noise, the far bigger concern is pollution. Almost all of the power-weight advantage in the lightweight two-stroke engines used in these machines is gained with partial combustion of lubricant-enriched fuel and no emissions control. With some pollutants it is something like two to three magnitudes of order worse per unit of energy produced, compared to a low-emissions car engine.
This is all well and good, but i'd much prefer the city focus on things like cleaning up all the broken glass everywhere or addressing the unhoused issues before taking on such superfluous tasks.
There are some good examples elsewhere in the article responses but this legislation may significantly improve health outcomes for landscapers and provide a non-negligible effect on the environment. Two-stroke leafblower engines pollute a lot.
It's not just about making people feel good or allowing audiophiles to listen to records undisturbed.
Legislating that property owners not use anti-human systems doesn't take much effort, is easy to knock out. Using a zero-sum mentality, that good legislation in one place is incompatible with doing work elsewhere, is harmful. Especially when the work you talk about requires not just legislation, but significant resources invested. Here, we only mandate that companies do the right thing, at their own cost. This seems like an easy win, something worth knocking out early. Blocking easy at-hand work on all the backlog of big important hard to do work seems illogical.
How is it superflous? It improves air quality a lot, and it's free to implement. Also, it's not an exclusive policy, it can be done in addition to the things you propose.
At the end of the day lawn service gets more expensive, but assuming the city can strongly enforce the law it should become more expensive more or less equally across the board so there shouldn't be any direct winner or loser from the policy. The companies would theoretically lose a few customers that could only barely afford the service in the first place, but I don't think it would cost many customers in the end.
Assuming the lawn services can pass the cost along to customers. Given the low barriers to entry, I would not make this assumption.
In reality, a mix of total wage decreases (i.e. reduction in hours, benefits and/or hourly wage), supplier payment decreases, profit decreases and price increases will incorporate the change. Also, if an outfit cannot afford the capital cost of upgrading their equipment, they will fold.
If it costs some services more to upgrade than others then they will be in trouble. If enforcement is nonuniform than it will also be an issue. But if both of these can be controlled then it's really just those consumers that could only barely afford a lawn service in the first place that get left in the cold.
Enforcement shouldn't be excessively difficult. Cops can write citations for illegal equipment, and if a company routinely ignores the citations they could get in real trouble. Give the companies plenty of time (a year or two) to phase in the new equipment as well. Make sure the change is well publicized, especially in Hispanic media. If the city was really proactive they could task an intern with calling every lawn service company in the city 6 months before the law goes into effect and make sure each one has a plan to transition in time.
The enforcement is key however. These sorts of regulations will be ignored 100% if they aren't enforced. Escalating fines are necessary, they have to make it more expensive to break the law than comply, or the companies that cheat will win.
It might inspire some residents to give up their lawns. Which would also be a plus. So far they've externalized the true cost of their lawn maintenance on everyone else.
Neither was the multi-million dollar subsidy to polluters paid by the people who didn't want or need the gasoline-powered leaf-blower service, and who have been picking up the cost of the free riders for a long time.
It's not free to implement. If they were to enforce this law it would bear costs to the city to get those citations. I'm willing to bet this law goes unenforced like the same law does in Los Angeles.
Why can't we do good? I'd prefer it if we solved global warming before putting in energy toward next-gen video cards but I do understand that some problems aren't simple (i.e. the unhoused issues in particular) and I don't think the easy problems should wait politely to be solved behind the hard and complex ones.
My apt complex has 'landscapers' that use these. Landscapers in quotes because there's about 10 sq meters of lawn and a few plants. Every weekend they're out there blowing dirt around. It's not like it does anything besides making the pool unusable.
I think a reasonable option for people that do this for a living would be a back-park worn battery pack that has an inverter to drive leaf blowers that typically use a 110VAC input, since the backpack could house the equivalent of maybe 10 of the normal small batteries that are used in the battery powered leaf blowers.. only problem is that they are pretty spendy.. likely the cost will come down once these are more mainstream.. but yea the noise of these things is horrible.. for example, lets say you live in a neighborhood where 8 of your neighbors all have lawn services that use them.. easily that means you could have one or two per day.. bwahhh bwahhhhh everyday.. super obnoxious.. Here is one backpack electric leaf blower:
EGO BAX1501 56V 28Ah, $1300
Has anyone else noticed the trend of ever-increasing laws and ever-decreasing enforcement?
It’s not a good mix. We end up with a system that punishes people following the rules and doesn’t do anything about the many people breaking the rules. It also creates the sense of unfairness and general lawlessness — that laws are recommendations that can mostly be ignored.
I echo this sentiment. It's either getting too expensive (people) to police laws with sufficient numbers, or we are not interested in offending people or doing the dirty work of putting teeth behind laws in the name of "equity" (for some things).
I hate half-measures that inconvenience those that follow the rules, and do nothing to punish those who break them.
Yeah, it's just not an effective means to change small behavior like this. They could have instead banned loud noise making machines and/or machines with high pollution, and this would reduce the supply, and shift the demand to the alternatives, which by definition should now optimize for the proper features (silent and green).
The way things happening now, especially in CA, is laws for everything such that it specifies behavior, not incentives. This then makes enforcement target individuals instead of market suppliers.
I'm saying ban something that targets the supply, in a way that is both general but at the same time addresses the specific immediate need. It's hard to expand here, but IMHO the system/process of Law is not meant to target things at such "level of detail". If the system was extremely fast at revising existing laws, I would have a different opinion, but with how much power it has plus how slow it is, why are lawmakers designing laws that punish such specific activities? As a crude analogy it's like a bunch of programmers are adding a ton of bloat to the code just for a tiny feature, that maybe should have been part of a bigger feature to begin with.
To summarize, every law needs to be extremely well thought out, but results have shown otherwise (although that's a different thread).
It generally ensures that there is always something to charge someone with if they come to the attention of the authorities and if the "offender" is not politically or socially advantaged in some way.
These types of laws should always be implement with some sort of grandfather system otherwise it ends up being a tax on being poor.
In BC we used to have something called Air Care, which measured your vehicle emissions and forced bad cars off the road. Naturally it only impacted people who couldn't afford new cars. It was the one of the dumbest government programs I had ever seen.
In California the state provides a $500 grant for low income people for to pay for emissions related repairs. They will also buy back cars that fail for $1500.
One of the biggest dangers about it is the ability of the government to practice selective prosecution.
When most people are guilty of multiple offenses, then a government can find political troublemakers and accuse them of violating dozens of "rules" that are otherwise never enforced.
Every new law should come with an expiration date, at which time a vote should occur to either extend or can it.
Alternatively, there should be a "fixed budget" for laws, as in: if you want to pass that new law, you're going to pick one of the existing laws on the books an can it to make space for the new one.
I think its great that combustion engines are banned since they pollute a lot!
Yes its named Parkinsons law. Parkinson noticed that the number of ships in the english army was decreasing but the number of administrators administrating the ships were increasing.
Government officials hire more officials which invents new laws and rules.
Seems like a disproportionate impact on landscaping companies, thinks are hard enough with COVID without adding the cost of retooling and buying a days worth of batteries for each piece of equipment
It would be ironic if this forced landscaping companies to all buy noisy diesel generators to run constantly so they can charge a bank of batteries while running on another set.
On the other hand, a single big diesel generator is less harmful to the environment than a bunch of 2 stroke engines. It could theoretically even get some pollution controls that would be too heavy and expensive for the power equipment.
Or maybe they'll buy those F150s with the built in power bank and have the truck idle to charge the batteries. That would be even better for noise level and the environment, as the truck comes with modern pollution controls.
Another thought is that this might open up a black market for people hacking gas powered equipment so it is quiet and can pass for electric powered from a distance.
Living in LA now and I didn't know they did this until I read through this thread. Gas mowers invade the neighborhood daily. No enforcement means nothing changes.
YES! If they're giving Tesla incentives give battery operated leaf blowers incentives as well. Super happy cities are starting to do this, hope my neighborhood could as well.
I wonder if landscaping companies will buy a fuel-powered generator to run their electrical equipment, seeing as they'd otherwise have to use the property's outlets to power their equipment (or risk not having access to electricity on some properties).
It's possible, but even if this happens it's still a pretty big win over the two stroke engines that are prevalent in lawn equipment. You'd be surprised at how efficient a modern generator is compared to two stroke engines.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] threadAll of the electric ones are basically toys compared to the gas powered one. Gas unit's 1100 cfm and 220 mph rating is substantially higher than the electrics and it shows in performance. The electrics can barely move a small pile of dry leaves. The gas one can lift sheets of wet, mucky leaves and move them around effortlessly.
On the other hand, I love my battery string trimmer. That's a device that seems perfect for electric as the power requirement is quite low and there's no carb to get all gummed up. The electric works every time and a battery pack easily does my entire yard trimming twice over, so there's no fiddling or stopping required.
I use animal skin gloves for that authentic feel, though I've tried synthetic and bareback, and that's fine too.
I've found my emissions are lower with this setup, unless I ate lentils for lunch.
There's pluses and minuses to everything. As a lot of commenters pointed out, there have been many local ordinances that already do this, and many landscapers ignore them; as do the folks that hire the landscapers.
Where I live, I don't think that we have ordinances like that.
As I work from home, it sucks. Those two-strokes are loud.
https://www.wshu.org/post/david-bouchier-spring-chorus#strea...
That's what they used to say about cars, too. Innovation and technological advances will find a way, especially with the economic incentives created by this legislation for an enterprising startup to build a better battery blower.
Yet I can still drive 500 miles hauling 2500lb (8000lb gross weight), or haul 40,0000lb (80,000lb gross) over 2,000 miles without refueling / recharging.
No electric vehicle can do that, still today.
Let me know when an electric vehicle will be able to haul 100,000lb of grain all day long by -20C, then we'll talk.
Anyway you’re right about the average *current* battery powered ones.
Then theres the whole buying batteries, longevity of batteries, the power to charge etc. I would bet that the damage to the ecosystem from using gas blowers / trimmers isn't that big a difference and if equated in measurement of power and life, the gas far outperforms it.
Also, the Electrics are just as loud in most instances. Are they going to ban gas pressure washers next?
These batteries really will not age well in both common scenarios. The professional landscaper that uses this thing every day, possibly for a extended period of time will kill the battery very fast. The casual home owner that may use this thing once a weak or so will kill the battery with inactivity as it sits around in the garage 99% of the time.
The entry-level models don't even have exchangeable batteries. Basically throwing a perfectly good device away because battery is dead, producing huge amounts of e-waste.
Or just have the rules convert to "must not look abandoned", as long as that doesn't conflict with other existing rules. In case of conflict, the "must be lawn" rule would just disappear with no replacement.
EDIT: Let's downvote instead of actually having a proper response. I can't wait until the bubble some of you live in pops and all of this nonsense goes away.
Also, what you add in battery charging, you easily make up with reduced maintenance of the tool.
We're speaking of people doing their lawns after all...
New theft target when each one has to carry $8k worth of batteries in the truck/trailer to have enough juice to perform their normal task, which could have been performed by two 10 gallon jugs of gasoline.
These kind of models exist since a very long time, and I was not thinking of any battery model when I wrote my comment.
If at least they do it everywhere it's possible, that would already be great. Most of the time when I am distressed by the pollution and sound of a blower/mower there is an electrical outlet handy.
For a single family home, this is fine. For townhomes, larger lot, commercial properties, this isn't as clear.
I imagine you can get some things corded still. I use battery and corded all the time, but I have gas powered as well.
In a small home (less than 1 acre) I can work around it, on the farm. It's almost all gas. Things like the blower, lawn mower, chainsaws, etc. had bad electric alternatives. We also don't and can't run, 1000 foot electrical cords all over the property.
Corded will always be the better option though. With the drills on the farm, corded offer way more torque! Just make sure you've got isolated circuits for exterior and aren't loading them down or you're popping breakers with a couple of the electric tools plugged in.
Hell, even just running a 4-stroke generator will be far less polluting.
Ruined wrists don’t have to be a thing.
The guy who uses the $100 Home Depot weed whacker to do his own lawn is the one who gets screwed because he now either has to wrangle a cord everywhere or spend much more for equivalent performance from an electric.
(on second thought string trimmers are low enough power that a cheap battery one should work for a homeowner but for blowers, chainsaws and most other landscaping power equipment my point still stands, you gotta spend big bucks on the 36-48v stuff that performs about the same as the ICE powered $99.99 special)
Its right up there with "rules for thee and not for me".
But anyway, in most medium to large European cities there is little reason to drive. The restrictions on vehicles are overwhelmingly positive for residents' quality of life and the environment.
At least in Paris, poor people are not often the ones driving into Paris for work, they're mostly taking the metro in from the suburbs.
Paris has some moderate air pollution problems, often among the worst European or American cities (of course, globally there's much worse), and that effects everyone's quality of life and long-term health in a myriad of ways that we don't fully understand yet, as well as in some obvious ways that we already understand.
Of course there's always a bit of political show-boating with these things, and so the French left-wing do this with their pet issues, namely environmental issues. But that show-boating doesn't diminish the tangible positive effects of the policy...
Whether it is virtue points or an important issue is irrelevant, the way it was handled was appalling and harmful.
EDIT - If you're downvoting consider this: If you and your family were running a small landscaping business and need to replace thousands of dollars of equipment, you might feel differently. Be empathetic towards those people and consider other ways to accomplish the goal. We could just as easily have banned the sale of these after a future date. There are always options to mitigate the pressure on the affected persons.
I wonder, between the two of us, who has spent more time actually making money by doing landscaping.
A large portion of these 'businesses' are 1-2 people who scraped together whatever they could to get the equipment to make a living. Many are low income. Many sacrifice heavily in their personal lives to be able to make ends meet.
The lie here is the notion that the bunch that go the route of 'organic landscaping' are representative of the entire group.
This complaint is brought up for every single environmental improvement, and it misses the concept that the risk is an imbalance, not a change which affects everyone. For example, you used to not be able to see across the street in LA on bad smog days – and I remember plenty of people insisting that doing anything about that would devastate the economy, and yet California seems to be not exactly an impoverished wasteland.
Many run their business with the tools they can afford. Upon inspection, you would find that many such businesses have little to no resale value to lean on to make such an upgrade.
> They've likely had notice for a long time. Especially if they participate in their government.
What percentage of people laborers have the time to actively participate in government? I don't know the answer to this but I suspect it's shockingly small.
Are electric equivalents of the banned gas tools really that much more expensive?
The problem preventing commercial adoption is that if you want commercial user amounts of uninterrupted run time you wind up spending a fortune on batteries.
Of course if you are a homeowner that equipment will last a lot longer. (home owners buy a cheaper grade of quality in general, so you can't compare lifetimes with pro grade equipment)
I have personally seen such equipment remain in use for 15-20 years. When I was young the lawnmower we used was a monstrous Craftsman that was originally built 20 years prior. It was used year-round for that period for everything from snow removal, lawn mowing, and hauling landscaping supplies (retaining wall blocks and the like).
You would likely be surprised at the level of care and maintenance some small business owners put in.
We are talking about hand held stuff here though. While pros need equipment to last longer than home owners, there is a limit to how much mass they can deal with for something that is hand held.
I agree that second-order effects need to be considered, certainly. That is the point of phase-in periods, which this measure had.
Is it long enough, or substantial enough? Should small businesses be able to apply for exemptions, or interest free loans for new equipment, for example? Perhaps.
It should be uncontroversial given the facts and experiences with these engines that they are awful pollutants, terribly aggravating to communities, and that the world would be better without them.
My only point is that the way you implement change matters and that this implementation will adversely affect the worst-off population.
> It should be uncontroversial given the facts and experiences with these engines that they are awful pollutants, terribly aggravating to communities, and that the world would be better without them.
No controversy there at all.
I can easily imagine they did. Who's right? People have been raising this issue for years, the idea did not just fall out of the sky. I'm unclear why the people who have been putting up with the problem for a long time need to coddle the people creating the problem any longer.
I'm happy to see changes like this as it's something I've complained about for years; multiple properties in my area used these sort of services, and I'd frequently have to deal with the dust and dirt from their property being blown onto mine, along with noise and bad smells. I also felt bad for the operators who were exposed to that every day. So I am one of those people who has spent years nudging for a regulatory change.
Why, exactly, should anyone support a business model that can only be profitable by dumping its weaknesses on to other people? I mean, if you want to use a potentially dangerous product and the risks fall only on you, you have an absolute right to do that. But you have no right to accrue benefits while dumping the risk onto someone else.
It's just a bandaid that needs to be ripped off. Like RoHS getting rid of lead solder; that was never gonna happen without regulatory intervention.
And this isn't going to harm immigrant small businesses, because everyone's in the same boat. It's not like non-immigrant businesses get to continue using gas blowers.
Price will go up a little bit for consumers as everybody switches over to electric.
But we're not even talking a massive capital investment here. Weed whackers don't cost $50,000.
And since pretty much every vendor would have the same cost increase, it wouldn't be a competitive disadvantage from a pricing point of view. Likely the cost increase would mostly be passed on to the customer.
"A single two-stroke engine produces pollution equivalent to that of 30 to 50 four-stroke automobiles. "
https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/two-strokes-and...
Since I also have the Ego mower & weedwhacker, I have 3 batteries to swap through, but it is a pain during fall cleanup.
Absolutely no good for commercial or big jobs though.
I have no reservation about saying that the societal good far outweighs the bad.
This corrects this imbalanced market where 99% of stakeholders are held captive by old, polluting, loud, ultra-obnoxious, all-downsides-heavily-externalized persistent disturbances. Mandating electric options was evidently what it's going to take to get any change, to start to do the right thing.
The market, now that it was to do the right thing, can begin to adjust it's approach as to how it wants to do the right thing. It can improve it's designs, &c.
120 volts at 10 amps is kind of tepid, when compared against a combustion engine, and typical for the US
If you're comparing a commercial backpack to a consumer-grade handheld, sure, big difference. But, that's apples and oranges.
Comparing the commercial EGO systems to the commercial Husqvarna systems, both produce ~600cfm of air movement in a backpack system. The battery life on the EGO systems is sufficient (60 min+ runtime peer battery, in my experience, more than enough for several large yards during mowing season).
Yes, a landscape crew would need to carry several spare batteries per electric device, likely with some sort of charging station on the truck. Expensive up front costs, no question. But, probably worth it in the long run for emissions and nuisance gains.
So, we have an electric one for that, and for various other tasks, like clearing our steep driveway of debris that makes it difficult to receive deliveries or get our cars up. Blowing takes 30 seconds, where sweeping would take 5 minutes.
I used to begrudgingly use expensive four-stroke tools because they were less irritating than two-stroke and electrics weren't up to snuff, but more recently I've replaced everything but a leaf mulcher with cordless electric and I'm really happy with them. I'll probably replace the mulcher eventually as well, I don't doubt that the cordless equipment can deliver, it's just that it still works and where I use it trailing an extension cord is fine.
I couldn't find one (at the time, probably 4 years ago). Most everything I could find was 1/4 of the equivalent power.
Though I will admit to not being sure exactly what you will find.
In 5 minutes of googling for "commercial battery leaf blower" and "backpack battery leaf blower", it looks like they're mostly still in the 500-600W (2/3 HP) range with a couple hitting around 1000W, even for the backpack units.
Most of the ones in the middle of the product lineup are 500-600cfm
The number I got for a 3hp model was based on a husqvarna I saw from a quick google search, I think... almost certainly a residential model.
Pacific Northwest resident chiming in.
I absolutely have a thick mat of wet leaves. But IMO, the solution isn't a more powerful leave blower; it's a rake.
With battery powered chainsaws, the noise signature is much better and quieter.
2 stroke engines just have a way of screaming in their power band.
I saw my first electric leaf blower ~3 months ago & chatted with the crew some; they'd only picked their new gear up the day before! They were happy with it. The wearable one was much quieter, but there was also a ground-based unit that was still loud as all get out, alas.
I've also asked other property management crews (probably 7 at this point) if they knew about the ban, & so far, no one even knows about it, other than the one crew I'd met who'd just gotten their electric gear.
I am very curious to see, long term, how powering these systems works out. Will a work crew simply buy a bunch of 40V or 80V batteries? How many will be enough? How many crews will turn right around & buy a generator they'll leave running a good part of the day? Longer term, perhaps hybrid work vehicles like the F150 & their built in 2.4 & 7.2kW inverter could become a crucial capability. Alas, it seems probable one way or another that combustion based energy, albeit less dirty & radically less obnoxious than these gas tools, will be used.
Anyhow. This ban can't come soon enough. Another year of these noise devices is going to be obnoxious. Unlikely to ever happen, but I wish cities would have designated noise hours, say 3 hours a day, 5 days a week (whatever) where noise was allowed (without special circumstances permit). It seems like such an obvious civic good to coordinate, to try to steer us away from all causing loud riotous noise all day long.
[1] https://dcist.com/story/18/12/04/d-c-council-strikes-death-b...
For charing, many newer trucks come with robust power systems for running electrics. Obv not an expense to be taken lightly, but we're getting there. Ford has the most compelling options right now - right up to 7.3kw system (I believe that's with the engine idling). I believe that with the hybrid drivetrain, you can use a not-insignificant amount of electricity with he truck engine off.
It sounds like that might be the most practical way to force compliance.
i'm personally not sympathetic to the noise argument, since we accept the constant noise of much more plentiful and sometimes-quieter-but-sometimes-louder 2-ton vehicles all over the place. blowers/trimmers are also usually used during business hours where it has to be acceptable to make some noise for work purposes.
in contrast, the pollution argument is quite salient, as @porb121 details[0], and reason enough for the ban. the exhaust pollutants can be smelled surprisingly far away (dozens of feet) and can enter homes through windows and linger. and with blowers at least, raking and sweeping are likely as efficient in most cases and doesn't really save labor/exertion.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26360215
The reason I’ve been hesitant to complain is it feels wrong to go after the (mostly working immigrant) landscape companies the Palo Alto NIMBYs have all hired to do their landscaping.
I assume a lot of them are probably commuting from far away.
depends on the vehicle. in my neighborhood, we have plenty of (intentionally) loud cars, motorcycles, and trucks. but the point is that work machines that come with unavoidable noise should be allowed to make that noise during working hours (unlike most vehicles, except perhaps delivery trucks, but they should be using primary thoroughfares, not neighborhood streets).
i also don't report landscaping companies for that reason.
A jackass on a straight-pipe harley is obnoxious, but they are around for like 30 seconds. But a jackass on an industrial zero-clearance lawn mower is going at it for at least 30mins.
These things don't need to be so loud that operators need to wear hearing protection.
A loud ten second car? Whatever.
Constant leaf blowers every morning for hours? They drive me crazy.
And heavens forbid leaves build up around plants, we must remove all compost like that because it will contaminated the soil, it’s so unnatural.
In a front lawn or landscaping that no one uses, it should be low maintenance native plants that are adapted to the weather so they barely need water and will benefit by letting the leaves decay. Send the leaves through a shredder if one really hates the sight of leaves.
however, i’d point out that lifting the noise floor, as road noise does, contributes to lifetime hearing loss, as we make everything else louder (it also negatively affects attention, concentration, stress and anxiety in subtle but meaningful ways). it’s the kind of long, low externalized cost that our short-term-oriented brains tend to evaluate and address poorly.
And if a neighbor refuses to comply with noise ordinances because they want faster/cheaper lawn care, they already kind of hate you. They're just being subtle in how they show it.
...but I see them much more frequently in Florida. I suppose frequency of blowing is very biome dependent.
Traditional American lawn maintenance is a horribly unsustainable (and in my opinion, ugly) practice. We should encourage alternatives.
See: Banks, "National Emissions from Lawn and Garden Equipment"
There's still plenty of use cases for gas units but if we could get them banned from everywhere but rural areas it would be a good step in the right direction.
Some folks go too far and say "nobody should have a lawn!!!" but they clearly don't understand the zenlike experience of avoiding one's family, drinking cheap lager, listening to a podcast, and working the lawn in the sunshine for a couple hours on a Saturday morning. Kept me sane last year more than anything else did.
Commercial leaf blowers are over 3 HP. 1-2 horsepower doesn't seem like a big difference, but it's literally 50-100% more power.
My (small) push mower is 5.1 HP, over 250% of the max power I could get from a corded unit. It can still bog down in heavy, damp grass, especially while mulching. Take away 60% of its power and it's not going to get better.
Battery trimmers are awesome; I'll give you that one.
I can definitely see it becoming in issue on larger areas, with larger weeds or, in less dry weather, if you really _have_ to, like landscaper services, maybe. But for the average suburban lawn maintenance?
The real solution here is to mow more often, and on dryer days. Never had any issue with my corded units as long as I keep the lawn short. When it's long, you have to move in a few passes to get a nice cut without clogging things up. Mulching long grass is gross anyway, you'll get way too much grass detritus out of it; I know it's good for the lawn, but again, it makes more sense with a weekly mow and fairly short grass, rather than letting it grow into a field and mowing it once a month or something like that. You get out what you put in.
Obviously that makes more sense for homeowners who do their own work as opposed to lawn companies; I'd be okay with exceptions for businesses, with 4-stroke only.
Don't most American houses have at least one 240V socket in the garage, for use with garden/garage equipment? (Otherwise, where do you plug in an electric car if you're visiting relatives, for example?)
[1] https://www.argos.co.uk/browse/garden-and-diy/lawnmowers-and...
Newer ones, depending on location.
>(Otherwise, where do you plug in an electric car if you're visiting relatives, for example?)
You charge on 120v or you don't charge.
Electric cars may change this. They haven't yet, at least not much.
(The important thing to note for non-US-dwelling folks is that your average American simply never deals with plugs other than 120V except for rare circumstance, like appliance replacement or adding a car charging portal.)
This battery-operated one works well and is also much quieter than the gas-powered ones.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/RYOBI-125-MPH-550-CFM-40-Volt-Li...
Even 10% nationally? Including every semi truck, car and airplane? And then all of our national power generation system?
It doesn't seem like blowers could be 10% of that no matter how you slice it.
A statistic for CA was motorcycles make up 1% of my miles driven but 10% of smog pollutants.
Pollution is a different matter though. Even the big 4-stroke tourers have worse emission control than cars; the 2-stroke motorbikes are exponentially worse in SOx/NOx/CO/particulate emissions (which hurt your lungs rather than the climate).
Also, it's not just leaf blowers. It's also lawn mowers and other gas powered lawn equipment.
Now I think everybody is quietly waiting for the revolution of battery powered lawn equipment to make this moot.
It wouldn't be great for large commercial estates, but the runtime is more than enough for most homeowners.
I have a second battery to swap and fast charge, but I also have an abnormal number of messy trees on 5 acres.
https://www.husqvarna.com/us/products/battery/
(I don't remember how I ended up there but I was looking at their battery products a few months ago)
I went pure electric 5 years ago with no problems. Starts up every time with the push of a button and since I bought a set, it came with multiple batteries so I can swap them out before fully depleting one for extended life.
It's bad when you're looking at some piece of equipment and are relieved to discover that it has been sitting with gas in it since the 90s. At least there is a hope the rubber bits are intact.
On the other hand, this is so common now that the aftermarket carb business has become a mass market. You can buy chinese knockoffs carbs with all of the hoses and plastic bits for like $10 on Amazon now.
Aftermarket carbs are cheap because carbs are cheap. You can buy a lawn mower at WalMart for $100, and everyone has to make a profit. That means the engine can't cost more than $20, and the carb must be less than that. The Chinese make a nice profit selling new carbs for $10, even though most carbs still go to the engine manufactures who pay a lot less in quantity.
Ethanol has been common enough in gas since the 90s.In the early years there were problems with it attacking rubber. That rubber hasn't been used in fuel systems for years though.
I have my share of electric battery-powered lawn equipment, but I've already gone through one generation of batteries which rendered the old equipment obsolete. And the markup on batteries is on the order of 500% compared to what a generic battery of similar chemistry would cost. It's an excellent racket, very profitable.
I wonder about the people here on HN buying Ryobi stuff... maybe they're onto something. Normally I wouldn't touch Ryobi with a ten foot pole, because it's trash. But OTOH, it's cheap, so maybe the quality of the tool will match up with the expected availability of batteries so the TCO isn't as offensive.
[0] If you haven't seen those old videos where B&S demonstrates why the Slick 50 demos were BS, you should. Lawnmower engines are way overbuilt, mostly as an artifact of their small size. They're hard to kill.
Small airplanes have not kept up (they still use lead fuel!), and so are overall worse than lawn equipment. However there is a lot more lawn equipment. (I don't know anything about modern jet engine emissions)
https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=1...
In 2011, approximately 26.7 million tons of pollutants were emitted by GLGE (VOC=461,800; CO=5,793,200; NOx=68,500, PM10=20,700; CO2=20,382,400), accounting for 24%−45% of all nonroad gasoline emissions. Gasoline-powered landscape maintenance equipment (GLME; leaf blowers/vacuums, and trimmers, edgers, brush cutters) accounted for 43% of VOCs and around 50% of fine PM. Two-stroke engines were responsible for the vast majority of fine PM from GLME.
For example, your cars catalyst prevents a lot of pollutants from being emitted -- but your lawnmower doesn't have this device at all.
CO2 is a different story all together -- because it's the primary byproduct.
Electric lawn equipment has only become viable in the market in the past decade or so due to improved batteries. Now that electrification is feasible (and often nicer to use than gas-powered), seems great to ban or at least disincentivize combustion engine equipment.
A couple of quotes from, comparing a two stroke leaf blower to a 2011 F-150 SVT Raptor:
https://www.edmunds.com/about/press/leaf-blowers-emissions-d...
"The hydrocarbon emissions from a half-hour of yard work with the two-stroke leaf blower are about the same as a 3,900-mile drive from Texas to Alaska in a Raptor," said Jason Kavanagh, Engineering Editor at Edmunds.com. "As ridiculous as it may sound, it is more 'green' to ditch your yard equipment and find a way to blow leaves using a Raptor."
"The tests found that a Ryobi 4-stroke leaf blower kicked out almost seven times more oxides of nitrogen (NOx) and 13.5 times more carbon monoxide (CO) than the Raptor, which InsideLine.com once dubbed "the ultimate Michigan mudslinger." An Echo 2-stroke leaf blower performed even worse, generating 23 times CO and nearly 300 times more non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) than the Raptor. "
10% does seem mind bogglingly high, but then when you consider just how big the efficiency gap is, and start thinking about how many people have leaf blowers, weed whackers and the like... maybe it's possible?
They seem to only make a single pass if I'm not having a call.
I'd guess a combination of inexpensive underpowered engines and a spinning blade. I have an old mower with a big engine that doesn't really seem to work too hard, and it's only a little bit louder than my electric mower.
This kinda soured me on electric lawn equipment for a while.
Then again, I'm also averse to the lengths people go through to maintain landscaping. Landscaping is necessary, but so many homeowners care so much about property values that they want everything to constantly appear uniform. Some neighbors even rat on each other to their HOA if one person went an extra week without mowing.
With at least the weedwhacker I have, there's not really an option. If you hold the button down, it overheats. If you leave it up to long, it shuts off. As a result, any time I'm walking across pavement, or in between patches that need weedwhacking, I have to rev the stupid thing.
I agree with everything you've said though. I don't have a choice right now, but the way suburban/urban landscaping is done is a nightmare.
Or get a new one if you can afford it. They're not terribly expensive.
It's also not technically mine.
Source: http://leafblowernoise.com/Electric%20blower%20sound.htm
So I would refute your claim.
Husqvarna 525BX 25-cc 2-Cycle 192-MPH 493-CFM Handheld Gas Leaf Blower https://www.lowes.com/pd/Husqvarna-525BX-25-cc-2-Cycle-192-M...
EGO POWER+ 180-MPH Brushless Handheld Cordless Electric Leaf Blower, 500-600CFM https://www.lowes.com/pd/EGO-Power-56-Volt-Lithium-Ion-Brush...
Can an electric leaf blower be as loud as a gas-powered one? Sure. I'm sure under the right circumstances a Prius can make noise comparable to Corolla too. Electric leaf blowers aren't silent and are often loud, but not aggravatingly loud. They won't make your next-door neighbors lose their mind, much less your neighbors two doors down.
Noise pollution is one of those places where I am seriously conflicted. It’s one of those cases where you feel like it’s regulating common curtesy.
See also: Harley Davidson mentality.
Yet people do these things which are infuriating and intrude on those around them without a thought.
Agree with things to reduce noise pollution, but don’t feel like this will help much in that regard.
The bigger issue imo is that we incentivize the wrong things. Money and time instead of quality and a job well done. It's faster to blow loudly than to rake silently. A silent landscaping company powered by reel mowers and rakes would clear less properties per man hour, but maybe there is in fact a market there for that premium, nearly silent service.
Noise pollution is an environmental impact.
I assume you mean:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-09/documents... (2015)
"All Nonroad sources account for approximately 242 million tons of pollutants each year, accounting for 17% of all VOC missions, 12% of NOx emissions, 29% of CO emissions, 4% of CO2 emissions, 2% of PM10 emissions, and 5% of PM2.5 emissions."
What's "Nonroad" isn't clearly defined here, so I assume it's quite a lot more than "Gas-powered blowers".
It's dangerous to humans in closed spaces, but that's not where leaf blowers are operated. (And yes, I also hate them, but that's not he point.)
I expect the non-particulate emissions are dominated by 2 stroke motors (well, other than CO₂).
You're especially right to be wary as these policies tend to ultimately penalize lower income workers, and I would prefer a larger discussion about solving housing access & other necessities that could make these structural changes way more equitable.
This trap we're in is pretty depressing
Also, just because it's inconvenient, doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Regulation costs money. Making a safer car was more expensive and it took tons of political legwork to legislate mandatory seatbelts/airbags/backup cameras. Doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
> In 2011, approximately 26.7 million tons of pollutants were emitted by GLGE (VOC=461,800; CO=5,793,200; NOx=68,500, PM10=20,700; CO2=20,382,400)
To quote other sources:
CO emission in the United States in 2001 was 120.8 million short tons, of which 74.8 million came from on-road vehicles.
Fair to say around 3% of total CO in USA today is being generated by GLGE (Gasoline powered lawn and garden equipment).
There's nothing green about green lawns.
Virtually no noise, no pollution, and even a brown lawn after being well kept didn't look terrible.
A lawn should be able to go 4 weeks with no water in the summer and not die. It will go dormant, and once the water starts again it will green up quickly. A dormant lawn will be brown and you shouldn't walk on it much, but if you don't need to do things on it and aren't bothered aesthetically by it, it's fine.
Once it goes brown, water it maybe every 3 weeks just to make sure it doesn't go from dormant to dead if you don't get enough rain.
I fully agree that some vegetation looks nice, and is good for insects and birds. But I'd much prefer some variety at least - different grasses, wildflowers, moss, clover, local plants, and not kept permanently trimmed 3mm off the earth. I mentioned this to my wife a few years back, and she looked at me like I'd gone crazy, and I've had the same aghast looks from others too.
Actually, I'd like to see some proposals for regulation around this. Homogeneous lawns are just such a colossal waste.
In this example, reasonable legislation would limit the noise and pollution from blowers, without specifically banning any particular technology.
The US had sealed beam headlamps for years after better lighting technologies were invented because US law required them instead of mandating some technology-agnostic standard [0].
Or more recently, we've banned the use of phones while driving. I ask: is it legal to play harmonica while driving? If we agree that it shouldn't be, the law should be written to ban both using a phone or playing harmonica while driving without specifically mentioning either, except perhaps as examples.
[0] https://www.carid.com/articles/brief-history-of-sealed-beam-...
In some ways this is nicer because a company doesn't need to do specific emission and noise testing certifications to comply with a single municipalities regulations. So people in Oakland can have potentially more choices while achieving a reduction of combustion emissions.
So the lesson is that Government really shouldn't get in the game of trying to regulate specific technologies rather than whatever harmful side effects are created by the technology. Regulate noise and emissions, and let the engineers find the best ways of meeting those targets.
There are practically infinite bad things that someone could possibly do. You can't outlaw them all.
Slippery slope arguments shouldn’t apply to specific provisions in the law that target likely scenarios.
Let’s say you said that the driver shouldn’t drive distracted. You have now outlawed listening to radio, music, or others talking in a way not conducive to giving full attention to the car, perhaps even while the car is being driven automatically, if there is any chance of the driver needing to drive manually such that they must be ready to drive.
That said, I agree that the method of generating the outcome need not always be defined. For example, in some legislation, companies/vendors are named specifically, which may lead to de facto support by the government of some private institutions, which seems anticompetitive.
These systems are legal but using the phone is not, so this really is a great example of trying to regulate technology rather than outcomes. All that happens is vendors put ports in their cars and route the phone interface to the driver in a fixed screen rather than in the phone's screen. Regulation bypassed.
Setting emission thresholds means needing to get out there and perform spot checks in the field. It's specialised, expensive and in practise means many people just flouting the law and getting away with it. Pointless law.
Simply banning ICE strimmers and blowers means any enforcement officer can easily cite rule breakers, confiscate equipment, etc.
And per sibling, not the same as mandating one technology, at all.
It meets the requirement.
Leaf blowers churn out a bunch of monoxide due to the generally poor motor design.
It will reduce noise across yards. It will increase efficiency. It will cause more ewaste. And it will definitely raise prices.
Yeah it’s ridiculous.
Which, even accounting for charging losses, will be less polluting than backpackable two-strokes, and less close to where workers breathe, so, mission accomplished, whether the pollution concern is environmental or worker health or both.
Which from a pollution point of view is way better than 2-stroke backpacks.
But that said, I hope they compensate current owners with vouchers or grant some trade in value and not outright ban them without compensation. That would be wholly unfair to current owners.
After all, the mains are never really far away in urban or suburban context, so ICE-powered tooling is meaningless.
In many cases there is also a way to plug to the grid using traps on the side of streetlights.
The suburbs are surprisingly loud because of this, louder than the cities I've lived in.
It's not just about making people feel good or allowing audiophiles to listen to records undisturbed.
It's free to the city's coffers. It is a multi-million dollar capital expense to the city's businesses and residents.
I support the measure. But it's far from free.
Assuming the lawn services can pass the cost along to customers. Given the low barriers to entry, I would not make this assumption.
In reality, a mix of total wage decreases (i.e. reduction in hours, benefits and/or hourly wage), supplier payment decreases, profit decreases and price increases will incorporate the change. Also, if an outfit cannot afford the capital cost of upgrading their equipment, they will fold.
Enforcement shouldn't be excessively difficult. Cops can write citations for illegal equipment, and if a company routinely ignores the citations they could get in real trouble. Give the companies plenty of time (a year or two) to phase in the new equipment as well. Make sure the change is well publicized, especially in Hispanic media. If the city was really proactive they could task an intern with calling every lawn service company in the city 6 months before the law goes into effect and make sure each one has a plan to transition in time.
The enforcement is key however. These sorts of regulations will be ignored 100% if they aren't enforced. Escalating fines are necessary, they have to make it more expensive to break the law than comply, or the companies that cheat will win.
It’s not a good mix. We end up with a system that punishes people following the rules and doesn’t do anything about the many people breaking the rules. It also creates the sense of unfairness and general lawlessness — that laws are recommendations that can mostly be ignored.
I hate half-measures that inconvenience those that follow the rules, and do nothing to punish those who break them.
Isn't that what they did?
Oh, are you saying they should ban the sale or posession, not just the use?
Or you're saying they should ban more kinds of noise-making or polluting machines, not just leaf-blowers?
Are you arguing for more expansive ban?
Or I may be missing it.
To summarize, every law needs to be extremely well thought out, but results have shown otherwise (although that's a different thread).
In BC we used to have something called Air Care, which measured your vehicle emissions and forced bad cars off the road. Naturally it only impacted people who couldn't afford new cars. It was the one of the dumbest government programs I had ever seen.
When most people are guilty of multiple offenses, then a government can find political troublemakers and accuse them of violating dozens of "rules" that are otherwise never enforced.
Alternatively, there should be a "fixed budget" for laws, as in: if you want to pass that new law, you're going to pick one of the existing laws on the books an can it to make space for the new one.
Yes its named Parkinsons law. Parkinson noticed that the number of ships in the english army was decreasing but the number of administrators administrating the ships were increasing.
Government officials hire more officials which invents new laws and rules.
Reference link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
On the other hand, a single big diesel generator is less harmful to the environment than a bunch of 2 stroke engines. It could theoretically even get some pollution controls that would be too heavy and expensive for the power equipment.
Or maybe they'll buy those F150s with the built in power bank and have the truck idle to charge the batteries. That would be even better for noise level and the environment, as the truck comes with modern pollution controls.
State should step up subsidies to encourage this.