I have never dried my own cars but my dad and grandfather insisted on towel-drying cars to avoid water spots.
Though come to think of it, a leaf blower might not work for that, unless it's actually managing to remove the water mechanically and eliminating evaporation. I recall mechanized car-washes using blow driers so maybe this does, indeed, work.
When you wash the car properly, you want to remove the excess water as it's not clean. Most people do this with a microfiber, towel or chamois. These can scratch the surface if not done properly.
A strong blower will remove the water without scratching the surface. It also works in places too small to reach with a towel.
I actually got into metal casting and blacksmithing because one day I tried using my dad's shop vac to blow air into a fire I'd made in the backyard. The shop vac was about as strong as a leaf blower and was extremely effective.
After that I dug a small pit, trenched a 2" pipe into the bottom of it to act as a tuyere, and then hooked the shop vac hose to the other end of the pipe. That fire got hot enough that some rocks lining the pit glowed white and sand started to clump together. I could toss an 8-10 inch piece of (undried) oak log into the fire and it would completely burn away in under ten minutes. I had used an old log holder from a fireplace made of 3/4" iron bars to allow airflow around the larger logs as the fire was starting. When the fire died down I discovered it had completely buckled and collapsed from the heat.
I went on to learn how to make refractory bricks and distill charcoal. I switched from the shop vac to a computer case fan for my actual forges though, as the shop vac easily blew all the charcoal out of the fire pot and was very loud.
I've noticed roofing crews use them to remove old shingles. It must work pretty well, if they are dealing with carrying them around on the top of a house.
If these truly sound that much better I'd personally buy every gardener in a 3 block radius one of these myself just to get rid of the bloody gas ones.
Many affluent areas have already banned gas leaf blowers and it’s incredible how quiet the battery powered replacements are. I was in Palm Springs recently and had nearly walked past a landscaper using one before if occurred to me just how quiet it was - didn’t even interrupt our conversation. I believe it was a Stihl backpack version (maybe https://www.stihlusa.com/products/blowers-and-shredder-vacs/...) but yeah, highly recommend!
It isn't so much the noise that bothers me, what I've never understood about leaf blowers is what are they meant to accomplish? When I watch people use them they either blow the leaves into the street or the neighbors yard. What do they think that does?
Now on the other hand, I do own a very noisy leaf vacuum. But when I've collected a bag full I can just deposit the leaves in my collection container. They are taken off to be composted
generally for landscapers it saves them the trouble of raking, which can put a lot of strain on your back — they'll blow the leaves onto a tarp and then wrap them up for easy removal
in my experience, homeowners mostly dick around with them
My son and I raise money for our Boy Scout troop by doing yard cleanup in the fall. Using leaf blowers and tarps is how the crew worked through 20 acres of cleanup over two weekends.
This thread is like people who’ve never cleaned a yard before saying “I’ve never understood the purpose of rakes and brooms - don’t they just move things around? Surely you need to pick things up to really clean?!”
To be fair, they are very good at removing debris from a front-porch. I fully support banning them, and they are heavily overused in situations when a rake works just as well, but they are superior in some cases.
There is a pile of leaves so deep in the street in front of my house that it has an entire ecosystem living in it. At this point they have composted some, insects have begun to live in them and grass is growing from the pile.
In many places that would be the homeowner’s responsibility to clean up. Even if not, it’s often in the homeowner’s best interest to not have a huge pile of rotting leaves clogging the gutter.
Our town used to do that, then they decided it was too costly and stopped. I am waiting for them to corelate the increased need to clean leaf-clogged storm drains with this decision.
I use mine (electric) to blow leaves from the street and sidewalk back onto my grass so that I can mulch them with the lawn mower. I also use it to blow debris back onto the grass-free perennials area around my tree to get free mulch. I'm weird, but it's really handy for that. The entire reason I own a lawn mower and a leaf blower is because I couldn't find a lawn care crew that would mulch everything in place - everyone around here wants to take your leaves away and then bring in artificially dyed mulch (and charge you for it).
They also work for blowing snow off the sidewalk if the snow is still fluffy.
Wouldn't letting the leaves to decompose be better for the soil instead of constantly removing them? I mean, the tree supposedly uses the nutrients from the soil to grow those leaves, and if you keep removing them away, at some point the tree will simply starve and die, right?
I use mine to blow debris from the driveway onto the lawn so it doesn’t get tracked into the garage, or to clean the leaves, sticks, and pollen from our many trees that accumulate on the back deck. The times I’ve had landscapers come they used tarps to collect the bulk of the debris they gathered with the blowers and hauled it away.
I own a Stihl leaf blower and primarily use it to clear debris from the gravel paths in my garden. Because raking gravel also collects the stones. Debris includes leaves, leaf husks, beech nuts, catkins, and a range of other things that drop off trees. I use a big rake to clear the lawn (I actually enjoy the physicality of this task).
All of this stuff is composted over the year in a large pile in a secluded corner of my garden, along with grass cuttings, scarified moss, etc. The volume of stuff usually exceeds the amount I can get rid of using the local council's garden waste collection.
Now that you say that, it makes much more sense. It isn't like I go into my neighbors backyards and monitor them using their leafblower. So all I really see is the yard maintenance guy in the front yard. I'll commonly just see them blowing them into the street. Not all of them do this however.
I use it to remove pollen, pine needles, gravel, debris from clippings, etc from my deck and drive-way. Sometimes I use it to clear out the gutters on my roof. I usually blow it all down into one corner then use a dust-pan and broom to collect it all and throw it in the debris bin. I hate it when people just blow the debris somewhere else; they're making it somebody else's problem and that's wrong.
There are problems with battery-powered tools (at least, leaf blowers) still, especially at the commercial level. For one, they just don’t have the runtime. I briefly had an 80V blower. On its highest power – which is the only way it could come close to a gas-powered model, it was barely able to get all of the leaves out of the yard (we had a tree with leaves that had needle-like protrusions, which made them quite hard to dislodge), and lasted about 10 minutes per charge.
If you don’t have sticky leaves, or are clearing primarily hard surfaces like a deck, then absolutely, battery-powered is the way to go. But if you’re a commercial operator who is driving tools more or less non-stop all day, it’s going to be a hard sell to have to have a minimum of N*2 batteries (at $150-200 each), plus the downtime of swaps, plus having to run a generator on your truck constantly to charge the off-duty batteries.
EDIT: Sibling comment below linked to a Stihl model that appears to offer an hour of runtime at full tilt. It’s also $2400 for the unit / battery / charger, tbf, but it at least has the performance.
A whole hour of runtime would be mean 1C discharge. 80V (which is likely 72V, but in the US it's ok to label the max voltage rather than the actual one) is made of 20 Li-Ion batteries in series. Lets say 2 in parallel, so total 40 batteries. I'd go with 3Ah per battery (could be more for 21700) and around 2Kgs weight. For 1h work that's ~430W of power which is rather under powered.
That fast charger (say 30min to charge) for this thing would be quite a thing to witness with over a kW of power draw.
About Stihl, it uses a 36V battery, so 10 Li-Ion in series. Which is half as powerful. I can't see a capacity higher than 36V/6Ah from Stihl. Now, it possibly uses multiple batteries, however, the issue with charging still remains the same.
Running a generator would be louder than the device, so imo that's a moot point. I'd consider using a massive power bank and/or lots of pre-charged batteries to carry the day but not an inverter.Taking enough batteries to swap and charging them in off-hours seems the only sensible approach (albeit not cheap)
In San Jose, whenever someone proposes this (or at least getting the gas powered ones to stop dumping carcinogens), they’re non-ironically branded as racist.
People argue the battery powered ones aren’t good for professional use (short runtimes) but that problem was solved years ago. They also argue they’re too expensive,
but that argument falls apart if you include engine maintenance and gasoline in the cost.
Unfortunately the article is very poor on details. The sound from the video is insufficient to tell.
Personally, I'd be quite excited to see what are the changes engineering wise. I bet it'd make a proper addition to BOLTR.
I still can't see how it'd be much quieter, as lots of the noise is just the air moving (and making sound waves), perhaps less vibrations, different frequencies due to different rpm?
"Our product takes in a full blow of air and separates it," said team member Leen Alfaoury. "Some of that air comes out as it is, and part of it comes out shifted. The combination of these two sections of the air makes the blower less noisy."
Sounds like they created a noise cancellation air channel.
During the great American knowledge collapse, it's becoming more and more important to make American students look smarter for working, like, less harder.
And as has already been pointed out elsewhere, even if it was an actual 37% reduction it would be useless anyway since no commercial operation would be viable with electric leaf blowers. They’re good for blowing the leaves out of a homeowners driveway and not much else
Maybe it's just a UK thing but I can't think of the last time I even saw a non-electric lawn mower. Even going as far back as the 80s they were the standard, just don't mow over the cable!
Depends on where you live and the size of the yard. Electric are great when the size isn't that big. Once you go larger, it becomes very hard to do practically with electricity.
There are different types of mowers - push (usually 4cycle), push+self propelled, riding one(s), then 2cycle scythe types, and then trimmers and brushcutters (spinning blades). Those options (more or less) are available battery powered, too. Battery powered ones have shorter use per charger but they are lighter (and usually less powerful).
However, if you can use a robot one (or few of them), it tends to be an easier setup - it does require flatter lawn and what not, though. However they are insufficient in cases where one really needs a riding mower.
Personally, I have/use a robot, a battery powered strimmer, gas powered brushcutter, and a push behind mower. The main job is done by the little robot, but the rest have their uses as well.
> Maybe it's just a UK thing but I can't think of the last time I even saw a non-electric lawn mower
UK here. I've been using a petrol mower for the last 25 years. My lawn is 40m long. I do own a 50m extension cable but it would be a real hassle for grass cutting. My three adjacent neighbours also have petrol mowers.
It's probably getting there given what Ego has on offer, but I think until it is downright better in at least some dimensions, it's going to be a hard sell. Right now it seems like it's more expensive, at best similarly powerful, and obviously batteries take time to recharge. I think it's gotta be niche for contractors.
That said, given how bad gas lawn equipment is for the air in a locality, maybe regulatory nudges are in order. I suspect if the incentives were right the rest of the problems would solve themselves.
As someone who went all in on Ego about 3-4 years ago, let me tell you, the technology is nowhere close to capable enough for even small-time contractors yet.
You would need at least 3 batteries per piece of equipment in use at one time in order to not have to spend time idle while a battery recharges ($700-$1000 upfront investment in batteries per piece). The lifespan of those batteries under constant usage would be atrocious.
Even if you could solve the battery problem, the power of the equipment doesn't come close to gas. My Ego leaf blower doesn't even compare to the plug-in electric one I had prior to acquiring it, and I still have to revert for some harder jobs. An example of this: if there is a clump of wet grass on concrete, like something left behind from a mower wheel, the Ego struggles to move it while the plug-in has no problem. Or if a pile of leaves is damp, forget about it.
The mowing quality is terrible, leaving long patches everywhere (despite a sharp blade and slow progression). The form factor of the mower deck makes corners and edges much more difficult than other machines. And because the power is limited, the mulching capabilities are almost nil. It shuts down quickly if you hit a particularly tough piece of lawn to avoid overloading its motor.
I love my ego but agree will all of your problems. It just does not have the power that gas mowers have. Suction can be a real problem on them, they use proprietary blades that have to be light weight because of the electric motor.
I do think their more recent models fix a lot of these issues but I don't think its ready for commercial use. Just having to have a large number of batteries to sustain your day of work is limiting.
I have all electric lawn equipment as well, though my mower is a Toro. No disagreements that a 13A blower connected to AC will beat the shit out of a battery-powered leaf blower, but I'm sure you do and hopefully did realize that, the math just doesn't work out. The one place the Ego does excel at is stuff like edging and string trimming, where there's not nearly as much power needed. They definitely struggle a bit on things like chainsaws and blowers where more power is just generally better.
The place where it is weakest is probably snow blowing. They now have a 2-stage electric blower, but I am pretty sure it's just nowhere near gas. I live in the midwest in an area where the 1-stage Ego electric blower is already kind of overkill, so that's what I'm running. It has its negatives and positives: it always starts without having to worry about the fuel sitting over the seasons, it's quiet during operation and doesn't pollute, the batteries are always ready since they are on the charge when not in use, and I have enough battery to run it for much longer than needed. That said: the batteries are, indeed, simply too expensive.
I'm surprised the mower sucks, this Toro electric mower feels reasonable compared to anything else I've ever used (granted, I do not have much lawn and have never used any serious mowers. Just your average lawn mowers). I wonder if it's true that all electric mowers suck or maybe it's just that Ego isn't/wasn't doing a good job on mower design.
I have no real problem with the blower being underpowered compared to a plug-in, but for commercial use, it would be a deal breaker.
The Ego leaf blower and even the chain saw are good tools for 90% of my average home usage, and the convenience of not having to deal with cords or trying to start a small gas engine makes them worth it to me. I have not had to go to my old string trimmer once and should probably sell it. Living more north of you, I haven't dared try the snow blower. The gas blower I have struggles with some of our snows up here.
The mower on the other hand, I wanted to return after the very first mow but convinced myself that even with a poor cut the trade off was worth it. 4 years later and with batteries dying I'm considering other options (including the Toro electric, but many reviews made similar remarks to the Ego).
> I have no real problem with the blower being underpowered compared to a plug-in, but for commercial use, it would be a deal breaker.
Yeah, exactly. That was my thought, too.
I don't think they're that far behind, but improvements in battery technology might be necessary for commercial usage to become viable without being subsidized or regulated.
> The mower on the other hand, I wanted to return after the very first mow but convinced myself that even with a poor cut the trade off was worth it. 4 years later and with batteries dying I'm considering other options (including the Toro electric, but many reviews made similar remarks to the Ego).
Yeah, I suspect you really do need the power of gas for your mowing. That does make me wonder why some people clearly do and some people clearly don't, but it's probably not worth wasting too much time pondering.
Reading through the comments here I feel like I live in a parallel universe.
I have Ego products and don't see any problems with them whatsoever. I've used and have gas and corded equipment, and by far prefer Ego. I haven't noticed any functional difference in how they perform, and if anything I get annoyed by gas models because they're heavier and more annoying to start and stop. Sure they're more powerful sometimes but I've never needed the extra power they provide. It's not like I'm going to chop up a log using my lawnmower. I've never had problems mulching anything or mowing well, and it works perfectly. And I live on a fairly wooded property so we get tons of leaves. The batteries last plenty long and charge really fast.
For what it's worth, they do make batteries in different Ah capacities. I don't even remember which ones we have but maybe we have the higher capacity ones?
I can see why contractors might have issues with constant use of cordless equipment. But I'm not a contractor, and my guess is they'd have more problems with battery lifespan than charging in practice if they timed the charging well.
I also understand why people wouldn't like the sound of leaf blowers but to me I don't understand the level of animosity about them, in the sense that there's other things that are much louder that I don't hear laws being passed about and so forth. To me it feels a bit like they're being singled out for some reason, I assume because people believe they're unnecessary? Either that or I'm just not bothered as much by that particular noise.
Like I said in another comment, perhaps some of the more recent models of ego mowers have better power but my model from 3 years ago is no where the quality of a cut that a cheap gas mower would provide. I still love my ego mower though.
1) You have to buy special blades because of weight.
2) The lift on these blades are not as great, you can definitely bag but its maybe 50% the lift a gas mower can provide.
3) This also impacts things like mulching where your not getting enough lift to chop up the grass enough.
4) It can bog down a lot quicker than a gas mower.
Still love my mower but at least the prior generation was under powered in the motor department.
It will get there I suspect, the tools and batteries can charge in the truck en route. Easier to just fuel up the truck once instead of filling up little gas tanks all the time.
I am sure it will, its just no where close yet imo. Truck charging is not as practical; if the crew is running a tight ship, they should not be far between jobs. So you would basically need a lot of batteries to sustain a day full of jobs.
Charging using the truck would require running the truck all day -- probably not an acceptable alternative. Consuming 2-10 Kw from a 200 Kw engine would be so inefficient that it'd be too expensive anyways. Instead you'd need to run a generator all day charging batteries.
A fast charging, high capacity tool battery takes at least 60 minutes to charge. In high power applications (lawn mower, leaf blower, chainsaw, etc) those batteries might be emptied in a little as 15 minutes.
A better alternative might be corded 240v tools running directly off the generator for high-power applications. 120v tools are limited to 2-3HP which doesn't compare well to gas engines.
If you had a serial plug-in hybrid with a 20+Kwh battery which also supported exporting 120vac, that would work. AFAIK such a vehicle doesn't exist in North America yet and might not exist anywhere globally.
You start stacking energy efficiency losses (engine -> charger -> battery -> inverter -> charger -> battery -> motor) and economic losses (expensive serial hybrid, higher than expected vehicle battery cycles, still need a large number of tool batteries which wear out in about a year, etc.) though.
Instead buy 120-volt and 240-volt leaf blowers. BTW 2-3 horsepower is plenty (probably too much) for one man.
We use water hoses w/o bitching too much. We could used corded leafblowers tomorrow. Or butch up, get rakes and get in shape: cleaner air, more exercise and longer hours for the lawn laborers.
I love my battery powered mower and trimmer (wow there's so many names for that)! I can mow the lawn and come back in and relax with a quiet show or game!
I wonder if the efficiency is indeed unchanged, or as quoted in the article "keeps all that force". If so, and if the added weight is really minimal, I wonder if this could be applied to EDF aerial vehicles such as hobbyist RC planes.
Won't help much until these are mandated by law, or.. we just wait for a couple generations to die out. There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. Over time, the next couple generations may hopefully adopt more battery powered outdoor stuff (mowers, blowers, etc) because of environmental concerns, or... goodness - maybe actual sound concerns. But it's going to be another couple decades, I think. Yes, I live in a rural area in the US. Things ain't changing here any time soon.
Not in rural areas. People shoot guns at 1am and... "god given freedoms" and "piss off back to the city y'all" and all that are trotted out anytime a complaint is made.
Again, it may change in another couple generations, but it'll be slow.
I lived in cities for four decades and rural areas for two. Hearing late night gunshots was routine in cities. I think it's happened once in hearing from my rural home. My neighbor is a state biologist who put down a sick coyote.
Or course it can happen a lot if you get the wrong neighbors. But that's more of a risk in the city where you have so many more neighbors.
Wow, which cities? I've lived between cities and the sticks in the U.S. almost my entire life and while I've never once heard gunfire in a city, in the country it's a daily routine (occasionally, if rarely, even fully automatic).
I lived in downtown San Jose for ten years and someone was shot to death right behind my apartment. San Jose isn't all that unsafe either, relatively speaking.
You had some pretty well-off rural neighbors if they shot guns daily. Ammunition isn't cheap. I've lived in a rural area for a long time, and, yes maybe once a week or month a neighbor will practice their marksmanship, but thankfully it isn't a daily occurrence.
It gets massively cheaper when those priorities include reloading your own ammo.
My most well off neighbor is the most prolific shooter I know. He shoots targets almost daily with his .22, and I don't hear it at all from 1/3 mile away. He doesn't use a suppressor, but some kind of quieter round. I guess that means slower.
I live in oakcliff in Dallas (area SW of downtown but still in Dallas proper). Gunshots every night and automatic weapons fire once a month. Police have completely given up, granted it’s all celebratory and usually not crime related. For example, when the cowboys score a touchdown you’ll hear a burst of gunfire.
Making something officially transgressive often makes the thing more attractive.
Is one supposed to avoid purposefully releasing diesel particulates by rapidly increasing engine speed? Yes and people sometimes still do it for whatever reason.
I was out weeding my garden yesterday evening and there was some pleasant bird song around me. And the droning of a gas mower a block away. And someone zooming back and forth on their crotch rocket on the main street in the other direction. At least the mower sound probably wasn't intentional...
> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them.
That’s an awfully uncharitable projection.
The lawn business people I know would love to adopt full electric fleets of gear. They aren’t sending their teams out with gas engines because it’s a “fantasy escape world”. They do it because gas engines are currently the only reasonable way to keep the crews running all day without spending thousands of dollars on batteries over and over again.
Current battery tech is hit or miss. The packs should be protected from over-discharge and last for hundreds of cycles, but in practice they got a lot of early failures. They also need extra packs to rotate while others are charging. At $100-200 per battery, they might be spending $1000 on batteries to operate a machine for a season, which would have bought them two gas powered machines and gas to operate them.
There’s also the issue of charging throughout the day. Getting a reliable charging setup that works on a truck inverter and getting crews to perfectly manage batteries throughout the day, including spares, is significantly harder than just filling up a gas tank.
Projecting all of this on to “fantasy escape world” is silly.
You are talking about people working in a business.
I'm talking about neighbors living in rural/suburban areas.
EDIT: We have a lawn care guy. He does our half acre in under 30 minutes. Our neighbors who do it themselves - same half acre size - typically take 90-120 minutes. They'll just sit on a riding mower and let it idle for minutes, while looking up stuff on their phones. Or let it idle and go inside for a drink, while leaving it running. They enjoy riding around with a loud engine underneath, like a really slow motorcycle. This is not speculation, it's from talking to them.
The business people have an incentive to get in and out quickly - they can do more lawns that way.
The people who like loud engine noise have no such incentive. They have an incentive to have a lazy afternoon of lawn mowing.
There’s some overlap as well–I recently had an extended visit in my rural hometown, working by a window overlooking the main street. Something I noticed quickly was that a huge proportion of passing vehicles that happened to be loud enough for me to glance up were actually lawn service pickup trucks with loud, modified exhausts. It also became clear that I’ve been living in the city too long to remember how obnoxious the all-day-every-day drone of lawn equipment is, it sort of blew my mind.
People letting an engine run, just because, they have such a weird quirk of the mind. It's bizarrely common.
It's not just out of spite, although for some for sure it may be part of it. It seems out of a weird affection for things that are noisy, under their dominion.
I have been running the best of the best in tools and battery tech: Milwaukee.
The blower and weed trimmer (especially) burn through very expensive batteries (XC8.0) very quickly. It is not a feasible replacement for even a moderate job. My yard is super small and I move quick and have learned to pull the batteries at 50% to keep from ruining them. But I have burnt up at least one $200 battery that will only charge to 75% now. That happened in the first season. Otherwise, performance is good.
If your yard is that small, why not use devices powered by a cord? Our yard is middling, but the trimmer, with an extension cord, reaches everything that needs trimming. I confess I know nothing about leaf blowers. My wife talks about getting one, but we still use rakes.
I doubt it applies to leaf blowers unless you get one with a battery pack that mounts on your back, but battery powered snow blowers are considerably more powerful than cord powered snow blowers since a cord is limited to 1500W continuous.
Convenience is a big reason. People look at me when I use rakes in the garden. Just to save some time I ended up getting a cordless leaf blower but my wife thought she might find it fun too. The area we have to clear was never going to support the maintenance of a gas-powered blower.
Separately, I was tired of the stand up vacuums for smaller jobs so got a corded stick vacuum. It's still a bit of a hassle even though I use it frequently to avoid messes getting out of control with the kids and pets. I know that if it was cordless it would get much more proactive usage by others. The design of the corded vac could be improved to make it easier but there is little incentive to do that.
A cord is limited to the amount of power you can get from mains. When you need a lot of power a battery can deliver - for a few minutes, then you have to charge for an hour.
When we moved into a new in city home a few years ago, I wanted to keep things quiet and electric. I bought a ryobi leaf blower and lawn mower, with four 40v 6.0ah batteries. Our lawn is neither small nor big - not sure on sq ft but it’s far from huge.
It takes me about 6-8 gull charges to complete mowing and blowing. Leaf blowing is by far the more energy intensive. During the fall I have to space out the work in order to charge. Granted my property has a lot of tree cover and therefore always has a lot of leafs and debris.
Needless to say I regret my decision.
One of the problems with the blower is that it has a standard mode that is effectively useless, barely usable for even clippings. You have to run it at “max” charge for it to be remotely effective.
Edit: I have a previous year version of the RY404170-LB backpack blower. It eats batteries like candy.
For what it's worth, automowers are great. I had a Husqvarna 330X doing .75 acres and was very happy with it. I don't even know how far it got on a charge to be honest, it just charged itself so I never had to worry about it.
Those look amazing. We have a rather long and complicated and hilly lawn and due to trees. Do you think a roomier like the 330x can handle a more complicated lawn layout?
Perhaps, ours had a gazebo, vegetable garden, dozen or so trees, and a very long rectangular path we mowed for access and it managed well. We spent some time getting it clear of rocks and divots though.
When we moved into a new home a few years ago, I wanted to keep things quiet and electric. I bought an Ego lawn mower, multi-head trimmer/edger, and blower. A 56V 8Ah and a 4Ah battery. Once again, our lawn isn't small or big, fairly average 80s suburban lot.
I pretty much never need to recharge the batteries when working. I haven't needed to do much maintenance to it at all, just sharpening the mowing blade. Even after a few years the batteries still have plenty of charge to mow, trim, edge, and blow both yards. I don't normally have enough battery to do all that and do the hedge trimmer for a while though, I'll normally go inside and cool off for 15-20min and then go back out if I need to handle that. The fast charger can get a pretty good charge in 20 minutes
> I have been running the best of the best in tools and battery tech: Milwaukee.
I've found Makita to be better for my line of work at least. I love my older Milwaukee tools. My 10" chopsaw from the early 90s is a solid beast, as well as my worm drive. Newer Milwaukee is a crapshoot, I've had three dead batteries from them, none from Makita. Two burnt out super sawzalls, and a miter saw with no idea what true is.
I will say Milwaukee tools have more power to them, but my Makita ones are more reliable. Less frills, less price too.
I am biased as I do more finishing then rough work, so I have an understanding that Milwaukee is better/quicker for that, but I'll stick with Makita for battery tools. I can go two, three days on a single charge with my miter.
You're talking about an 18V battery, maybe up to 8Ah. About 144Wh.
My batteries on my blower and trimmer and lawn mower use 56V batteries, up to 12Ah. About 672Wh. The smallest battery I have for it is 280Wh.
Milwaukee might make some decent power tools, but they're still batteries designed for a drill or some other smaller handheld tool used for short stints. Companies focusing on lawn care products have much different battery packs.
> best of the best in tools and battery tech: Milwaukee.
Is Milwaukee better? I always understood Milwaukee (Red), Dewalt (Yellow), and Makita (Teal) to basically be interchangeable for most products and it just depended on who you ask and which color team they were on.
I just bought a battery powered lead blower from Costco. It's my first one and it's awesome! I use it all the time for things I didn't think I would.
However, it is still very loud and doesn't last long enough for commercial use.
One instance recently, had a few very aggressive wasps in the garage (Son is allergic). In the past I'd use some chemicals, the leaf blower got them out in seconds, it's so powerful it blew them outside far enough they couldn't get back and just flew off.
I'm a bit frightened to ask what surprising use cases you found for a lead blower.
On a more constructive note, I don't know where people get the idea that battery powered means quiet. My vacuum is electric and far from quiet – why would a leaf blower be?
It just is. You don't need a theoretical explanation, just go turn on a gas leaf blower and a battery operated one and see for yourself. The internal cumbustion engine is much louder than the actual blower mechanism.
Inspirational words, but I'm not giving up my power drill. Long ago my family had a brace and bit, but it's long gone, and would be awkward to use where I use the drill.
this is quite a straightforward reality for many people and calling it a “fantasy escape world” and “uncharitable” is itself miserly and uncharitable, and classic HN rules-lawyering in a nutshell.
like yes people do like using loud power tools for the sake of using loud power tools, most people would consider them at least moderately fun.
It's neither uncharitable nor a projection. My dad is one of these - the loudness is entirely the point, by his own admission. He told me this. He intentionally buys the loudest most powerful/obnoxious tools he can rather than the most practical and dicks around with them.
My dad is also the laziest man on the planet and does ZERO housework. He only does lawn work because it's an opportunity for him to play with his toys.
>The lawn business people I know
Nobody's talking about people with lawn businesses. Businesses will want to just get the work done and move onto the next client.
Not the OP but I would agree with you if I was not told explicitly by several people that they love being outside with loud gas powered engines. These people happen to be my neighbors. There's a culture around small gas powered engines. People grew up with them, and learned engine repair on them, which helped them build a career. I have used battery powered leaf blower and a battery powered weed eater, and I have been told "that's nicer than anything else I've ever used, but I just love gas engines".
We need LiFePO4 packs, we need them at a +200% markup ($300/kwh) rather than a +900% markup ($1000/kwh), and we need them mounted in a frame based on good backpacking backpacks with a wire running along your arm to the tool.
>Projecting all of this on to “fantasy escape world” is silly.
I kind of agree. How I see is that there's a lot of frustration in people in general, and many manage their internal turmoil by manifesting it into external stimulus. Many behave actively, organizedly anti-social ways, so much so that new words, Wikipedia articles have been created to describe the behavior, like "Rolling coal" or "Whistle tips".
Now, I think that these can be thought of as tips of an iceberg. The iceberg being unhandled emotional stress, a system that perpetually creates it, and the behaviors of people that handle it.
I agree that the business incentives are there to keep ICE around. ICE is mature technology, battery-powered are not, and since batteries have not coalesced or aren't regulated around a handful of standards, manufacturers use this to lock in customers into their own ecosystem, among other kinds of power struggles being present as well. I'm personally not confident that I can buy a replacement battery for a new device in 5 years for a fair price, as I expect that there is going to be a new battery standard, with which my "old" device will not be compatible with. So ICE makes a lot of sense still.
On another level, I think it's important to note that noise is power. It affects us on ancient, animalistic level. Loud noise means us danger, or at the very minimum something important to pay attention to. A low level of constant noise feels like safety. No noise is creepy, we better watch out. To be able to make a huge noise is powerful - people and animals usually have gestures explicitly for this reason, and it has been used in warfare too, both in the distant and close past.
So, people are sensitive to this power. Combined with the ability of increased mobility, or the safety that a metal chassis provides, it makes it an attractive way for people to feel like they are in power, or to reduce the powerlessness they feel in other parts of their life.
I took this to mean my father-in-law, but not a paid business or situation where these things are a necessity. He is a lawyer who's worked remote since 2000 only leaves home for necessities and outside hobbies, but has all kinds of equipment including a tractor and snow plow. Of course, he has a ride-on mower and enough other equipment to start a landscaping business.
> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers.
I don't believe that part - the ones shown in the picture/videos are brushless motors, quite efficient (90%) and really silent on their right own.
The noise comes from the need to move air (and the noise is just air waves), along with certain vibrations. A brushless motor is super silent if you exclude the fan(s) cooling it.
It's both. This design focuses on quieting the airflow. From TFA:
The team started working last September. They hoped to improve an electric or battery-powered leaf blower, which is already much quieter than the notorious gas-powered ones, where the sound can carry over an average suburban block.
Leaf blowers are already mostly electric, and they are annoying as hell. People will take time to replace them, but I assure you they aren’t loved at all.
They chew through batteries so fast and they have a really high pitched sound ~16kHz that gives me tinnitus when I use it without ear protection. I suppose the same would happen with a gas one, but I was hoping to avoid wearing ear protection.
I don't think this is nearly the same thing as people being obnoxious with their motorcycle or car exhausts.
What I'd really say is maybe we should rethink if blowers are even useful or necessary at all over the old broom and scoop.
Many times I see landscapers use them to simply blow dust and leaves everywhere, including into busy streets, rather than using them to try and collect all detritus into a single pile for collection.
If that's more commonly the case, then why use them at all?
This is a shitty take. Everyone I know who refuses to use battery powered landscaping equipment absolutely hates the noise and dealing with the gas engines.
The problem is that the battery stuff doesn’t compete on price/power if you’re doing basically anything more than a lawn measured in square feet.
Battery stuff is just fine on the power aspect. However price weight kill you. Gas is light for the amount of runtime you get, while a battery is very heavy. A contractor will need more than $1000 worth of batteries to get through a day per person or $4 worth of gasoline.
You just aren't looking at the full set of options available then. The Stihl electric line is used by contractors and cities all around the world, and are incredibly reliable / strong.
These were my neighbors growing up. Chain saws, quads, backhoes, bulldozers, fire engines, school busses -- anything with wheels and big motors they would be running all day long. Every day during the summer I'd wake up at 8am to 3-4 quads being driven around outside my window by the neighbor kids, and that would go on all day long until sunset.
That actually wasn't bad though compared to moving to San Francisco, where they decided to carve a narrow chunk out of the side of a solid-rock hill right below my window. Jackhammering all day from 7am until 5pm. I bought a sound meter and complained several times that they had exceeded the sound limits but no one cared.
It really affected my wife, we had just moved to SF and she had no where to go while I was at work. She tried libraries and parks and such but there were too many homeless there and they harassed her. She has trouble sleeping due to mental health issues and she usually sleeps from 4am to 12pm, but she couldn't do this due to the jackhammering outside of our window that started at the crack of dawn.
This meant she didn't sleep at all for months, and she ended up having a psychotic break, for which she was hospitalized. She was sent to a hospital in Santa Clara, and I drove there every day to see her.
Anyway, all of this is to say that noise issues are serious to some people, and there's really no limit to how much noise someone can make. You can complain but nothing happens.
Respectfully, no, earplugs do not work when they are jackhammering a mountain outside of your window. I shouldn't have to dull my senses just to live in society because some people have no consideration of making others uncomfortable in their own homes.
As a car-person, gear head / petrol head, etc., this has always been somewhat baffling to me. I've always been in it for the speed, the exciting sensation of your body moving through space. Lots of things end up being kind of cool by association: fat tires, wings, loud exhaust, a lopey idle. But to me they were only interesting because of what they implied, something that can go fast. Some people add those things without being able to go fast, which I've always found distasteful, a thing frequently derided as "all show and no go". It took me a while to accept that some people really are in it for the noise. I can't really knock it, I'm getting a sensory experience that I enjoy but can't quite explain, and I suppose they are too. But keep it away from my house. ;-)
Once I was riding my motorcycle to work, and another guy rode passed me on his motorcycle. His exhaust was so loud it gave me a headache almost instantly. I can't imagine how much it must hurt to actually ride the thing.
"Their design cuts the most shrill and annoying frequencies by about 12 decibels, which all but removes them, making them 94% quieter. The team reduced the overall leaf blower noise by about two decibels, making the machine sound 37% quieter." [1]
Somewhat upsetting here... I don't have a problem with people doing things like this and students need encouragement, but we are talking about shifting from the sound of a leaf blower to the sound of a vacuum cleaner [2]... in the best case.
One particular annoyance here: the sound emission must be from the end of the blower but also from its casing. I feel many products like these are cheaply designed, and the OEM could solve many of the nuisance issues with simple housing changes... or spending a few more pennies on the bearings or blades in assemblies. These are not OEM primary goals, as they are looking to save pennies in a lot of the parts in these designs.
JHU should make these comments!, and also offer their designs for free given these are public orgs using mostly public dollars... if the result is such a big deal, getting manufacturers to commit to sound reduction in licensing deals would be a true result!
Yes, these mechanical engineering senior design projects at JHU are all sponsored by some organization or another, and the sponsor gets to keep the end product (and in this case also patent pending). Source: did a mechanical engineering senior design project at JHU 6 years ago (though mine was less successful, haha)
"Johns Hopkins researchers' success in winning federal funding—which accounted for close to 87% of its 2022 R&D expenditure—enables them to pursue projects in an array of fields, from human genetics to artificial intelligence."
[1] https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/01/05/nsf-higher-education-research...
Oh yes... "private" org using public dollars is more appropriate.
It appears as if this specific research was funded by Black & Decker. If they couldn't get the benefits from it, it's not as if they'd pay JHU to do and make public this research, but rather that they'd do the research a different way, likely robbing the JHU students of the real-world problem-solving experience as a capstone project of their engineering curriculum.
How JHU's other, unrelated research is funded doesn't seem terribly relevant to this privately-funded, patent-pending innovation.
If three people make this, then it should say something about a.) leaf blowers and how they are liked by bystanders b.) that this might be solving the wrong problem.
"you had to be the 3rd one to make it?"
With people making a personal attack out of everything, I wonder: Does this make you happy? How are those people in real life? Can't they discuss things without getting personal? (Oh and I see the irony of my comment, but I do consider this a meta-discussion)
PS: No I don't read every one out of 180 comments before I comment myself. Chapeau if you do!
> With people making a personal attack out of everything,
Just because you feel attacked doesn't mean you were attacked. Nothing bad happened to you, other than being asked a simple question.
> PS: No I don't read everyone of 180 comments before I comment myself.
In this case 0 were read in order to rush and make a low effort joke because there were two rake comments above the fold and nowhere near 180 total when you wrote it. There's no need to lie here, you gain nothing from it.
"In this case 0 were read in order to rush and make a low effort joke"
You should work for the NSA or the three later agency of your country, you can spot what people do possibly thousands of kilometers away! There was this one Columbo episode, one of my favorites, where the NSA wanted to hire such a guy. Sadly it was all fake. So the cynical side of me assumes you also can't spot what I'm doing at my computer, and your assertion you could see what I was doing, was fake :-(
"make a low effort joke"
You still have not understood my comment. You make no effort to understand the comment, even with my explanation. I guess this is because you don't want to understand people but get something out of attacking them.
My comment was not a joke, which was the point of my previous comment.
I was not making a joke. But that's not fitting the narrative in your head.
You invent other people in your head, me "rushing to the comments to make a low effort joke", ignoring what they say ("I was not making a joke"), then make up what they say, so you can attack them, instead of an argument ("I was not making a joke").
"The point stands that you lied about the number of comments"
I never said how many comments I have read. How can I lie about the number of comments I have read then? Are you mixing up comments? You see me highly confused.
[Edit] I made the comment because there are many leaf blowers here - and while they do individually safe time to the user, they create hell for everyone else who might be noise sensitive. And I made the comment to express that there is already an invention, the rake. So people could use that instead of optimizing their comfort and time against everyone else wellbeing. But people don't care.
Isn't it called a leaf rake? Frankly I never understood the popularity of leaf blowers to begin with. They are noisy, less effective than a leaf rake and very bad for health and back of the users.
It seems they exists only because people are stupid enough to think that something that makes noise and use a lot of energy would necessarily be better.
> less effective than a leaf rake and very bad for health and back of the users.
Citation needed. I can clear my whole yard with an electric blower much faster than with a rake. I also have no idea how holding a leaf blower would be bad for my back or health.
Exactly right. It's asinine to blow leaves. They don't do any damage and they create habitats for spiders and insects. I hate poeple who want clean, empty mowed lawns, aiming for an ideal that is far away from nature. Sickening.
I don’t want a natural habitat in my yard. That’s what the woods behind my house are for. I want a clean, relatively flat, and soft field of grass that my kids can run around barefoot in.
I’m all for natural beauty, but most people already live in urban or suburban environments. What’s the point in pretending when you’re surrounded by asphalt and brick?
>> It's asinine to blow leaves. They don't do any damage and they create habitats for spiders and insects.
Leaves are a problem in many areas, be them footpaths, roads or even railways. And good luck trying to maintain a golf course by just leaving the leaves out to rot on the grass.
A canopy of unblown leaves can cause damage to the surfaces underneath through mold or mildew. In some cases, this damage can be effectively permanent if let go long enough.
>In some cases, this damage can be effectively permanent if let go long enough.
I have no expertise in leaf or ground quality. If this is the correct, even in very rare cases, over the quarter-billion years or so that trees have been shedding leaves, should the entire planet not be barren wasteland by now?
What's the process by which leaf damage is undone over very long time periods?
It's just an ecosystem thing - if the ground cover can't handle the leaves it probably should be a different ground cover there. This does remind me of something cool though. I was up in the UP Michigan canoeing and ended up in a forest of maple trees. Their leaves had so completely dominated the ground that it was just a blanket of leaves and sap for miles. Only a few patches of fern could make it there but otherwise there were no (visible) ground plants
I think it varies and you probably shouldn't have that much confidence stating something you don't actually know as fact. In my personal experience I see more commercial operations using them to blow cut grass. Maybe a higher ratio are privately owned by individuals though. Who actually knows?
In my area they're occasionally used to blow leaves in the fall. Mostly they blow grass clippings off the street and sidewalk. Leaves in the fall are mostly mulched by mowers. It's about 20 times faster than blowing them around and collecting them.
Moving hundreds of pounds of leaves each season is backbreaking and time consuming work. The game changer is to rake the edges in and mulch them with a mower. Not quiet but it's quick.
Most American's would benefit greatly from some time consuming work. The comments on HN would likely improve from the mood altering benefits of exercise as well.
Lots of people have physically demanding jobs and things they do around the house.
And statistically speaking, most of this work is really done by professionals since most people live in cities without their own yards to clean up. People are paid to do physical labor all the time. It's often healthier long-term than desk jobs.
Yup! And deciduous trees planted next to your house are an excellent green way to decrease heating and cooling costs. Shade when you need it, not when you don’t. This is the exact reason we blow leaves too.
Are leaf blowers only a North American thing? When I grew up in Germany I hardly ever saw one. When I moved to the US they were everywhere. Not sure if they became popular around that time or if it's just more common in the US. When and where I grew up everyone also took care of their own garden, so I suspect that played a role as well
However, I think the idea that everyone needs to have a gardener loudly and poorly tend their 1/16th acre lot at random times is a problem unique to California suburbs.
Yeah I have to think it's the same phenomenon that makes people buy large 4-wheel-drive pickup trucks that they rarely use for anything but commuting and getting groceries. The same phenomenon that makes people buy a commercial-style zero-turn Dixie Chopper to cut their suburban lawn once a week. Big? Loud? Smokey? Gratuitious in every way? I want it!!
I share that sensibility, but it makes more sense in spaces that have already acheived a "wild" equilibrium.
In many cases, existing crafted landscapes can't handle the acidity/moisture-trapping/etc of decaying leaves. So you're really advocating for people to give up on expensive, considered, laborious projects that exist for functional or aesthetic reasons. Even if there are alternatives that are comparably functional or beautiful, what's there is there already and a lazy wilding doesn't necessarily lead to one of those agreeable alternatives.
I did that my first year of home ownership (because I am lazy). When I spring came around and the snow melted, all of the ground cover had turned into mud. No living plant life at all. I had to replant it all.
Something tells me that was not your desired outcome. Now I remove the leaves.
If they are serious, then they are making the equivocation fallacy - arguing by using a word in two different ways and hoping nobody notices the mistake.
But it's likely they are doing this as a pun, where readers are supposed to notice the equivocation, and find it funny or annoying. For example we can imagine a lazy husband saying "they're called leaves, so that is why I'm going to leave them for tomorrow!" This is not a serious attempt to equivocate the two meanings of "leave" - it communicates non willingness while also causing laughter or annoyance.
An obvious equivocation is not usually an effective argument. But making it a pun can win points with a good humored audience, because they find it funny. Funny arguments can influence opinions even though we know they are nonsense.
TLDR; when people mix word meanings secretly to confuse people and win points, it's equivocation, and that's a morally bad argument and is usually unacceptable. But when people mix meanings blatantly to win points by being funny, it's a pun, and that may be acceptable in non-serious conversations.
I tried this when I first got a house. The leaves decompose and you end up shoveling a layer of mud off your waking surfaces. It also becomes incredibly slippery when wet. A dense layer of waxy oak leaves can be like walking on ice.
He's saying to leave it on the yard to break down, if you do that it turns to slippery ass mud eventually, and guess what people like to be able to walk in their lawns, if we're sweeping up the entire yard so that we can use our yard without it being slippery and muddy from decomposed leaves... congrats you've just fucking reinvented the rake and leaf blower
Tuesday I mowed the lawn. Yesterday morning, I got up, made coffee, grabbed my shop broom and cleaned up out front. Not a leaf blower insight.
Sure it took a couple of extra minutes but I also got some light exercise. I understand why a lawn service uses a leaf blower. I don't understand why my neighbors do.
Hey whatever. I don't care. But when I hear a leaf blowers early on a Sunday or even a Saturday, I cringe. There's no reason miserable people need to make others miserable as well.
It's called hearing protection. People wear it while operating heavy machinery, shooting guns, or being at rock concerts. Might not hurt to keep a pair around your home.
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[ 8.4 ms ] story [ 1480 ms ] threadi would be leaf blowing my car every other day with the amount of rain here
When you wash the car you want all the water off of it. Water isn't clean.
Though come to think of it, a leaf blower might not work for that, unless it's actually managing to remove the water mechanically and eliminating evaporation. I recall mechanized car-washes using blow driers so maybe this does, indeed, work.
When you wash the car properly, you want to remove the excess water as it's not clean. Most people do this with a microfiber, towel or chamois. These can scratch the surface if not done properly.
A strong blower will remove the water without scratching the surface. It also works in places too small to reach with a towel.
They were car guys, my grandfather got best of class iirc at the concourse d'elegance for a 356 in the eighties. Now I own no car (but many bikes!)
After that I dug a small pit, trenched a 2" pipe into the bottom of it to act as a tuyere, and then hooked the shop vac hose to the other end of the pipe. That fire got hot enough that some rocks lining the pit glowed white and sand started to clump together. I could toss an 8-10 inch piece of (undried) oak log into the fire and it would completely burn away in under ten minutes. I had used an old log holder from a fireplace made of 3/4" iron bars to allow airflow around the larger logs as the fire was starting. When the fire died down I discovered it had completely buckled and collapsed from the heat.
I went on to learn how to make refractory bricks and distill charcoal. I switched from the shop vac to a computer case fan for my actual forges though, as the shop vac easily blew all the charcoal out of the fire pot and was very loud.
Now on the other hand, I do own a very noisy leaf vacuum. But when I've collected a bag full I can just deposit the leaves in my collection container. They are taken off to be composted
in my experience, homeowners mostly dick around with them
I have seen (predominately contractors) blow leaves into a tarp to take away on a truck though.
They also work for blowing snow off the sidewalk if the snow is still fluffy.
Lawn services mostly use leaf blowers to clear driveways and sidewalks of grass clippings.
I use mine to blow debris from the driveway onto the lawn so it doesn’t get tracked into the garage, or to clean the leaves, sticks, and pollen from our many trees that accumulate on the back deck. The times I’ve had landscapers come they used tarps to collect the bulk of the debris they gathered with the blowers and hauled it away.
All of this stuff is composted over the year in a large pile in a secluded corner of my garden, along with grass cuttings, scarified moss, etc. The volume of stuff usually exceeds the amount I can get rid of using the local council's garden waste collection.
If you don’t have sticky leaves, or are clearing primarily hard surfaces like a deck, then absolutely, battery-powered is the way to go. But if you’re a commercial operator who is driving tools more or less non-stop all day, it’s going to be a hard sell to have to have a minimum of N*2 batteries (at $150-200 each), plus the downtime of swaps, plus having to run a generator on your truck constantly to charge the off-duty batteries.
EDIT: Sibling comment below linked to a Stihl model that appears to offer an hour of runtime at full tilt. It’s also $2400 for the unit / battery / charger, tbf, but it at least has the performance.
That fast charger (say 30min to charge) for this thing would be quite a thing to witness with over a kW of power draw.
About Stihl, it uses a 36V battery, so 10 Li-Ion in series. Which is half as powerful. I can't see a capacity higher than 36V/6Ah from Stihl. Now, it possibly uses multiple batteries, however, the issue with charging still remains the same.
Running a generator would be louder than the device, so imo that's a moot point. I'd consider using a massive power bank and/or lots of pre-charged batteries to carry the day but not an inverter.Taking enough batteries to swap and charging them in off-hours seems the only sensible approach (albeit not cheap)
People argue the battery powered ones aren’t good for professional use (short runtimes) but that problem was solved years ago. They also argue they’re too expensive, but that argument falls apart if you include engine maintenance and gasoline in the cost.
Personally, I'd be quite excited to see what are the changes engineering wise. I bet it'd make a proper addition to BOLTR.
I still can't see how it'd be much quieter, as lots of the noise is just the air moving (and making sound waves), perhaps less vibrations, different frequencies due to different rpm?
Sounds like they created a noise cancellation air channel.
Edit: checked DCBL772X1 - it's listed 68 dBA - that's not necessarily loud, so if they managed -7dB, massive props to them.
They claim a 2db reduction overall.
Then they say that is 37% the noise. But it is not.
Human hearing isn’t linear with power.
2db is not the human perceived volume.
The article isn’t light on details - it’s bullshit.
It would be interesting if they stacked two or three together to muffle even more noise.
No camera is going to pick that up because no human is going to hear it.
They claim 37% reduction, but that isn’t true for human perceived volume.
However, if you can use a robot one (or few of them), it tends to be an easier setup - it does require flatter lawn and what not, though. However they are insufficient in cases where one really needs a riding mower.
Personally, I have/use a robot, a battery powered strimmer, gas powered brushcutter, and a push behind mower. The main job is done by the little robot, but the rest have their uses as well.
UK here. I've been using a petrol mower for the last 25 years. My lawn is 40m long. I do own a 50m extension cable but it would be a real hassle for grass cutting. My three adjacent neighbours also have petrol mowers.
That said, given how bad gas lawn equipment is for the air in a locality, maybe regulatory nudges are in order. I suspect if the incentives were right the rest of the problems would solve themselves.
You would need at least 3 batteries per piece of equipment in use at one time in order to not have to spend time idle while a battery recharges ($700-$1000 upfront investment in batteries per piece). The lifespan of those batteries under constant usage would be atrocious.
Even if you could solve the battery problem, the power of the equipment doesn't come close to gas. My Ego leaf blower doesn't even compare to the plug-in electric one I had prior to acquiring it, and I still have to revert for some harder jobs. An example of this: if there is a clump of wet grass on concrete, like something left behind from a mower wheel, the Ego struggles to move it while the plug-in has no problem. Or if a pile of leaves is damp, forget about it.
The mowing quality is terrible, leaving long patches everywhere (despite a sharp blade and slow progression). The form factor of the mower deck makes corners and edges much more difficult than other machines. And because the power is limited, the mulching capabilities are almost nil. It shuts down quickly if you hit a particularly tough piece of lawn to avoid overloading its motor.
I do think their more recent models fix a lot of these issues but I don't think its ready for commercial use. Just having to have a large number of batteries to sustain your day of work is limiting.
The place where it is weakest is probably snow blowing. They now have a 2-stage electric blower, but I am pretty sure it's just nowhere near gas. I live in the midwest in an area where the 1-stage Ego electric blower is already kind of overkill, so that's what I'm running. It has its negatives and positives: it always starts without having to worry about the fuel sitting over the seasons, it's quiet during operation and doesn't pollute, the batteries are always ready since they are on the charge when not in use, and I have enough battery to run it for much longer than needed. That said: the batteries are, indeed, simply too expensive.
I'm surprised the mower sucks, this Toro electric mower feels reasonable compared to anything else I've ever used (granted, I do not have much lawn and have never used any serious mowers. Just your average lawn mowers). I wonder if it's true that all electric mowers suck or maybe it's just that Ego isn't/wasn't doing a good job on mower design.
The Ego leaf blower and even the chain saw are good tools for 90% of my average home usage, and the convenience of not having to deal with cords or trying to start a small gas engine makes them worth it to me. I have not had to go to my old string trimmer once and should probably sell it. Living more north of you, I haven't dared try the snow blower. The gas blower I have struggles with some of our snows up here.
The mower on the other hand, I wanted to return after the very first mow but convinced myself that even with a poor cut the trade off was worth it. 4 years later and with batteries dying I'm considering other options (including the Toro electric, but many reviews made similar remarks to the Ego).
Yeah, exactly. That was my thought, too.
I don't think they're that far behind, but improvements in battery technology might be necessary for commercial usage to become viable without being subsidized or regulated.
> The mower on the other hand, I wanted to return after the very first mow but convinced myself that even with a poor cut the trade off was worth it. 4 years later and with batteries dying I'm considering other options (including the Toro electric, but many reviews made similar remarks to the Ego).
Yeah, I suspect you really do need the power of gas for your mowing. That does make me wonder why some people clearly do and some people clearly don't, but it's probably not worth wasting too much time pondering.
I have Ego products and don't see any problems with them whatsoever. I've used and have gas and corded equipment, and by far prefer Ego. I haven't noticed any functional difference in how they perform, and if anything I get annoyed by gas models because they're heavier and more annoying to start and stop. Sure they're more powerful sometimes but I've never needed the extra power they provide. It's not like I'm going to chop up a log using my lawnmower. I've never had problems mulching anything or mowing well, and it works perfectly. And I live on a fairly wooded property so we get tons of leaves. The batteries last plenty long and charge really fast.
For what it's worth, they do make batteries in different Ah capacities. I don't even remember which ones we have but maybe we have the higher capacity ones?
I can see why contractors might have issues with constant use of cordless equipment. But I'm not a contractor, and my guess is they'd have more problems with battery lifespan than charging in practice if they timed the charging well.
I also understand why people wouldn't like the sound of leaf blowers but to me I don't understand the level of animosity about them, in the sense that there's other things that are much louder that I don't hear laws being passed about and so forth. To me it feels a bit like they're being singled out for some reason, I assume because people believe they're unnecessary? Either that or I'm just not bothered as much by that particular noise.
1) You have to buy special blades because of weight.
2) The lift on these blades are not as great, you can definitely bag but its maybe 50% the lift a gas mower can provide.
3) This also impacts things like mulching where your not getting enough lift to chop up the grass enough.
4) It can bog down a lot quicker than a gas mower.
Still love my mower but at least the prior generation was under powered in the motor department.
A fast charging, high capacity tool battery takes at least 60 minutes to charge. In high power applications (lawn mower, leaf blower, chainsaw, etc) those batteries might be emptied in a little as 15 minutes.
A better alternative might be corded 240v tools running directly off the generator for high-power applications. 120v tools are limited to 2-3HP which doesn't compare well to gas engines.
You start stacking energy efficiency losses (engine -> charger -> battery -> inverter -> charger -> battery -> motor) and economic losses (expensive serial hybrid, higher than expected vehicle battery cycles, still need a large number of tool batteries which wear out in about a year, etc.) though.
120 VAC:
https://youtu.be/dIZsACfqB-E?t=46
and it has 20kWh battery:
https://carbuzz.com/news/2023-mitsubishi-outlander-phev-has-...
I feel cars have been stuck in boring mode for 2 decades, but now with zany stuff like power outlets and such, they are getting more interesting.
Instead buy 120-volt and 240-volt leaf blowers. BTW 2-3 horsepower is plenty (probably too much) for one man.
We use water hoses w/o bitching too much. We could used corded leafblowers tomorrow. Or butch up, get rakes and get in shape: cleaner air, more exercise and longer hours for the lawn laborers.
Also did you just pull this from memory?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance
If there's a quiet option and someone deliberately uses a noisy one, could that be considered a nuisance?
Again, it may change in another couple generations, but it'll be slow.
If it's any consolation, not every rural area is like that, at least around here people just want to be left alone.
Personally I'd buy one of these in an instant, I like being able to enjoy the peace and quiet!
Or course it can happen a lot if you get the wrong neighbors. But that's more of a risk in the city where you have so many more neighbors.
My most well off neighbor is the most prolific shooter I know. He shoots targets almost daily with his .22, and I don't hear it at all from 1/3 mile away. He doesn't use a suppressor, but some kind of quieter round. I guess that means slower.
Is one supposed to avoid purposefully releasing diesel particulates by rapidly increasing engine speed? Yes and people sometimes still do it for whatever reason.
That’s an awfully uncharitable projection.
The lawn business people I know would love to adopt full electric fleets of gear. They aren’t sending their teams out with gas engines because it’s a “fantasy escape world”. They do it because gas engines are currently the only reasonable way to keep the crews running all day without spending thousands of dollars on batteries over and over again.
Current battery tech is hit or miss. The packs should be protected from over-discharge and last for hundreds of cycles, but in practice they got a lot of early failures. They also need extra packs to rotate while others are charging. At $100-200 per battery, they might be spending $1000 on batteries to operate a machine for a season, which would have bought them two gas powered machines and gas to operate them.
There’s also the issue of charging throughout the day. Getting a reliable charging setup that works on a truck inverter and getting crews to perfectly manage batteries throughout the day, including spares, is significantly harder than just filling up a gas tank.
Projecting all of this on to “fantasy escape world” is silly.
I'm talking about neighbors living in rural/suburban areas.
EDIT: We have a lawn care guy. He does our half acre in under 30 minutes. Our neighbors who do it themselves - same half acre size - typically take 90-120 minutes. They'll just sit on a riding mower and let it idle for minutes, while looking up stuff on their phones. Or let it idle and go inside for a drink, while leaving it running. They enjoy riding around with a loud engine underneath, like a really slow motorcycle. This is not speculation, it's from talking to them.
The business people have an incentive to get in and out quickly - they can do more lawns that way.
The people who like loud engine noise have no such incentive. They have an incentive to have a lazy afternoon of lawn mowing.
It's not just out of spite, although for some for sure it may be part of it. It seems out of a weird affection for things that are noisy, under their dominion.
So there is that antianxiety effect. Ingrained from an early age.
My friend in the trade explained it thus.
The blower and weed trimmer (especially) burn through very expensive batteries (XC8.0) very quickly. It is not a feasible replacement for even a moderate job. My yard is super small and I move quick and have learned to pull the batteries at 50% to keep from ruining them. But I have burnt up at least one $200 battery that will only charge to 75% now. That happened in the first season. Otherwise, performance is good.
Separately, I was tired of the stand up vacuums for smaller jobs so got a corded stick vacuum. It's still a bit of a hassle even though I use it frequently to avoid messes getting out of control with the kids and pets. I know that if it was cordless it would get much more proactive usage by others. The design of the corded vac could be improved to make it easier but there is little incentive to do that.
It takes me about 6-8 gull charges to complete mowing and blowing. Leaf blowing is by far the more energy intensive. During the fall I have to space out the work in order to charge. Granted my property has a lot of tree cover and therefore always has a lot of leafs and debris.
Needless to say I regret my decision.
One of the problems with the blower is that it has a standard mode that is effectively useless, barely usable for even clippings. You have to run it at “max” charge for it to be remotely effective.
Edit: I have a previous year version of the RY404170-LB backpack blower. It eats batteries like candy.
I pretty much never need to recharge the batteries when working. I haven't needed to do much maintenance to it at all, just sharpening the mowing blade. Even after a few years the batteries still have plenty of charge to mow, trim, edge, and blow both yards. I don't normally have enough battery to do all that and do the hedge trimmer for a while though, I'll normally go inside and cool off for 15-20min and then go back out if I need to handle that. The fast charger can get a pretty good charge in 20 minutes
I've found Makita to be better for my line of work at least. I love my older Milwaukee tools. My 10" chopsaw from the early 90s is a solid beast, as well as my worm drive. Newer Milwaukee is a crapshoot, I've had three dead batteries from them, none from Makita. Two burnt out super sawzalls, and a miter saw with no idea what true is.
I will say Milwaukee tools have more power to them, but my Makita ones are more reliable. Less frills, less price too.
I am biased as I do more finishing then rough work, so I have an understanding that Milwaukee is better/quicker for that, but I'll stick with Makita for battery tools. I can go two, three days on a single charge with my miter.
My batteries on my blower and trimmer and lawn mower use 56V batteries, up to 12Ah. About 672Wh. The smallest battery I have for it is 280Wh.
Milwaukee might make some decent power tools, but they're still batteries designed for a drill or some other smaller handheld tool used for short stints. Companies focusing on lawn care products have much different battery packs.
Is Milwaukee better? I always understood Milwaukee (Red), Dewalt (Yellow), and Makita (Teal) to basically be interchangeable for most products and it just depended on who you ask and which color team they were on.
However, it is still very loud and doesn't last long enough for commercial use.
One instance recently, had a few very aggressive wasps in the garage (Son is allergic). In the past I'd use some chemicals, the leaf blower got them out in seconds, it's so powerful it blew them outside far enough they couldn't get back and just flew off.
On a more constructive note, I don't know where people get the idea that battery powered means quiet. My vacuum is electric and far from quiet – why would a leaf blower be?
Have you compared your electric vacuum to your gas powered one?
A lead blower would require a lot of battery power for sure.
The very existence of a power tool, even when inert, laying (nay, waiting!, biding!) on the shelf, it shapes your mind, aspirations, disposition.
Truly supernatural, a fetish, a cursed monkey paw in the curiosity shop.
like yes people do like using loud power tools for the sake of using loud power tools, most people would consider them at least moderately fun.
It's neither uncharitable nor a projection. My dad is one of these - the loudness is entirely the point, by his own admission. He told me this. He intentionally buys the loudest most powerful/obnoxious tools he can rather than the most practical and dicks around with them.
My dad is also the laziest man on the planet and does ZERO housework. He only does lawn work because it's an opportunity for him to play with his toys.
>The lawn business people I know
Nobody's talking about people with lawn businesses. Businesses will want to just get the work done and move onto the next client.
Not the OP but I would agree with you if I was not told explicitly by several people that they love being outside with loud gas powered engines. These people happen to be my neighbors. There's a culture around small gas powered engines. People grew up with them, and learned engine repair on them, which helped them build a career. I have used battery powered leaf blower and a battery powered weed eater, and I have been told "that's nicer than anything else I've ever used, but I just love gas engines".
I kind of agree. How I see is that there's a lot of frustration in people in general, and many manage their internal turmoil by manifesting it into external stimulus. Many behave actively, organizedly anti-social ways, so much so that new words, Wikipedia articles have been created to describe the behavior, like "Rolling coal" or "Whistle tips".
Now, I think that these can be thought of as tips of an iceberg. The iceberg being unhandled emotional stress, a system that perpetually creates it, and the behaviors of people that handle it.
I agree that the business incentives are there to keep ICE around. ICE is mature technology, battery-powered are not, and since batteries have not coalesced or aren't regulated around a handful of standards, manufacturers use this to lock in customers into their own ecosystem, among other kinds of power struggles being present as well. I'm personally not confident that I can buy a replacement battery for a new device in 5 years for a fair price, as I expect that there is going to be a new battery standard, with which my "old" device will not be compatible with. So ICE makes a lot of sense still.
On another level, I think it's important to note that noise is power. It affects us on ancient, animalistic level. Loud noise means us danger, or at the very minimum something important to pay attention to. A low level of constant noise feels like safety. No noise is creepy, we better watch out. To be able to make a huge noise is powerful - people and animals usually have gestures explicitly for this reason, and it has been used in warfare too, both in the distant and close past.
So, people are sensitive to this power. Combined with the ability of increased mobility, or the safety that a metal chassis provides, it makes it an attractive way for people to feel like they are in power, or to reduce the powerlessness they feel in other parts of their life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistle_tip
I took this to mean my father-in-law, but not a paid business or situation where these things are a necessity. He is a lawyer who's worked remote since 2000 only leaves home for necessities and outside hobbies, but has all kinds of equipment including a tractor and snow plow. Of course, he has a ride-on mower and enough other equipment to start a landscaping business.
That is the only reason leaf blowers exists.
The noise comes from the need to move air (and the noise is just air waves), along with certain vibrations. A brushless motor is super silent if you exclude the fan(s) cooling it.
The team started working last September. They hoped to improve an electric or battery-powered leaf blower, which is already much quieter than the notorious gas-powered ones, where the sound can carry over an average suburban block.
What I'd really say is maybe we should rethink if blowers are even useful or necessary at all over the old broom and scoop.
Many times I see landscapers use them to simply blow dust and leaves everywhere, including into busy streets, rather than using them to try and collect all detritus into a single pile for collection.
If that's more commonly the case, then why use them at all?
The problem is that the battery stuff doesn’t compete on price/power if you’re doing basically anything more than a lawn measured in square feet.
That actually wasn't bad though compared to moving to San Francisco, where they decided to carve a narrow chunk out of the side of a solid-rock hill right below my window. Jackhammering all day from 7am until 5pm. I bought a sound meter and complained several times that they had exceeded the sound limits but no one cared.
It really affected my wife, we had just moved to SF and she had no where to go while I was at work. She tried libraries and parks and such but there were too many homeless there and they harassed her. She has trouble sleeping due to mental health issues and she usually sleeps from 4am to 12pm, but she couldn't do this due to the jackhammering outside of our window that started at the crack of dawn.
This meant she didn't sleep at all for months, and she ended up having a psychotic break, for which she was hospitalized. She was sent to a hospital in Santa Clara, and I drove there every day to see her.
Anyway, all of this is to say that noise issues are serious to some people, and there's really no limit to how much noise someone can make. You can complain but nothing happens.
Once I was riding my motorcycle to work, and another guy rode passed me on his motorcycle. His exhaust was so loud it gave me a headache almost instantly. I can't imagine how much it must hurt to actually ride the thing.
Somewhat upsetting here... I don't have a problem with people doing things like this and students need encouragement, but we are talking about shifting from the sound of a leaf blower to the sound of a vacuum cleaner [2]... in the best case.
One particular annoyance here: the sound emission must be from the end of the blower but also from its casing. I feel many products like these are cheaply designed, and the OEM could solve many of the nuisance issues with simple housing changes... or spending a few more pennies on the bearings or blades in assemblies. These are not OEM primary goals, as they are looking to save pennies in a lot of the parts in these designs.
JHU should make these comments!, and also offer their designs for free given these are public orgs using mostly public dollars... if the result is such a big deal, getting manufacturers to commit to sound reduction in licensing deals would be a true result!
https://audiology-web.s3.amazonaws.com/migrated/NoiseChart_P... [2]
not amazing (at least on paper)
[1] https://www.stihl.de/de/p/laubblaeser-blasgeraete-saughaecks...
[2] https://www.chem.purdue.edu/chemsafety/Training/PPETrain/dbl...
JHU is private. It seems like this research may have been sponsored by Black & Decker, also private.
Oh yes... "private" org using public dollars is more appropriate.
How JHU's other, unrelated research is funded doesn't seem terribly relevant to this privately-funded, patent-pending innovation.
"you had to be the 3rd one to make it?"
With people making a personal attack out of everything, I wonder: Does this make you happy? How are those people in real life? Can't they discuss things without getting personal? (Oh and I see the irony of my comment, but I do consider this a meta-discussion)
PS: No I don't read every one out of 180 comments before I comment myself. Chapeau if you do!
Just because you feel attacked doesn't mean you were attacked. Nothing bad happened to you, other than being asked a simple question.
> PS: No I don't read everyone of 180 comments before I comment myself.
In this case 0 were read in order to rush and make a low effort joke because there were two rake comments above the fold and nowhere near 180 total when you wrote it. There's no need to lie here, you gain nothing from it.
You should work for the NSA or the three later agency of your country, you can spot what people do possibly thousands of kilometers away! There was this one Columbo episode, one of my favorites, where the NSA wanted to hire such a guy. Sadly it was all fake. So the cynical side of me assumes you also can't spot what I'm doing at my computer, and your assertion you could see what I was doing, was fake :-(
"make a low effort joke"
You still have not understood my comment. You make no effort to understand the comment, even with my explanation. I guess this is because you don't want to understand people but get something out of attacking them.
My comment was not a joke, which was the point of my previous comment.
So you weren't making a low effort comment, you were trying to start substantive discussion, but you didn't even read other comments? Sounds likely.
I guess since we're telling pointless stories about TV shows I should comment on your bright future as a HumancentiPad component.
You invent other people in your head, me "rushing to the comments to make a low effort joke", ignoring what they say ("I was not making a joke"), then make up what they say, so you can attack them, instead of an argument ("I was not making a joke").
"The point stands that you lied about the number of comments"
I never said how many comments I have read. How can I lie about the number of comments I have read then? Are you mixing up comments? You see me highly confused.
[Edit] I made the comment because there are many leaf blowers here - and while they do individually safe time to the user, they create hell for everyone else who might be noise sensitive. And I made the comment to express that there is already an invention, the rake. So people could use that instead of optimizing their comfort and time against everyone else wellbeing. But people don't care.
Plus a broom to keep the sidewalk clean.
Similar story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932971
EDIT: why the downvotes?
It seems they exists only because people are stupid enough to think that something that makes noise and use a lot of energy would necessarily be better.
Citation needed. I can clear my whole yard with an electric blower much faster than with a rake. I also have no idea how holding a leaf blower would be bad for my back or health.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2NSBAe6bdI
I’m all for natural beauty, but most people already live in urban or suburban environments. What’s the point in pretending when you’re surrounded by asphalt and brick?
But leafblowers are mainly just antisocial technology.
Leaves are a problem in many areas, be them footpaths, roads or even railways. And good luck trying to maintain a golf course by just leaving the leaves out to rot on the grass.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58783589 "Dry ice to help cut train delays caused by leaves on tracks"
I have no expertise in leaf or ground quality. If this is the correct, even in very rare cases, over the quarter-billion years or so that trees have been shedding leaves, should the entire planet not be barren wasteland by now?
What's the process by which leaf damage is undone over very long time periods?
I saw a bumble bee come out of hibernation from inside an old leaf out in the garden recently. Amazing experience. The leaves also make good top soil.
If you need to move leaves, use brooms. Or leave the leaves be, assholes! :-D
Or was the post sarcasm? Poe's law.
It's (often but not always) slower work, but it's quieter.
And statistically speaking, most of this work is really done by professionals since most people live in cities without their own yards to clean up. People are paid to do physical labor all the time. It's often healthier long-term than desk jobs.
If I didn’t have a leaf blower, my driveway would be solid ice in the winter, mud in the spring and fall, and dust in the summer.
However, I think the idea that everyone needs to have a gardener loudly and poorly tend their 1/16th acre lot at random times is a problem unique to California suburbs.
Looks like they are way faster than unpowered tools.
In many cases, existing crafted landscapes can't handle the acidity/moisture-trapping/etc of decaying leaves. So you're really advocating for people to give up on expensive, considered, laborious projects that exist for functional or aesthetic reasons. Even if there are alternatives that are comparably functional or beautiful, what's there is there already and a lazy wilding doesn't necessarily lead to one of those agreeable alternatives.
It's a bigger ask than your phrasing suggests.
Something tells me that was not your desired outcome. Now I remove the leaves.
Or was the post sarcasm? Poe's law.
But it's likely they are doing this as a pun, where readers are supposed to notice the equivocation, and find it funny or annoying. For example we can imagine a lazy husband saying "they're called leaves, so that is why I'm going to leave them for tomorrow!" This is not a serious attempt to equivocate the two meanings of "leave" - it communicates non willingness while also causing laughter or annoyance.
An obvious equivocation is not usually an effective argument. But making it a pun can win points with a good humored audience, because they find it funny. Funny arguments can influence opinions even though we know they are nonsense.
TLDR; when people mix word meanings secretly to confuse people and win points, it's equivocation, and that's a morally bad argument and is usually unacceptable. But when people mix meanings blatantly to win points by being funny, it's a pun, and that may be acceptable in non-serious conversations.
Doesn't imply that the entire yard was being considered a walking surface
Sure it took a couple of extra minutes but I also got some light exercise. I understand why a lawn service uses a leaf blower. I don't understand why my neighbors do.