I once made the mistake of sleeping with a window open the night before the lawn crew came through my apartment complex. A plume of 2-stroke exhaust is a particularly nauseating way to be woken up. It was bad enough that I grabbed my toothbrush and ran out the door and headed to work without a shower.
But hey! No leaves on the patio come Tuesday! #worthit
The problem pollutants for vehicles are NOx and particulate (particularly small particulate under 2.5 or 10 microns in diameter). This test found the truck produced a lot of NOx, and didn't test for particulate matter, so it's not really able to say what you want it to say.
Leaf blowers are two-stroke engines which have an entirely (and much worse) emissions profile compared to modern four stroke engines. E.g. you'll find things like benzene in their exhaust. Hence results like "waiting near a 2-stroke scooter on an intersection is orders of magnitudes more poisenous than waiting near a car".
Yet, 2 stroke scooters don't have to have the same emission controls as automobiles. This is because they have a small carbon footprint; as a class, they don't contribute that much to pollution.
Benzene may be more acutely poisonous than some other molecule which also has six carbon atoms, but from the planet's perspective, it's just six carbon atoms.
If you're breathing any exhaust, you're taking in CO. Less pungent smelling exhaust is not any better for you.
It's fine. Even my weed trimmer is 4-stroke. Aircraft engines, which really need to have a great power to weight ratio, are normally 4-stroke.
For small things, the only place that seems to justify 2-stroke is a chainsaw. This is partly because weight matters much more, and partly because a chainsaw is held at many different angles. Oil flow in a 4-stroke engine is difficult when you can't rely on gravity going in any particular direction.
Given that the whole point of a leaf blower engine is to move air, I have to wonder if the best solution might be a turbine.
That's a great idea! Now if you'll just design an inexpensive turbine that won't fly apart catastrophically at 10,000-50,000 rpm, twist your hand off due to gyroscopic forces, and is easy-to-start w/o first spinning up to 5,000 rpm, we're set to go!
Best bet: electric corded (120 Volts AC) leaf blowers: cheap, powerful, reliable, light and easy to maintain. No danger of battery fire/explosion due to abuse/age.
The startup issue might be mostly solved these days with cheap lithium batteries and brushless dc motors. That said you still have the turbine issue and the fact that it'll be much much louder.
Someone was proposing a sleeve valve design to fix the weight problem, but that was years back (when blowers first hit the level of nuisance), so I’m assuming that didn’t pan out...
I just switched to an electric mower. It cost about the same as an decent mower, is lighter weight, always starts, is plenty powerful, and has about 45 minutes of charge on a swappable battery. I could buy more batteries if I wanted more runtime. I can also swap that battery with other equipment like string trimmers.
I've overhauled my last temperamental gas carb. The end of gas lawn gear is indeed in sight.
I think electric only makes sense for individuals that use these tools once a day at most. Running a lawn maintenance business on electric tools would probably be far more expensive and logistics-heavy.
For now you’d probably be right in some cases but not all. It’s certainly on the cusp of changing.
A petrol lawnmower still wins for long runtimes, though even that can be mitigated by having multiple batteries. It’s fair to say the electric upsides are marginal with mowers.
Whereas with hand tools like leaf blowers and line trimmers, the benefits are massive. Professional electric garden tools place the battery pack on a backpack so that the handheld component is light weight. They are quieter so no ear protection is needed, no sooty emissions so no face mask needed, and less vibration so it’s far less fatiguing for all-day use.
Perhaps a good idea if you’re blowing all day but I rarely feel the need and I have dust & pollen allergies.
Either way, with electric you’re not breathing in concentrated nitrous oxide and two-stroke oil soot. To deal with dust you’d only need a light and relatively comfortable fabric mask like they use in hospitals (or on Japanese public transport).
I just switched to all electric lawn tools. I got the trimmer, chainsaw, and blower from the 80v Kobalt line. Like you say, plenty of power, much easier maintenance, and multiple batteries mean the runtime is not limited.
I had a 40v electric mower with 5A battery for $350 new a few years ago. Battery life got shorter every run, the stopped working after 2 years, replaced under 3 year warranty. Second battery life continues to get shorter.
New 5A batteries are $150. I had some 2A batteries from other lawn equipment but the mower eats through those in 10m, plus puts another charge cycle on them.
I finally got feud up and got a Honda self-propelled gas mower for $400 that should last 10 years. I think battery mower is great for tiny lawns, say 0.1 acres or less. Anything bigger and li-ion tech is going to be too expensive over the years.
Love the battery weedeacker and hedge trimmer though. The battery blower is great for blowing the porch or driveway, but for fall cleanup or gutters it's the same story; get a corded electric for that.
Maybe I've just been lucky, but I've had exactly the opposite experience. I've mowed a large lawn with a Li-ion battery-powered mower for four years and I can't detect any degradation in the batteries. Maybe you already know and do this, but I'll note that some basic battery temperature management will greatly prolong their life. Don't let them bake in the sun, don't store them or charge them in a hot garage, etc.
On the other hand, all of the gas-powered mowers I've ever used, even really expensive ones, were heavy, fiddly, stinky, obnoxious things that eventually drove me to use a reel mower for a short time before I went electric.
I do still have a gas-powered machine. It's a tiller with a four-stroke engine. It's new and high-quality, and it's a fucking pain in the ass. It's hard to start, loud, smells like shit when it's running and the fuel stinks up my garage. Unfortunately there are no electric tillers, but we'll get there some day.
It was a Kobalt. I think it may have been their first battery powered model. The Honda mower will evidently need maintenance (outside of oil and air filters which I can do) at some point too, but the nice thing is Northern Tool and Equipment has a shop and they are a Honda dealer, so they can fix it and have the Honda supply chain.
Thing that sketched me out about the Kobalt is that once it fails or the battery is discontinued, you're on your own. I opened the battery up and it had 20x 4v cells but they were so tightly wired and glued that replacing all 20 would have been a pain in the ass, plus would've run around $80 for the cells.
Tillers are another beast, you don't drive them around the yard, they drive you. At least in the North Carolina clay...
I got a mid-range Ryobi, because there is at least one string trimmer that uses the same power pack, and you can buy more of them. So far so good, but spring is coming so we'll see.
I picked up an 80v leaf blower, and it's a bit unbalanced but definitely not too heavy to use. It's definitely been one of my happier purchases as far as lawn and yard tools go.
> gas powered leaf blower puts out as much pollution in a day of work as a Ford Raptor will in 100,000
This is not believable. Think of how many tankfuls of gas that will go through in 100,000 miles. Every atom of carbon going out the tail pipe is "pollution".
A day's use of a gas leaf blower has a vanishingly small carbon and NOx footprint compared to 100K miles of a fossil-fueled Ford truck.
