I live in DC, a few bits of info about why it makes sense here, and may not make sense in your home:
1. They didn't ban leaf blowers, the banned _gas_ leaf blowers. Electric ones are quieter, inexpensive, and work just as well nowadays. My building has an electric Milwaukee that was 200 bucks and lasts all afternoon on a battery or two.
2. This isn't about people wanting to manicure their lawns out in the burbs at 7am on Saturdays and using a gallon of gas per decade. DC is relatively dense with mid-rises and office buildings, it's the grounds crews and landscapers running them 9-5.
3. Coincidentally now with the age of work from home it's an extra boon not to have your neighboring building's super blasting a leaf blower below your window at 11am during your zoom meeting.
With any policy you have to look at the downsides -- people and companies have to buy new leaf blowers and batteries, what's the cost in money and environment? But I think they're fairly minor compared to the upsides in pollution and peace and quiet.
The main people who get hurt by this policy are small business landscapers, who are eligible for a subsidy to help replace equipment, which I think is a nice compromise.
I would really wish other cities followed suit. And I propose to extend this to a ban on all devices with noisy and smelly two-stroke engines: chainsaws, lawn mowers, motor scooters etc. The scooters may not be a problem in Washington, but anyone who has ever been to an Italian or Spanish city can probably relate...
I agree with the sentiment but pragmatically I think we have to time bans to when replacements are really equivalent or better-- electric mowers in particular are still 4x the cost and get mixed reviews, and I don't think chainsaw usage is a huge civic problem here in DC, but I don't live next to any big parks.
Maybe we could also go with making new ones illegal to sell, though we'd have to coordinate with MD and VA which seems unlikely.
Leaf blowers are a slam dunk, I don't know enough about scooters to comment intelligently.
Battery-powered lawn equipment is definitely getting better. I find less runtime and a bit less performance a good tradeoff for my interchangeable head weedwhacker vs. a temperamental two-stroke engine that I use once a month or so.
However, electric isn't going to do the job for a sit on top mower as far as I know and, in general, professionals who are using their equipment all day long are mostly not going to find electric's tradeoffs reasonable.
We don't have to outright ban everything either. I would be absolutely delighted if my city enacted a "quiet Tuesdays" or whatever where any noise making machines above a certain decibel were banned. If people could just coordinate to make all their noise on one day instead of the "leafblower today, mower tomorrow, jackhammar on weekends" we have right now
Not to mention the very serious environmental and health impacts of constant noise pollution
Power washers used regularly on commercial property, too. As far as I can tell, the electric ones are every bit as effective and cost about the same amount. And anyone using a power washer is already trailing a hose around, too — a cable is not much of a hardship.
(Few things are quite as unpleasant as a crew using a stinky 2-stroke engine to do prolonged work on an otherwise nice plaza.)
The Milwaukee chainsaw and mower do what they're advertised to do, and you could use them "professionally" assuming you had enough batteries laying around.
California has already banned the sale of small gas motors and others will follow suit; but it will take years and years for the existing ones to die off.
With scooters, of course you could argue that a two-stroke-engine scooter is still better than a car that emits more CO2 (and even more if it's stuck in traffic or searching for a parking spot in some European city center). But electric scooters are definitely competitive and noise-free - of course more expensive, but still affordable, at least for an average European income.
2-strokes are actually pretty astoundingly awful for pollution and air quality. They emit so much that when running a leafblower and an F-150 Raptor the same amount of time, the leafblower will emit orders of magnitude more pollutants, save for CO2 specifically. pretty much any vehicle on the road is emitting less hydrocarbons per-mile than a two-stroke.
Obviously CO2 is a problem for global warming, but I definitely don't think its worth the air pollution trade-offs of a two stroke in a crowded city, especially when 4-stroke alternatives exist and are better in almost every way.
California banned gas chainsaw sales last year IIRC. It was such a poorly worded law that firefighters and loggers have to go out of state to buy them, instead of it being a prohibition on suburban homeowners using them. The electric saws aren't practical in the woods at all because the battery and spares are so big and heavy. It's hard to beat the energy density of gasoline.
Also electric saws are a damn hazard compared to gas saws. They cut right through safety chaps, no problem.
Gasoline engines struggle to produce torque at very low RPM's, so once they begin choking on the fibers in the chaps, they lose momentum and stop.
Electric motors on the other hand produce peak torque at 0 RPM, so it's way harder to bring them to a standstill.
Many of these electric chainsaws are premium brands and still have this problem- to my knowledge there are no electric chainsaws that have a safety feature designed to make sure chaps work.
The clever safety feature that could be engineered to help make these safer is to add a torque sensor to the motor that cuts off power if excessive torque is sensed. This excessive torque condition would hopefully be calibrated to not have any nuisance shutoffs, but can still stop the saw when needed for safety.
This surprises me. I visited a major tool manufacturer a couple of years ago and even their midrange electric drills now use a microprocessor (specifically an ARM Cortex of some variety) and a sensor to synthesize the waveform that drives the brushless motor. They were talking to me because it had so much extra computing power for so little cost they were trying to find IoT applications for the thing.
I would expect commercial-grade electric chainsaws to use similar technology, and that they could be programmed to cut power in the event of a sudden speed reduction, mimicking the safety of a gas engine. But what do I know.
The explanation as I've heard it is that ICE's deliver pulsed power. At peak power in the engine cycle it cuts chaps easy but when the output dips it chokes on the fibers.
Electric saws deliver uniform power and don't have this quirk.
Wanna ban stuff based on noise pollution? Fine, I'll give up my gas mower as long as I never have to hear some jerk on a motorcycle blast through my neighborhood ever again.
No argument here. However, note the motorcycle with the obnoxiously loud exhaust is most likely already illegal (subject to a fine), wherever you are. It's just not well enforced/enforceable.
For sure, my country (the Netherlands) was set to block use of gasoline scooters by 2025, but the EU blocked that [0, Dutch]. Anyway, about 50% sales is electric now anyway, they are quite attractive on their own.
> people and companies have to buy new leaf blowers and batteries
It seems hopelessly anachronistic and impractical, but why can't rakes be an alternative? It would take more time, but the landscapers would be paid more if they're working hourly.
Much of the leaf blower usage in my area is just to blow the grass clippings back onto the lawn when they end up in the street/driveway/parking lot/sidewalk/etc. If the mower just had a mulching system which trapped the cut grass under itself, then there'd be no need to blow the cut grass at all, it would already be on the lawn.
It's funny to me watching the lawn crews get out their blowers at the end of every mow to blow the grass clippings. It seems like such a waste of time, and hence money to pay them for that labor. Simply preventing the need for using a leaf blower seems like something someone should solve for these lawn crews.
My mower has a mulcher, but it isn't the mower that's the problem. It's the edger. Gotta get the remains from that off the sidewalk afterwards.
I have all electric tools and it's amazing how quiet they are. My neighbor laughed at me for wearing hearing protection until I told him they have Bluetooth in them. ;)
I think the point was that since they banned gas leaf blowers, they might as well have banned all leaf blowers, leaving nothing but hand tools. Of course someone could invent a hand-cranked blower or something... would be interesting to see exactly what loopholes in the legal wording people would find.
One or two minutes of use should be enough to get those spots. The real issue is people who run things things for an hour. A time limit per day would be ideal.
Leaf blowers are useful for things other than literally blowing leaves. I use one to dust out my car, garage, and also clean vacuum filters. Very carefully used it can dust off old PCs and laptops as well
> Electric ones are quieter, inexpensive, and work just as well nowadays. My building has an electric Milwaukee that was 200 bucks and lasts all afternoon on a battery or two
Not really. I committed to the Milwaukee battery system and now have a leaf blower, a string trimmer, and a chainsaw, to maintain a few acres (nothing fancy just keeping it from being overrun with invasives). They all perform reasonably well in the instantaneous sense, but battery performance is a huge limiting factor. I get about 15-20 minutes of total runtime from everything at conservative speeds (turtle mode for the trimmer/blower, medium speed for the chainsaw).
But the bigger issue is heat dissipation, if you actually run them for 5 minutes in a row the battery heats up, drains super quickly, and the thermal failsafe shuts it down. Then the battery takes quite a long time to cool off during which time it can't be charged. To run these things at full load you need a collection of like 10 batteries (very expensive even if using "compatible" knockoffs) and a second person managing the battery logistics.
So, using these practically means running them in very short bursts with cooldown time in between, which is usually not conducive to efficient work patterns.
For the chainsaw, instead of felling a tree, then limbing/bucking it, then moving the wood to its storage place, it's more like do one or two cuts, move the pieces to storage, repeat - And a helper can't speed things up by moving wood as I'm bucking it. That being said, I typically don't drop more than 1 tree at a time and it is nice to not have to stop and restart a gas chainsaw.
The string trimmer is good for hitting small patches / edges separated by distance, but I actually bought another gas trimmer for mowing my rocky+stumpy hillside.
The leaf blower is basically garbage I regret buying; I went back to using a rake and have used the blower maybe once or twice for blowing powdery snow off of things and accelerating fires, mostly just because the thing is in my garage.
The one consistently good thing about them is it's possible to use them after dark without seeming like a total crackhead, which is nice I guess
> They didn't ban leaf blowers, the banned _gas_ leaf blowers. Electric ones are quieter, inexpensive, and work just as well nowadays.
While noise is an issue with gas blowers, the biggest issue with all kinds of blowers is how much air pollution they cause by putting dust back into the air.
The real problem with <fossil fuel powered thing> is actually <the thing that removing the fossil fuels doesn't affect> is a popular lie with no basis in fact. If something is burning fossil fuels then that's almost certainly the fix with the most bang-per-buck. Especially 2-stroke engines. Electrify everything.
But yeah, protective equipment for workers is still required with electric blowers and air quality matters.
It's actually correct - leaf blowers are one of the first things that the electrics caught up on, because all you need to do is spin a fan really, really fast.
The problem with electric tools has always been the run-time, they've been functional but without recent battery technology, changing batteries every 10-15m was simply impractical.
I hate these things and weed whackers with a passion.
I don't want to hear power tools first thing in the morning, whoever wakes up thinking "I'm going to start up some LOUD shit at 8am" better be playing bob marley records or something.
I opened the door recently just to have a tiny rock fly from a weed whacker across the way come RIGHT into my eye, it hurt for over a day.
Just hearing those rocks hit against my window is stressful enough but that was enough for me to fantasize about locking people up for using these things if I owned my own small country.
I think a good benefit of lawns is that it prevents too many bugs from growing in the lawn. However, if you live somewhere where you have to water a lawn I would agree with this.
Why are bugs a bad thing?
From a human perspective I can understand the dislike of things like mosquitoes, but we seem to enjoy decimating ecosystems purely for our own benefit.
I’m not pro-lawn in the sense of believing that a well manicured monoculture of some non-native grass is the ideal use of residential land. That’s bad. Letting dandelions grow and having a spot for butterflies and native bugs is a great thing and should be encouraged. Using part of the lawn for a food garden is also laudable.
Keep in mind that when I talk about lawns serving a purpose I’m using the context of small, reasonably sized homes. In that context, you don’t want a dense thicket of brush reducing accessibility and potentially causing issues with the plumbing and foundation. You want to keep some free space to roam and work with as well. You don’t want a home where you open the door into a bunch of unkept flora. You don’t want to have to wade through waist high brush in order to get around the outside of your house.
It may sound a little extreme, but again I’m not advocating for perfectly manicured lawns - just reasonably kept ones with minimal pesticides.
I think that's a reasonable view to have. It doesn't take up a lot of space while allowing for natural ecosystems to exist alongside human single family residences.
Another idea could be to increase density of human housing while providing vertically built parks integrated into the housing for people who want to use them and keeping larger areas in their more natural state to foster vibrant ecosystems. This would allow people in the high density housing to have space to roam or work while giving the least human interference on the surroundings, in theory at least.
We could even move transportation underground with high density transit networks to decrease impact on surface ecosystems even further.
You'd have to ban trees as well. Few people in my area have lawns, but all of their gardeners run the leaf blower for 20 minutes pushing the leaves around.
One thing that really pissed me off living in Los Angeles was the fact that leaf-blowers were technically "banned" but there was zero enforcement. Leaf-blowers are literally everywhere and at all times of the day. The noise pollution is just ridiculous. Especially offensive when I would watch a gardener using them in the street blowing cuttings into a, progressively, smaller and smaller pile, all so he could scoop them up to take them away. Basically the leaf-blower was just being used a a lazy man's broom.
leaf blowers are low on my list of things to fix in LA, but i don't like them on balance mainly because of your last point. it's almost never faster or better to use a leaf blower over the combination of rake and broom. it's just flawed mental bias that a machine is 'less work' than manual tools.
in my neighborhood, laborers use blowers to blow shit randomly into the air and the gutters (and into my windows) rather than being picked up and put in the trash/compost bin. blowers create pollution via that random action as well as via their exhaust, and that pollution combined with their ineffectiveness make them a net negative to me, not the noise. while i don't love noise either, any outdoor labor will produce some noise, so noise is unavoidable, which is why it's limited to working hours by statute (after 8am).
car/motorcycle exhaust noise, on the other hand, is entirely artificial, unnecessary, aggressive, and offensive, and should not only be banned, but punished heavily.
That's interesting about the 2 stroke engine being the issue for pollution.
"In 2014 a study published in Nature Communications found that VOC emissions (a variety of carbon gases that can produce smog and harm human beings) were on average 124 times higher from an idling two-stroke scooter than from a truck or a car"
Though this quote does make me wonder, what about when each vehicle are in transit?
There is now fuel injected 2-stroke engines which will pass the current Euro4 emissions rules for dirt bikes and motorcycles. There's no reason that a small 2-stroke can't have lower emissions today. It's clearly more expensive to make a fuel and oil injected 2-stroke engine than a simple pre-mix 2-stroke, but it's possible and then you get all the benefits (and even more!) of a traditional 2-stroke in terms of power output, you just have a little computer and some injectors instead of a carburetor.
One of the major benefits of a two stroke engine is the simplicity of the design, which lowers cost, reduces size, and increases reliability. Your proposal is a net loss on all these factors.
A far better solution is to replace these sorts of things with battery powered electric solutions.
2-strokes output more power. This isn't my proposal, this is a thing which exists in the world today, produced by various different engine manufacturers for sale to the public today in motorcycles.
Miniaturizing it to work on a hand-held lawn care device is just an engineering task.
It needs a high pressure rail with fuel pump, electronic injection and ignition control. This adds considerably to the cost, which when you take it into the engineering optimization problem, starts pointing to electric plus batteries for these small sizes. You need about 100cc before it makes sense to start looking for fuel engines, or some application that requires really high energy density for long endurance at light weight (eg. surveillance drones).
Intuitively I think an injected engine would be more reliable. Gummed up carburator causes the pull-start blues for me frequently on my chainsaw when I haven't used it for a while. I do get a nice arm workout though.
It was the same with my lawn mower. It only gets used maybe 6-8 times a year. For some recent years here were how many days it had been idle before each use: (245, 22, 14, 15, 14, 33), (258, 24, 12, 13, 17, 11, 38, 71), (167, 21, 21, 20, 15, 61).
Two simple things fixed that:
1. I switched to gasoline that does not have ethanol added.
2. Once every 2 to 4 weeks in the off season I start it and run the engine for a minute.
The container I use to store gas holds about two years worth and the mower runs fine on the the two year old gas. I do add fuel stabilizer. The bottle of that claims it is good for 2 years but my previous bottle was 6 years old when I replaced it and the mower was fine on 2 year old fuel with 6 year old stabilizer.
If you live near any body of water big enough to attract boats you might try at marinas. CENEX also often sells it. Here's a site that can help you find it locally if you are in the US or Canada [1].
I do not do any winterizing procedure for the off season. I asked the repair place I took it too one year when it would not start before I started doing #1 and #2 if winterizing was necessary if you were running it occasionally, and they verified that you only need winterizing if it is going to not be used.
100% agree on the ethanol-free gas to reduce carb gumming.
For overwintering, I just detach the hose after the fuel filter and drain the remaining mower fuel back into the can. Or, on small push mowers where this isn't possible, use the fuel shutoff and just leave the gas in the tank.
Then run the mower until it dies. Doesn't take more than a minute.
Finally, unscrew sparkplug(s), pour a teaspoon of motor oil into the cylinder (keeps rings from seizing/rusting).
Leftover gas in the can gets put into vehicles at the end of the season so I'm not storing stale gas.
I'm willing to bet that computer controlled fuel injection wouldn't solve the issue. It may lower emissions slightly but two strokes still require lubricant to be mixed with the fuel, I'd bet my hat that's where the high VOC emission is really coming from. They're constantly burning oil, literally.
The oil is injected separately from the gas. So only as much oil as is needed for the engine load and speed is injected, which allows varying the oil mix as low as even below 100:1 compared to normal pre-mix concentrations of 40:1 or 50:1. So the amount of oil burned is significantly less on the injected 2-strokes as it’s only injecting what the engine needs for lubricity and nothing more.
That's interesting, I wasn't aware they get injected separately. While this would decrease VOC emission greatly, I can still see these engine designs being higher emission than a comparable four stroke although I may be wrong. I'm not a mechanical engineer.
My reasoning is that oil still gets burned, likely at a higher rate than any oil that gets through on the four stroke. It would be interesting to see if two strokes could be redesigned to place the oil outside of the combustion chamber, I think that would be a serious game changer for ICEs.
That being said, I'm definitely an advocate for moving away from combustion altogether.
For a homeowner, a 2 or 4 stroke gas engine has no compelling benefit these days over a cordless electric string trimmer. The price of the electrics seems to be low enough now and carry enough energy to handle pretty much any single family home. But for a lawn care crew who may cut 20+ lawns a day, they will need a heck of a battery solution for string trimmers or leaf blowers, either in terms of battery capacity or in mobile recharging ability (which surely would end up being a gasoline or propane generator on the trailer with the lawn equipment).
Personally - I think electric is still a fews years off being usable for yard equipment.
I live in a metro, but my property is about an acre. I bought an electric lawnmower/weed eater when I bought the house. I used them for a year, then donated them and bought gas (4 stroke for both).
The problems I encountered: Batteries are expensive and they just don't last nearly long enough (both charge and life). To do a real pass on my yard without waiting for a charge cycle, I would have needed about 4 batteries for the trimmer, and 8 for the mower. I do live in a heavily wooded area with a large number of vines (and kudzu...) but still - that's nearly 1000 dollars in batteries alone. I opted to wait, and stick with 4, but it means what was previously 4 hours in the yard is now 4 hours split into several sections - an all day affair.
Even with the above, I would have probably stuck with the trimmer (the mower was just garbage), except I had two batteries fail in the first year. That's just an unacceptable extra cost for yard work, and FAR eclipses the entire amount I've spent on gas for the mower/trimmer combined over the last 3 years I've had them.
So... No. Frankly I don't think they're there yet. It's very close, but it's slower, and frankly - outrageously more expensive.
So I'm going to wait for cost to come down, and regulation to address battery interoperability in this equipment (hah... as if our government would actually do something useful).
>For a homeowner, a 2 or 4 stroke gas engine has no compelling benefit these days over a cordless electric string trimmer
Cost.
I would have gone electric if I could but seeing as I don't obsess over my lawn (i.e. I let it grow out enough before cutting it back that most HNers would be hand wringing if I were their neighbor) there's no amount of mental gymnastics that makes it a sane tradeoff. I'm not gonna double the cost on something I run maybe 20min/mo. If I were one of those people who bought overpriced premium equipment I didn't need then it might make sense.
Do y'all not have corded electric mowers in America?
Here in the UK, an entry-level petrol mower is £150+ while an entry-level corded electric mower is only £50. They're also much lighter, which is great for ladies and kids. And they start really reliably, even if they've sat in a shed all winter.
Corded electric mowers are very rare in the USA. I live in a suburban neighborhood in the North East and have never seen one in my life. I see some battery powered ones though.
I wonder if it’s due to our outlets being 120V? We’d be limited to less than 2.5 HP with a normal outlet, whereas gas push mowers typically have engines in the 5-7 HP range.
We certainly have corded electric mowers. I cut about half an acre with one and it's great. I find it performs better than a gas mower in higher grass (I generally cut once every two weeks).
If you have it already, I understand. But if you started from scratch, or if your existing mower died? It might be a slightly different decision. Electric costs more indeed but your own ears, nose and lungs are important as well.
I was starting from scratch at one point. Cheapo mower was $115 and weed whacker was $100. The greenworks combo that would have done the equivalent job was $~200 more for a smaller mower. This is comparing new vs new. I would up watching the internet classifieds and getting a free gas push mower making the cost discrepancy even more. I have yet to have starting issues with any of it and I don't do anything special other than do my last mow in October and first in April/May
I could do without the noise but I own fancy Bluetooth hearing protection for other reasons so that's really a non-issue. A little bit of exhaust every 3-5 weeks in the summer is just a non-issue in practice. I'm sure if I had some ideological reason to care a lot I'd find it more annoying but I don't so...
I have a friend who has the whole 40v kit. In retrospect I definitely made the right decision because his stuff doesn't have the requisite power/duty cycle for my "it's been a month and I have company this weekend, time to mow the lawn" use case and the noise of the gas stuff is less of an issue when it's a monthly thing and not a weekly thing.
I have two trimmers, one is a four stroke and the other is battery electric. The gasoline trimmer is generally a rarely used pole saw now because I can trim the whole yard without killing the small battery. It's easier, lighter, and quieter.
Leaf blowers are the last frontier of regulatory internal combustion engine efficiency. Your car is required by law to travel 100 miles on a drop of 10% ethanol fuel with minimal smog release. Your leaf blower can be powered by funeral home soot for all the EPA cares, and you can run it full blast right outside little Timmy’s window all afternoon. This was a win for both noise and air pollution, which we should be clear kills many more people per year than the costs borne by landscapers to upgrade to electric machines.
The issue with the electric ones is that those lawn care companies have crews that run leaf blowers all day long from one house to another. This is no longer possible as they take hours to recharge after each use.
It works if each home owner buys a leaf blower of his own, but that's way less efficient from a manufacturing/maintenance perspective.
These folks can have multiple batteries. That's the real answer, imo. Greenwork's Pro backpack's runtime is 37 minutes at full power on their 60V 8Ah battery (~1/2kWh). Yeah, it's a $300 battery. But with a 4 year warranty, and much longer expected life-time, buying 3-6 for each blower you've got is scary upfront but a drop in the bucket over time.
There's some other sub-optimal options, but hopefully we don't see this energy-wasting noise-making cheapening out. They can charge them when they drive in most modern trucks (AC inverters are practically standard for work trucks). Worse, they start carrying around generators or idling their trucks; back to far more expensive (over time), polluting, and noisy. But both ought be better than a small screeching 2-stroke in terms of quality of life for the hundreds of people in the nearby area.
We're doing great. This is a huge improvement for quality of life for a huge huge number of people. For far more energy efficient & less costly over time systems, at modest investment cost. Particularly if you are a landscaper, having 6 sets of batteries that last 5+ years (and many many more if you're only cycling batteries once a day) seems like an incredibly minor investment cost.
The lawn crew that I use works 6-10 per day so that’s 9-15 batteries to buy, carry around and charge. And that’s just for one person. There’s normally two people with leaf blowers.
Hopefully there’s some industrial version as carrying 20 batteries and charging them five days a week is really expensive.
9 batteries by the numbers I presented runs to 5.5 hours. 15 batteries at 37 minutes a piece is 9.25 hours.
I can see that being a possibility for someplace like a college campus where one crew is literally just roving around an limited area for the day to maybe get in 5.5 hours of straight actual use, maybe, if the team is super well pipelined in what they are doing. But it seems like a fanciful/rare/contrived example. How many days of this a year does the crew work? For most lawn-care folks, I tend to think they have a lot of different sites to cover, and there's some transportation, and a variety of tasks other than leafblowing. I have a hard time imagining someone actually clocking 6 hours of actual full-throttle use of a leafblower on any day, much less day after day.
Even in exotic uses (unseen in the city in question/my own city, DC), I think adaption is less of a challenge than one might think.
I’m not a yard company but I’ve talked to the team that does my yard and they said (two of them) that they do 12-16 houses a day and each house takes about 30 minutes. Usually one is blowing the whole time while one mows and weedwhacks and then the second puts on a backpack. They have a long day from like 7am to 6pm.
So my example certainly isn’t contrived. But it’s just one example and the only one I know.
If these teams start at 7am, they should be executed/shot without legal reprecussions if they start at 7am in most areas with gas bullshit.
You've specified an 11 hour work window. If, between two people, they spend 50% of that day working with full-throttle leaf blowing, I'm very impressed with their efficiency. Getting around & blowing being that dominant a factor in the day is impressive. That's still 9 batteries tops & they should accept that easily given the very very very very low total cost of ownership, given that they dont need to figure out how to lug a bulk of batteries around & can just carry 1 at a time (the backpack hardware allows for two).
I certainly wish they wouldn’t be so loud early in the morning, but don’t agree on execution :)
I think the issue is that buying and managing 9 batteries is much harder than a tank of gas. Not that it’s impossible, but that’s not a realistic path for professionals. We need better batteries before this is a feasible replacement.
This is also just a two person company and they own their own business.
They need to deal & adapt. Having batteries in the truck is not hard. They have a social obligation to a huge number of people to not be disruptive in doing their jobs & it's not at all hard for them to meet that. Gas is not that much easier.
My local lawn crew actually runs a cord to an outlet outside my house to charge their batteries for the next house. They were clear they do this when I hired them, but I'm super happy with it since I no longer need to worry about the noise for calls and the like.
Granted, it probably only makes sense for a smaller crew like the one I found, but I thought it was a nice solution.
> The issue with the electric ones is that those lawn care companies have crews that run leaf blowers all day long from one house to another. This is no longer possible
Why does this matter though? Does this army of leaf blowers that run all day actually contribute anything useful?
I get some people like a tidy yard or tidy lawn or whatever. Who cares though? It shouldn't be treated as some inalienable right to have a tidy driveway so leaf blowers must be allowed.
> We're just increasing inefficiencies.
Yes but it doesn't matter because the job of blowing leaves doesn't matter. It's just control freaks trying to tightly control nature and franky, who cares. They can pay more for the privilege of having someone use a rake or broom to clean up leaves instead.
Living in Europe, most people just leave fallen leaves alone. I've never seen someone use a leaf blower except for dust etc. Is it a uniquely American thing to obsess over tidying up leaves?
Part of it is because of lawns, if you have a lot of trees the leaves can simply smother your lawn.
But even in cities there’s reasons to clean them up. They clog drains, they lump together in the gutter creating blockages that cause large puddles when it rains, they stain the pavement, they decompose on the sidewalk and people track it everywhere in buildings, and more. Maybe you don’t see these as problems that need solving, but people aren’t tidying up leaves just for the fun of it, they have reasons. We’re not simply obsessed with cleaning up leaves.
Everywhere in America that I have lived, their primary use case is landscapers blowing leaves and trash from private property into the street, thereby clogging drains.
As an American, I have only ever seen the opposite. Pretty much everyone where I'm at just mows over the leaves. Blowers mostly used to clear streets and sidewalks. Rakes are sometimes used to collect leaves and burn them, but even that is uncommon.
However, I live in the midwest. We don't have as many trees here as the east or west coasts.
I'm on the East coast and I do mulch leaves with the mower for most of my lawn. However there are parts of the property where we have more trees and where leaves accumulate from being blown by the wind from other parts of the lawn. In those parts the lawn would probably die if I didn't clear the leaves myself.
However I also have honeylocust trees which drop loads of these large bean-like seed pods and these stems after the leaves fall which bunch up and can only be best described as like "wads of shaved pubic hair." I also have sweetgum trees which drop these hard, spiky seed pods that I also need to rake up. The mower can turn those into projectiles.
Really the best solution, in my case at least, would be to alter the landscaping in that area to something that would be unaffected by the leaves, but I don't have the time for that now. So clear leaves I do.
You're lucky. On multiple occasions I've had rocks and leaves blown into my face by one of these people, while I'm driving in a convertible car with the top down.
Because someone asked 'why do they do this in America when they don't do it in Europe' and your explanation was 'because if you have lawns trees can smother them'. That doesn't make sense as an explanation to the question unless you think having lawns and trees or not is a difference between Americans and Europeans. Otherwise how does it apply?
All I stated was that if you have a lawn, it is possible for uncollected leaves to kill or damage parts of your lawn.
I don't know why "they" don't do it in Europe, I have no idea where the commenter I replied to is from in Europe. I was just stating one reason why people do it here.
Q: "Why do people in America clean leaves off the lawn?"
A: "Because it's possible it can damage the lawn if you don't in some circumstances."
Simple as that. No idea why people do or do not do it elsewhere.
Frequent leaf blowing is very much an issue where i live in Sweden. Where can I move to escape the leaf blowing? I despise the energy waste and pollution, especially the noise. The leaf blowers never seem to be doing useful work anyway; all they do is to move small amounts of organic matter a couple meters.
Here in NL, leaf blowers are used by munipical park service employees. I can attest that the constant whining noise of these things can really drive you up the wall when you're trying to get some difficult work done from home.
I live in Europe and I have at least 3 neighbors that vacuum/blow leaves in rotation, with gas fueled leaf blowers, and I hate the fucking noise. I have a small electric one as well that I use once every 2 months at most.
This is excellent and I greatly appreciate the write-up as it encourages and helps others see how they might accomplish the same in their own cities or districts. I'm literally listening to gas leaf blowers outside my apartment right now while I work from home; it's something I've never quite gotten used to, and this article is great motivation for trying to bring about change and improvement
As someone who was a paid policy and budget advocate in DC on local DC issues for 20+ years, this is a sweet example of activism at its best. Citizens (in the sense of the citizenry, not in the sense of legal status) working together to make a change. Coupled, of course, with an outstanding and effective legislator who is masterful at working with the public and working her colleagues.
The several nonprofits with which I worked had some major wins over the years but it's community-driven efforts that make my heart sing. So please, take action for or against something!
So are video games, alcohol, candy, pogo sticks, and about a million other things. I get that climate doomers are hyper fixated on lawns ruining the planet and leading us all into the apocalypse but you should just be honest about believing that rather than using lazy and trite arguments.
Those other things have a mainly personal cost, lawns have large negative externalities. Especially the people who regularly have their lawn sprayed with pesticide/herbicide. Never fun getting caught in a downwind cloud of that stuff on a walk through the neighborhood.
Those things all have massive external costs. How much energy goes towards powering computers and other devices playing games? How much time, effort and money goes towards developing them? How much power is used to power the offices where the games are produced?
All that candy needs to be manufactured and transported, and then the waste of the packaging handled, all for essentially zero nutritional benefit compared to other food options.
We should perhaps ban everything that isn't strictly essential for life.
Not to mention it's the most common crop humans grow and we don't even eat it. They're basically green deserts with the amount of pesticides it takes to maintain them and they're an incredible waste of water
Have you ever seen a tree lined residential neighborhood where no one cleans up the leaves at all?
It's like a dystopian wasteland with piles of leaves collecting on the sides of homes and in streets 5 feet high. Leaf piles don't just disappear if left alone - they turn into large piles of muddy mess in the streets and around the edges of homes and will be there next year - and build up year-over-year.
It leads to mold issues, rodent issues, car accidents, and an absolute garbage looking neighborhood. It doesn't have to be perfect - but the opposite extreme never makes sense.
Imagine the hubris it takes to think you have the right to choose what people can and "should" spend their time on. I'm guessing you have yet to grasp the concept of individual freedom.
In your original comment, you seem to advocate for banning groomed lawns, which is different than lifting a mandate in grooming lawns. Perhaps the mandate for groomed lawns could be removed without banning them? I wonder how effective that would be, knowing how ingrained in many cultures a "well-kept" yard is.
True. My words were uncareful and flippant response to outlawing one thing with the proposal to outlaw another.
My end goal and what were said are close but not directly in line. I don’t really care if a few crazies manicure their lawn, but it shouldn’t be a forced standard. Everyone doing it is terrible for the environment.
Any communities where you have a critical mass of people with spare fucks to give about their neighbors' power equipment is already rich enough that most people are going to have landscaping far in excess of the bare minimum because they can afford it and they like it or feel obligated by social norms to do it, basically the same bunch of reasons you find 2-child households owning 4Runners and people who barely cook owning a bunch of fancy cookware.
Lifting a ban won't do squat because it only affects a tiny minority. The only reason the laws and HOA rules even exist in the first place is because most people in the effected jurisdictions already kept a lawn and so nobody cared to raise any opposition when the jackbooted types wanted to force the few nonconformists to conform.
It's immoral to impose your opinions on what is and is not productive on what other people do with their land and money, even if those opinions are correct.
IME, a big part of the irritation is caused by the irregular throttle inputs by the operator. The continuous revving->idle->revving is what bothers me the most. If they kept the throttle constant, like a lawnmower, it would be easier to ignore and less distracting/obnoxious.
My problem with this decision is the wasted leaf-blower bodies when the batteries die and the user can't find a reasonably-priced replacement. The rest of the leaf-blower goes to the landfill and a new one is purchased, starting the cycle over again.
Meanwhile, a 2-stroke leaf blower will last for decades. (Well, probably a decade until the little squeeze bulb on the carburetor goes out. Replace that for $2 and you're good to go for another decade.)
If the leaf-blowers used a standardized battery so the implement isn't discarded with every other battery change I'd see it differently.
The #1 thing I think I wish to add, that I missed the first time around, is that I think a lack of standard batteries & chargers is a huge limitation that- if we dont see progress in ~3 years- needs legal action. The 1/3rd to 3kWh battery sizes in particular needs some standard sizes, standard charge/discharge practices. Everyone being beholden to their brand will keep prices artificially high & reduce practical adoptability. Scooters, mowers, backpack leaf blowers should all have some common-norm pack-sizes available for use.
I woke up to one in front of my window this morning.
Keep up the good work.
Those vile contraptions should be banned globally.
They don’t clean anything, spit out fumes and ultra loud noise like the tiny engines they contain, and spray pollution and dust everywhere, making aerosol out of settled dust.
> In 2017, the California Air Resources Board issued a warning that may seem incredible but has not been seriously challenged: By 2020, gas-powered leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and similar equipment in the state could produce more ozone pollution than all the millions of cars in California combined. Two-stroke engines are that dirty. Cars have become that clean.
As I mentioned in another comment in this, 2-strokes don't need to produce horrible amounts of emissions, you just need to mix the proper amount of oil in with the gas for the given engine load. This can be done (and is done!) today with injected 2-stroke motorcycles. The emissions go down dramatically and you can get as much or even more power than a traditional pre-mix 2-stroke.
1. They didn't ban leaf blowers, the banned _gas_ leaf blowers. Electric ones are quieter, inexpensive, and work just as well nowadays. My building has an electric Milwaukee that was 200 bucks and lasts all afternoon on a battery or two.
2. This isn't about people wanting to manicure their lawns out in the burbs at 7am on Saturdays and using a gallon of gas per decade. DC is relatively dense with mid-rises and office buildings, it's the grounds crews and landscapers running them 9-5.
3. Coincidentally now with the age of work from home it's an extra boon not to have your neighboring building's super blasting a leaf blower below your window at 11am during your zoom meeting.
With any policy you have to look at the downsides -- people and companies have to buy new leaf blowers and batteries, what's the cost in money and environment? But I think they're fairly minor compared to the upsides in pollution and peace and quiet.
The main people who get hurt by this policy are small business landscapers, who are eligible for a subsidy to help replace equipment, which I think is a nice compromise.