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.
