I have come to love gas powered leaf blowers this past month. There really is nothing better for trail maintenance. If you have to clear a couple miles of trail a gas powered leaf blower makes it a literal walk in the park. Electric ones just don’t have the kind of power that the backpack ones do and run out of battery too quickly. Or you have to rake the whole thing by hand which could take a day or two.
That being said in some areas you’re not allowed to use a leaf blower (electric or gas).
This supports my stance for the electric vs gas argument. Which basically boils down to use the right tool for the job. Is using an electric blower the correct tool to clear miles of trials, not really. Use gas. Does that Amazon delivery vehicle running stop and go all day need to be gas, no. Use electric. It’s not hard.
For those ev vans specifically they are better but they have some issues with sandy roads in rural areas because they’re so heavy.
While I disagree on the power (try the Ego commercial backpack leaf blower), the battery life is no question. People don’t realize how much energy it takes to blow that much air that quickly.
Maybe I’ll give it a try when it makes sense to buy a new one. For now the Stihl is still chooching
100% agree. My old man’s Stihl will probably last longer than I do.
I love that you suggested something actually professional, but please don’t kid yourself, at 56V you’re not going to get anywhere near a 2-stroke/4-stoke or even household AC current.
I do an absolute shitload of electronics repair, and I need people to understand that you cannot ever get close to other solutions with battery power. There are many complex reasons, but the basic answer is: forget it.
It comes down to what you need it to do. Leaf blowing isn’t super critical, like if you need torque to turn something it either works or doesn’t. But electric leaf blowers work fine if it’s slightly less power and you need 10% more labor to finish but it goes from 25 an hour in gas to less than a dollar per hour.
I haven’t seen a comparable backpack electric blower, but for my backyard the one I got is more than enough and I have a lot of overhanging trees.
Things are progressing quickly though, soon enough you should be able to get one for your needs. Also the lower noose level is nice.
The little ones were great for clearing snow off roofs and used the same batteries as the tools we used. But if you buy a big one now you’ve also got to Invest in a new battery ecosystem. Then you may as well buy an electric chainsaw and pole saw/weed whacker. And now does the entire ecosystem make sense to switch yet?
Got rid of my gas weed trimmer 3 years ago. I’ll never go back. I got a good quality electric. It has enough power to do all the necessary yard work 2x over on a charge. It doesn’t get bogged down. I don’t have to mix two stroke fuel. I don’t have to clean the fuel system after not using it for the winter or store gas over the off season. No worries about spills. Just swap out the batteries and go.
Blowers have suffered from insufficient power when battery operated. Maybe that’s changed. I’d love an electric mower, but they’re crazy expensive for a decent one.
I love my electric mower. I can do my yard *2 on a battery charge. Worth. Also yes it was like 600$ CAD but no more hassles like you mentioned. Peace of mind is a thing AND it’s better for the environment.
My 40v leaf blower is better than a gas blower, because it’s just as strong as one and doesn’t use gas or oil at all. Also lighter weight and no maintenance. But if you tried an 18v or 20v leaf blower it might not favor as well.
Electric leafblowers should do a better Job than Gas powered. Linear motors are just better. That’s why basically any EV let’s Gas powered cars behind at traffic lights.
A lot of lumberjacks use electric saws more and more.
The downside obviously is that you cant just refill it on the spot.
My 38v pushes leaves and rubbish around well enough in my eyes. It does chew through the batteries however, which ended up tipping one pack unable to charge without manual intervention.
Same batteries go in my electric mower, I can mow my backyard on a single cell if I don’t leave it too infrequent between.
If you don’t mind a little more effort, a manual lawn mower is fantastic! Plus it’s incredibly quiet
My neighbor has a manual mower. Its so cute! I wanna mow the lawn just so I can push it! Also, it doesn’t hurt to push (I’m so old haha)!
Plus you get to be amused by apparently declaring the reality of your lawn maintenance equipment!
Unfortunately our lawn is not suitable for a manual push mower.
Fuck yes about time
Good riddance!
Agreed! The weekly parade of leaf blowers from lawn to lawn is abysmal.
Why?
Pollution inefficient, higher maintenance, Loud.
I thought the noise was mainly due to the air
Do you not have ears?
I live in a high rise in a metropolis and wish they would be banned. The maintenance crew of the university the other side of the street is using those things in the spring and fall. Exactly the time of the year when I want to open my windows, they, with their ear protection are blasting their engines on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off, while I’m trying to watch a video or listen to some music. Whiiiiiiiiiiir, pap pap pap pap pap pap whiiiiiiiiiir whiiiiir whiiiiiiir whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiir pap pap pap pap pap whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiir.
There’s a hundred windows in front of them, and another high rise just the other side of the street. How many people are just as annoyed as I am because those lazy fuckers can’t be bothered to use a rake?
Worse, the maintenance of my own high rise joins them a few times a month to blow the gravel off the fucking concrete around the building. So again, windows open, all you can hear for an hour is those fucking blowers on and off and on and off and on and off.
The other day I was eating on a terrasse and the handymen were replacing pieces of wood. Well, instead of sweeping the wood chips, he used a fucking blower among the people eating, to “clean up”.
Those things can go to hell for all I care.
I thought the noise was mainly due to the air, so I don’t really see how switching to electric ones would help
Incorrect, the engine exhaust noise far overwhelms the fan blade air. But sure all sound must travel thru the air. Smarter blade design would cut some noise down as well. And remember the engines are usually most efficient at some high RPM. That’s why hybrids rev up their engine even when not moving the car…just being efficient.
This becoming the next faux-outrage, Republican/conservative wedge issue in…3…2…1.
They’re coming fer yer gas lawnmower!
Like the police will come round and take them.
well, pretty sure ICE has rounded up many a white person’s lawnmower.
Oof.
Wha-- Oh!
Ouch
Counties near me already banned two-stroke engines. Gas leaf blower ban is on the books for a month or so from now.
WTF? Do they even make 4 stroke chainsaws?
They exist, as do electric. I haven’t heard anything good about them. …
Try some of the higher-end electric chainsaws. They’re incredible. Some loggers even use bigger commercial variants.
neat!
Tell them they’re made in China or Mexico
Good, they aren’t needed anymore since electric ones do the same job.
The amount of people I hear discussing their surprise satisfaction with electronic tools is pretty astounding, even coming from electrical engineers and similar. The skepticism and doubt, propaganda from Big Combustion is real 🤠
You absolutely don’t need to buy garden tools that run on gas. The electric equivalent is at the same level or even better.
I’m not sure if it was intentional or if brushless motors are really that much more powerful but electric tools are far better now than they were even just 10 years ago.
Battery pack improvements have to be right up there with why electric have gotten so much better now.
The new tabless batteries in particular are a good step forward even with older tools. And they are last 18 months or less depending on your tool colour of choice.
Really big tools like most landscaping or concrete tools that use the really big batteries (think back pack batteries) have an insane amount of watts they can push out.
I never used petrol tools but I did use mains tools a lot due to the extra power but now 240v is often lower than the top battery tools now.
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Titled: Somewhat Verbally Abusive “kill your lawn” Instructional Video Nice
If nothing else it’s hilarious. Its dictated by a man who 100% sounds like he just finished breaking some guys knee caps in the other room before disposing of him from The Boss
(He gets rid of the lawn by cutting the lawn into carpets and flipping them over. He does actually give you information after insulting you for having a lawn)
Dude had subscribe. In the deep south, but talks like a mobster that going break your knee caps if you plant grass in your yard.
He’s kinda famous, been around for awhile - his first (original? main?) videos are all about him spreading random seeds in public places, walking around and checking about things he planted “illegally” and generally just fun to watch. :) All the time with his colorful commentary.
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now we salt
It’s incredible how effective salt is. I had a bunch of “used” water softening salt I didn’t want to put back in after cleaning my system, so I spread it over some nuisance bamboo growing under my fence and a rooty bush near my septic line. It’s just sand now.
Try it on trumpet vine. I have been at war with this thing for easily 8+ years and it won’t fucking die. Salt, round up, boiling water, nothing works. I’ve never had a rivalry last this long.
Salt seems like a really good way to destroy your soil so you can’t grow anything else either 😅
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I was an early adopter of an electric lawnmower, which I regretted. That thing had so little power that I had to mow like every 3 days or it would just push the grass over. I went back to gas after one season. However I went back to electric 5 years ago or so, and it’s FAR better. But for a blower, or weed eater, electric has always been superior.
What year was the weak one purchased?
I don’t remember exactly, but it would have been somewhere around 2010? Black and Decker.
As a homeowner, sure. However, if I had a landscaping business, I would need something that can run all day.
And it’s a thing with batteries on your back. Cities around here have these and it works well.
Carpenters do just fine all day with electric tools. Replaceable batteries are a thing!
You underestimate just how big and heavy of a battery you would need to power a leaf blower all day. Gasoline has 50-80x more energy density than a lithium battery.
I suppose you could bring a bank of smaller batteries with you and swap them out throughout the day, but that means another piece of equipment to lug around, and climate control becomes an issue if you live in a hot climate. Batteries and heat are not a good combo for safety and reliability.
need to power a leaf blower all day
That’s the magic thing in the word “replaceable”. They are, you know, can be replaced. While you use one, the other is charging, and then you replace them. Just like, you know, construction workers are doing for the last at least three decades.
This all sounds like FUD to me. You might as easily complain about how much harder it is to refill the gas tank than swap the batteries a few times.
Lithium Ion batteries generally have a maximum optimal operating temperature of 122°F but will operate up to 176°F. If the temperature is approaching 176°F, I think the human will be the first thing to fail.
Also, nobody needs to lug around a full day of power. Spare batteries can stay in the truck until needed, at most you would have one spare on your person.
Fairly certain that a battery will immediately get hotter than its surroundings with any kind of sustained use or charging.
176°F
You’re talking as if it’s some kind of new unknown technology and there is no way to know if it’s even viable.
I was using battery operated tools when I worked in construction like 20 years ago, and they were performing fine.
I was thinking in the context of a landscaping company driving to a bunch of different clients’ houses and doing general cleanup and maintenance, lawn mowing etc at each one. Electric lawnmowers now have dual battery packs that you can swap between, each one lasting about an hour. I wouldn’t expect a leaf blower to be much different in power requirements. Could probably even share the same battery design with the mower.
If you’re only doing an hour or less of leafblowing per client then you can just keep swapping batteries and have spares in the van/truck. For a really big job you might need more but then you could probably ask the client if you can plug your charger into their house to charge. I think a lot of people have outdoor outlets. Otherwise you could have a charger in the vehicle.
I work trails, carrying a bunch of batteries out into the woods would be awful.
Do you just assume that Gas powered leafblowers are lighter or did you do some research?
I did a Quick check and found that electric leafblowers are way lighter and allow you to carry around some extra batteries, without carrying more overall.
Imo the biggest argument is the price.
I think they will eventually make sense. Extra batteries are very heavy and expensive though (I only have experience with Husqvarna and Stihl)
About the same as carrying a full canister of fuel.
Power usage on an electric blower is very different than other power tools. With a drill you are not constantly revving it. You use it for a few seconds to drive a screw and then setup for the next one. With the blower it’s running continuously.
I have a drill than can run on a battery for most of a days work, while my leaf blower using the same batteries gets maybe 20 minutes of use, if I am conserving it.
I’m not a landscaper, so maybe it can be done, but I’ll believe electric is better when the landscaping companies start using electric tools, just like carpenters switched from wired to battery when it made sense.
It can take a while to switch over. If a landscaping company has been running for years they’ll have a lot invested into gas powered tools that they aren’t just going to throw away. Plus they’ll have a lot of experience and familiarity with the way their tools work and how they fit into their workday. Switching over to electric would be a big investment in tools plus a bunch of re-training and planning to avoid issues with running out of batteries on a job.
A company owner who does their research could potentially get ahead of the game and save a lot of money on fuel costs by switching to electric before their competitors.
You get 5 minutes drive between clients bud. This whole thread is just City dwellers thinking they’re dunking on rural folks without a shit of a clue and it’s part of why both conservatives and leftists hate liberals
Oh boy, rugged no nonsense suburban cowboy who drives 5 minutes between houses to move some leaves around, is trying to play big.
You, fucking libs, will not survive a day in out suburban town driving air conditioned truck from home to home to stand on a lawn and blow leaves around. You have no idea how hard the real life is, sometimes you don’t even get lemonade from the client, and standing on a lawn is a hard job none of you city dwellers will understand!Commercial grade electric mowers can run for like 6-8 of straight mowing before a charge. They charge with EV ports like your moms tesla.
She might be a bitch but she drives a Mercedes thank you
Use a rake?
Using a rake for 12-14 hour shifts, 5-6 days a week in the summer sun? Get real, my dude.
What a creative way to tell me you’ve never worked a day of physical labor in your life, without telling me you’ve never works a day of physical labor in your life. Raking leaves by hand all day every day would absolutely destroy your shoulders and forearms.
And I hope I never will. And having to work those kinds of hours to make a living is the really fucked up part of your story.
I don’t work labor (edit: anymore) but that’s the reality of the world we live in, my dude. Landscaping sucks, and doing it without a leaf blower would suck even more.
Shit sniveling soft handed ass attitude bro, I hope you live surrounded by concrete.
Most of the stuff’s pretty good but finish nailers aren’t quite there unless you’re using the smallest brads available.
Air tools for finish nailer. Any nailer air is going to be better (in my narrow experience with electric nailers, I could be wrong.)
Air is definitely the preferred tool for the job.
Makita just released a new 18 gauge that everybody’s gushing over. That said you’re not going to get that air Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam. It’s more like Bam…wazzit…Bam…wazzit…Bam…wazzit…Bam…wazzit…Bam…wazzit.
There’s plenty of landscaping businesses in my area that advertise as fully electric and seem to be making a profit.
I have an even more effective proposal that can run for centuries with minimal repair and does just as good a job on fuel that is practically free.
spoiler
And it makes you healthier, and uses far less resources.
Let’s see your ass rake for an 8-10 hour shift, come on now!
Playing devil’s advocate here (I use a battery one that’s lasted almost 15 years and works fine on modern Lithium instead of NiCad - Black & Decker came with a weedwhacker too). Electric is fine as a single home consumer, but not for working crews. Modern Li batteries last pretty long for a single user doing basic tasks. (The real racket is in weedwhacker spools, they’re like $10ea now. I digress.)
I live in the deep south of Texas (the muggy, humid greenish part not the desert) - it’s very common to have “working crews” of lawn maintenance out and about all the time. Generally speaking they just drive a truck + trailer full of gear around and look for opportunities. More common than an ice cream truck or FedEx driver after a flood rain like we get, get a deal for $20 fast & clean.
These working crews use gas powered gear simply because electric cannot keep up with the duration and use patterns required by their team without investing in a lot of batteries ($$) and a way to recharge them on the go (generator == gasoline, maybe natural gas if lucky). I haven’t looked into the CA ban from this article to find out if they’ve carved out an exception or not for working crews, licensed or not.
Regarding the linked Texas law - read it, it actually prohibits any local (non state, non Fed) municipality from banning any device based on it’s power source. This includes… surprise… solar panels on your roof! There are communities who think they’re “ugly” and ban solar roof panels, it’s real. The law does not prohibit any ordinances or regulation therein of said energy source (for example noise laws, quiet time laws, etc.) but they cannot supersede state/federal laws. This article flippantly wants you to believe it was enacted just to preserve gas lawn blowers using lazy wordsmithing for clicks.
Why wouldn’t those crews just charge their equipment from the alternator? It’s additional wear and tear or the alternator, but far cheaper than a generator
A landscaping crew would require more batteries and/or a method to charge on the go. Cost might be prohibitive to do that now but in time it might work out. Imagine if you have a large battery in a trailer that charges up all the small batteries between sites or solar on the roof.
Considering most landscaping work is done in the summer months maybe a move to a different Lithium chemistry that is cheaper but doesn’t like cold as much could be beneficial for pro tools.
This isn’t true anymore. Go check out greenworks commercial line.
Or Ego.
I know a beekeeper who has a power inverter hooked up to his truck. He uses it to charge the batteries for both his power tools and bee vacuum systems. He can even use it to run regular plug-in AC devices. Lawn crews can just have the backup batteries charging while they drive from job to job.
That’s pretty sweet. More car company’s are including provisions for these types of systems built in to accommodate the changing trends too.
Cost might be prohibitive to do that now but in time
I was being subtle in addressing this, but it’s spot on - the lawn maintenance working crews in question are all folks out trying to hustle and earn a living, these are not “outfits” with disposable income to invest in the electric future. Quite often the gear is bought/sold in pawn shops all over town, tools are probably the #1 item in any given pawn shop around here (followed by the usual jewelry, guns, etc disposable income items).
Tangent: I lived in CA (SF) for ~18yrs and recognize a lot of the names of the cities and what they’re generally like. “Rich”, “white” (light-skinned any race/culture), “affluent” are the words that came to mind. I dare say that many of these enacted bans are based on “those brown folks making too much noise in my pretty neighborhood.” $0.02
These types of companies may not have tons of disposable income to invest in this but as they need new tools it will probably phase in.
It probably depends on the batteries, battery market, and repair market. We don’t really expect batteries to last a decade. The repairability of these tools is a concern.
Meanwhile, it’s pretty common to repair gas tools. Sometimes from multiple broken ones. Powering the gas tools is similarly simple. None of it requires a company to continue to develop their proprietary product to run.
This is an industry and a market that has been around for decades. I suspect the limited part supply and limited repairability of the electric tools is going to limit their practical lifetime compared to the existing ones on the market.
Great point about repairability. I’ve seen some interesting videos of EV repairs on cars with odd pack issues. Very specialized work right now but assuming skills will develop over time that makes it much easier.
Don’t forget electric weedeater and mowers are not designed for constant use. My buddy and I back in the day had a mowing business in Dallas, Texas. We had gas mower but electric weedeater. We had to replace it twice because it burn up after using it constant for 3 days. Don’t know why we didn’t buy gas one. I remember we used electric to begin with because all we had. But later? Guess they were cheaper back then.
Just because you bought a cheap electric weed eater doesn’t mean it was the electric that was the problem.
Probably burned up the brushes in the electric motors. Those are usually replaceable. Many tools are now available in brushless.
This was in 1999 and it was a cheap weedeater.
Man you would be surprised how much the technology has improved since 1999
The scythe returns…
Glad I just got one from a yard sale. I don’t really have a use for it, just fixed it and think it is nice to stand in my front yard at the beginning and end of each day (within the legal noise ordinance) revving it up and blowing nothing. Just for my neighbours.
Leaf blowers - converting gasoline into neighbourhood disharmony since 1955
My neighbor is OCD about cleaning his electric dirt bike. He’ll pressure warsh it for thirty minutes and then spend an hour blow drying it with a gas blower. Dude it’s good enough.
A long and rich tradition
the number of people who deliberately use those things just to annoy everyone is ridiculous
Leaf blowers in general need to be banned. They cause too much soil erosion.
Also, they don’t clean up the mess, they just relocate it next door or onto the street.
I guess we should ban brooms then too with that logic.
Most brooms are sold with a dustpan attached.
I just got a nice straw broom the other day. Try to
banrelocate it and I’ll relocate its haft… i don’t know… uhh… from my cold-dead hands! (sorry I just wanted to brag about my new broom! I’ve been cleaning cobwebs and (old) wasp nests from our house and its gonna be transformative once i get enough cobwebs off.)Unrelated, you don’t supposed its bad to have wasps around, do you? Theres a Paper Wasp nest outside my bedroom window and sometimes they get in to escape the heat and I have to let them out when they start buzzing around. I think its cute!
A number of states and cities are banning gas-powered leaf blowers due to pollution, noise and health risk concerns.
🧐 Cars are next, right? Riiiight???
Yea I gotta walk away from this thread the ignorance stinks so badly
Lotta comments from folks without callouses. Electric tools suck, you never have enough batteries, they might have speed but the torque sucks, and who’s gonna replace the thousands of dollars worth of gas tools I have? Keep yapping softhands, I’ll eat your downvotes for breakfast and go burn 5 gallons of mix before days end Monday.
I rebuilt my house from the ground up, from the foundation to the studs to the drywall, by myself, it was the cheapest on the market for a reason. So don’t worry, the callouses are plenty.
You’ll do fine with an electric leaf-blower. If you have a landscaping business or maybe 20 acres, I’d say you’re in a pickle and frustration is definitely justified.
The batteries can be a pain and a lot of the cheap ones die quick, buy a few extra quality batteries and remember to charge them. With the cost of gas alone you’ll end up saving money in the long-run if you’re out there as often as you suggest. I built a solar generator that powers my garage which is where I charge my batteries, so it litterally cost me nothing but the initial investment. I have a quarter acre and do my neighbors half acre, 2 batteries ~$30 a piece let’s me weedwack and blow. My mower goes through 2 and I have an extra one just encase I need it.
Having to replace everything you have definetly sucks, I feel like they should just stop selling them and let the ones out there go until they die instead o prematurely going in a landfill.
…what electric tool batteries do you have that are $30 apiece? 🤨 I’m terribly curious. Because I’ve paid $350 for currently top of the line Milwaukee M18 Forge 12.0 batteries. Each.
Bosch 18V, 2Ah are around 30-35 euro where I live
Ooo that might’ve been misleading. I bought them as the local hardware store was shutting down about a year ago. I helped the owner out with website stuff so I got a percentage off plus the out of business sale. I think they were ~$80 originally. Nothing fancy.
Slightly misleading, but I’m not going to begrudge you for getting a hell of a deal. 🙂
That’s not to mention how your precious batteries are even fucking made, if you want to talk about ecological travesties. This is typical liberal pearl clutching.
Damn, it’s so cool that oil drilling and oil refining are famously such a clean and non-destructive processes, otherwise you would look like a complete idiot right now.
In the United States alone, 350,000 premature deaths can be attributed to fossil fuel pollution on a yearly basis. Then there is the impact of offshore oil spills, leaky pipelines, and the occasional refinary explosion.
All you have done in this whole thread is pearl clutch. This is a big part of why leftists and liberals all hate conservatives.
Cool with new sales being banned but as far as the existing ones go it’s kind of a whatever for me. Sure it’s a touch louder but we use an electric in this neighborhood and the blower part is plenty loud too. As far as emissions go I’m sure they’re dirty as shit but it’s probably not even the worst offender as far as landscaping equipment goes and in the big picture is probably meaningless. If people want to keep the old gassers going as long as they can before buying an electric I don’t really give a shit.
Iirc the two stroke engines commonly used on leaf blowers and string trimmers are among the worst polluters for lawn equipment.
Not only very dirty for the air but so loud. Gas leaf blowers are 80-100dbs while electric is 60-85dbs. Decibels are logarithmic so that increase is quite substantial.
Look up how batteries are made.
You keep saying this like it’s a gotcha when even the barest level of research shows that it’s still better.
Emissions from battery production can vary wildly depending on the process used and manufacturing energy grid. According to this study, manufacturing an 80kWh battery will release between 2400kg and 16,000kg of CO2. A commercial lawnmower will have a ~20kWh battery, so in a lifetime with two batteries we’ll guess about 1200-8000kg CO2.
EPA says the average gas mower produces 88lbs of CO2 per hour of use. Over a 2000 hour commercial lifespan that’s 80,000kg of CO2. And that’s putting aside all the other pollutants and secondary emissions from maintaining a combustion engine.
Do a little research before you start your rants next time.
