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Comment by mechanical_bear | Hacker News Reader

I fucking loathe leaf blowers. I can tell what day of the week it is by which neighbor is going for an hour or two straight with the leaf blower. Get a damn rake!

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Leaf blowers are the worst. Several cities in CA have banned them. I don't know why more haven't followed suit.

There's a myth that groundskeeping is more costly without them, but the city of LA reported that costs didn't significantly increase after banning them.[1]

[1] https://www.dailybreeze.com/2018/08/21/redondo-beach-bans-le...

I’m in Folsom, Ca. I wish they were banned here.

I live just north of NYC in suburbs and leaf blower bans are never enforced. Not worth the time of the town or the city to bother dealing with the rules they create. It stinks.

> There's a myth that groundskeeping is more costly without them

A... myth? Have you ever used a rake, and a leaf blower? How about for many hours?

If there's no change in costs when switching between the two, it's getting hidden or absorbed somewhere. It takes substantially less time and effort to use a leaf blower than a rake for the vast majority of tasks that call for either.

Maybe you don't need to track down and collect every single leaf?

Like it's okay if things have a slighty not perfectectly tended to appearance.

There's beauty in chaos.

Yep. That falls under costs being "hidden or absorbed somewhere."

Arguably there could be even more beauty in not even raking them! That doesn't mean leaf blowers and rakes are comparably cost effective, though (as implied by the claim I replied to).

Lots of HOA's will be right up your ass if you don't take care of the leaves on the lawn. That's one of the reasons I won't buy anywhere that has one, but a leaf free lawn requirement with a leafblower ban seems punitive.

The crowning jewel of the cognitive dissonance is that places where people who complain about noise live and places the HOA would be up your ass over petty stuff are mostly the same places.

Perhaps you have never experienced mold issues due to excessive fallen foliage then? Or a copperhead nesting in a pile and biting one of your children? These things happen frequently. Or perhaps your neighborhood has a nice tree canopy, but the excess foliage causes a safety concern to motorists and cyclists alike. There are good reasons to clear excessive leaves that don't involve only looks.

In fact most of the times the city will provide a truck a few times a month that will vacuum the leaves from the road, provided you push them all to the curb.

Not every suburb is this desolate, cookie-cutter hellscape like you see in places like Texas. Many of the historic neighborhoods, especially in the northeast, have real reasons to manage foliage.

And if you think leaf blowers are bad, just remember, people just used to collect them into huge piles and just burn them (still do in very rural areas), or worse yet, just toss their bags of leaves into the trash can. Leaves and landfills are a bad combo. With yard waste collection, towns will compost them and turn them into compost or rich soil: https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2017-12-18/you-asked-we-answere....

Indeed! Leaf blowers are a complete menace to any semblance of peace and quiet.

Ah, leaf blowers. The planet is warming and still, the little hooman burns oil to move leafs forward, waking up the entire neighborhood. Those things should be banned worldly.

I can't find it, but I remember the story of an individual who lead a crusade against leaf blowers and was somewhat successful.

I don't even understand the point of them. They don't clear up the leaves. A leaf vacuum cleaner would make more sense.

> A leaf vacuum cleaner would make more sense.

I used one once. It was fairly useless. The bag was too small to collect any sensible amount of leaves and it choked on the small twigs and other stuff that is often mixed in with leaves if there are mature trees in the vicinity.

(UK here) I have a large lawn (longest diagonal is 40m) and many mature trees and I also hate leaf blowers with a passion. I now have some proper rakes designed for leaf sweeping - approx 75cm wide. I can clear the whole area in about 90 minutes (approx once per week). I have a tall collection sack and a set of the large plastic grabs that let me pick up huge amounts in a single go. The speed trick is to avoid pickups for as long as possible, working a 'wave' of leaves across the lawn. I pick up piles from the leaf-side of the front line and don't ever try for a complete pick-up, so the ones left behind simply get raked a bit later. The collected leaves are dumped, unbagged, in a massive pile that grows throughout the collection season. In the summer I mix my grass cuttings in and in autumn (a year after the first leaves were added) I have some superb weed-free mulch. The raking also helps keep the lawn in good condition.

Every few months my old petrol leaf blower is used for about 30 mins to clear debris off a gravel path that has proven impossible to rake, and when this blower dies I'll get a battery one.

Years ago there was an unfortunate incident involving the caretaker of the official Australian Prime Minister's residence in Canberra (The Lodge).

At the time John Howard was PM and was setting the controversial precedent of refusing to reside at The Lodge - he instead insisted on living at another government owned residence in Sydney (Kirribilli House).

So. The caretaker died when a tree fell on him while he was using a leaf blower during a storm to clean a property that was not even being used.

Maybe I'm really weird but I don't even bother raking leaves, I just run over them with the lawn mower and let em decompose on the ground. I do sometimes have to remove some of them from the driveway but I do that with my hands and takes like 5 minutes.

> I fucking loathe leaf blowers...Get a damn rake!

I fucking loathe chain saws...Get a damn axe!

I fucking loathe lawn mowers...Get a damn scythe!

I fucking loathe loud diesel trucks...Get a damn wagon train!

I fucking loathe cellphone ringers...Get a damn semaphore!

Seriously, until you've done a full day's landscape maintenance yourself, you're not qualified to talk about leaf blowers. Luckily battery powered leaf blowers are getting better, and will be up to most households' maintenance needs soon, hopefully. I believe we're still a ways off from battery blowers being good enough for commercial crews though.

Reductio ad absurdum

Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil the temporary owner is trying to destroy by monocropping homogeneous “grass”, I’ll hope that generally makes collecting organic matter to waste wrapped in individual virgin plastic bags obsolete itself. Groundskeeping could do with a 21st century ecological update… we even had the native plants movement in the 80s

I dunno, what about mulching it in sítio?

Leaf blowers are also futile in wind.

> Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil

You're doing your own reductionism. Not all leaf blowing is to collect leaves for disposal in plastic bags (and I'm 100% for using leaves as mulch where they fall on beds, and also with not having lawns). Leaves need to be blown out of gutters, drains, and ditches - otherwise the road will start being eroded. Leaves need to be removed from paths and patios, otherwise they will stain the concrete, let moss grow, and make the surface slippery. You try doing that by hand on 8-10 properties in a day, on minimum wage, without health insurance (the situation of most landscape maintenance workers in the US) - and then tell me that banning leaf blowers is a good idea.

Leaves on the lawn can easily be mulched in place and used to build up organic matter, as you point out - but that too requires a gasoline engine powered machine. The call should be for banning lawns, if that's the concern - not banning leaf blowers.

(I should also mention that if you don't live somewhere with a real winter or dry season that causes heavy leaf fall, your situation isn't representative.)

How did landscape maintenance workers perform that task before leaf blowers?

How did people cope before cellphones existed? It's the same as my original point - it's a nonsense question. If you want to create additional work for people by doing it in a less technological manner, focus on the served in the society rather than underserved, who are trying to get a leg up in the economy.

They didn't.

The standards to which we maintained things were far, far lower in the past because doing so was much more laborious and therefore expensive.

It works seem that those lower standards have no significant adverse effect. They only impact trivial stuff like aesthetics.

You couldn't slip on wet leaves and expect to sue the property owner back then.

You didn't have trees in lawns, basically. Look at the pictures of old English manors - there would be hedges next to grass lawns but the trees were few and far between in the lawns.

The areas of the garden with trees would be a different thing.

I don't know about England, but trees were common in American lawns since long before leaf blowers existed.

50% of the time my neighbor's maintenance company spends with leaf blowers is chasing individual leaves across the yard and through shrubbery (not exaggerating). They'd save themselves time if they just bent down and picked up the damn leaves with their hands. Or -- novel idea -- left the last couple leaves anyway, because just as many more will accumulate 30 minutes after they leave.

Fully agree. Leaves happen. I'm just pointing out (apparently in a too sarcastic manner) that the technology is the best we have right now for clearing a lot of leaves within a ton of manual labor (raking leaves over a large area is a decent workout). Banning a technology when its overuse is due to poor landscape planning is a knee-jerk reaction that doesn't address the underlying thing that's really causing the frustration. I.e. we'd all be better off if houses had gardens designed with lower maintenance requirements in mind.

> 50% of the time my neighbor's maintenance company spends with leaf blowers is chasing individual leaves across the yard and through shrubbery

Neighbor here blows for 2-4 hours regularly, carefully hitting every sq in of the lawn. Most of that time is spent blowing clean grass, with the nearest leaf (there are only a few to begin with) being a doz yards away.

The point is exactly that leafblowers do not represent a technological improvement: they have too many downsides, and accomplish too little. No one is arguing that all technological progress is bad. Rather, in the specific case of leafblowers they represent a detriment, and should be used infrequently-to-never.

I was a landscaper for several years before college. We mostly serviced estates in the country or with very large lots. I used both a backpack blower and handheld. I understand the efficiencies gained by their use in some instances. I also know that on the smaller residential lots that a big backpack blower was overkill. A rake could have sufficed more often than not. In the case of other equipment; a lawnmower can’t reasonably be replaced with a scythe, it will not produce adequate results, a weed eater can’t be replaced for the same reason. A rake can produce adequate results with only a bit more work. And in cases where a blower is “necessary”, it doesn’t need to be used to chase every damn leaf for two hours on a residential property.

I am not morally opposed to leaf blowers, just the noise that is foisted on everyone else by their use. I couldn’t go down to my garage and rip the throttle on my two stroke motorcycle for two hours once a week without getting the police called on me, yet the leaf blowers have become normalized. It’s nuts.

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