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Comment by ajhurliman | Hacker News Reader

The battery powered blowers are pretty loud too, just FYI. I have to wear hearing protection with it every time.

Lawn and Garden Equipment Sound: A Comparison of Gas and Battery Electric Equipment

https://sciforschenonline.org/journals/environmental-toxicol...

Thanks for the link, that’s good info. My model is listed; it seems accurate from experience: way too loud for comfort while operating it, would be disruptive to a bbq 50 feet away.

The gas ones are certainly louder, though.

Nice to see proof that, while still quite loud to the user, multiple tested battery blowers fall off to reasonable levels by the time you get to 100-200ft which is a pretty typical distance for neighbors in a lot of areas.

Key takeaway regarding gas blowers: "Noticeably louder to 4 times louder"

As I recall, the average electric leaf blower emits around 70 dB, while the average gas blower puts out 80-90 dB (although some advertise themselves as quieter, I am dubious but have not verified by running these tests myself). The electric leaf blowers are noticeably quieter, and what noise they do make is much more concentrated on a smaller set of frequencies than a gas blower, which is kind of all over the spectrum when it gets going.

Full spectrum is less mentally distracting than narrow spectrum.

Not when it's bouncing up and down the spectrum seemingly randomly. The "random" nature of the operator repeatedly gunning the engine but not just holding there is way, way, way worse than if it was just the same spectrum, but continuous.

The average electric blower is a lot less powerful than the average gas one. When you find an electric with comparable power the noise is similar. You cannot move a lot of air through a small pipe without making a lot of noise, this is physics (there are things you can do to make it better, but they have limited ability).

Old electric just couldn't get the power out of mains or a nicad battery. Newer li ion batteries can deliver more power and thus electric blowers are useful.

Don't get me wrong, gas engines are noisy as well, and so gas blower are louder, the difference isn't that much though.

I do think there's much much more open design space for electric leaf blowers to explore, where-as gas blowers just have terrible conflicts. You can make a quieter efficient 4-stroke gas blower, but it's going to cost a ton, have way more mechanical complexity, and probably weight more than you want. Where-as I think we're really only starting to learn about how to optimize electric leaf blowers for sound.

And I think electric blowers in general do a bit better. The top rated Ego LB5804 is supposedly 65dB, which is significantly quieter. Ryobi Whisper has a professional-grade backpack model that still is 59dB.

It looks like it might need a little more oomph, but random shout out to Moxie Marlinspike (creator of Signal messenger)'s ultra-quiet leafblower. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33324195 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104

> Where-as I think we're really only starting to learn about how to optimize electric leaf blowers for sound.

We could also collectively as a society realize that leaf blowers are low value tools that we could probably just do without. Leafs on the ground aren't harming anything.

I bought a battery powered blower (80v pack Kobalt brand product) thinking it would be quieter, but it's a different kind of loud. What surprised me is that it has a tiny propeller (about 4 inches diameter) that spins at ungodly RPMs. I would love to see a product with a large diameter squirrel cage blower with an electric motor.

Yeah I have a Ryobi 40v and it is super loud too. Doesn’t help that I have to run it in high power mode mostly to get the leaves to blow out of the rocks properly.

Why are ya'll even blowing stuff around in the first place?

And to where? I never saw a leaf blower growing up in the UK and we had plenty of trees. I guess the leaves just got mown up if you had a garden or stayed on the ground until they broke down.

No one else is as close as the operator is.

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