Bans on gas-powered leaf blowers are spreading around the US | Hacker News Reader

Bans on gas-powered leaf blowers are spreading around the US

usatoday.com

23 pointsgeox24 comments

It seems like enforcing noise nuisance laws would be a good route to go. It would tackle unmuffled 2-stroke engines and many motorcycles at the same time.

Enforcing noise nuisance is impossible in practice.

By the time police (?) arrives to check it out in 90% of cases, the source of disturbance will be long gone.

So it's a huge waste of taxpayer dollars, because you could be enforcing something more important (e.g. traffic or crime prevention)

> Enforcing noise nuisance is impossible in practice.

Definitely a challenge, but where there's a will there's a way.

An app for reporting would be great, though calibration might be a dealbreaker.

Just enforcing it at all would bring about a huge amount of change. I literally see police chilling in their cars while obnoxiously loud cars & motorcycles drive by and they do nothing even though my city has noise ordinance laws. The biggest problem isn’t the lack of laws but the enforcement of them. I’d wager that many of those people feel like they can get away with it not because the police will arrive too late, but because the police don’t care to enforce what’s right in front of their faces.

> Enforcing noise nuisance is impossible in practice

Just add a pair of calibrated microphones to traffic cam setups.

This I can get behind. The Monday morning smell of gasoline fumes and noise is something I can do without.

DC did this and it's such a huge amazing quality of life benefit. It's superb & excellent.

Cities should do a lot more to tackle noise & pollution.

I'd ban them base on just noise alone

Then you'll have to bad electric ones too. Because they are also loud as shit.

Both systems essentially rotate a fan and that noise will never go away

But if you are trying to equate the noise of a few 4-stroke gas engines with that of brushless electric motors then I don’t think you are acting in good faith

Leaf blowers are normally 2 stroke which are noisier than 4 stroke and they generate more pollution

Electric leaf blowers are still loud, but there's a 10-20 dB difference.

I'd gladly suffer the indignity of stepping on a few leaves if I didn't have to listen to an hour of blaring leaf-blower every Tuesday morning.

Leaf litter is also where juvenile lightning bugs live. Less leaf litter = less lightning bugs.

Is that a worse problem than hours of leaf blower noise?

I googled and apparently it's another name for fireflies and on my list of insects that cause problems, fireflies don't make the list.

Insect populations are dying out and it’s a huge problem we don’t talk enough about.

People are calling out fireflys because they are (were) very visible but it’s a problem for every species. We are replacing native plants with low pile outdoor carpet in the suburbs, and dousing everything else in pesticide

I mean to discourage people from blowing away their leaves.

Less leaf blowing may also result in more lightning bugs / fireflies, which many people enjoy.

> Leaf litter is also where juvenile lightning bugs live

Also various species of bumblebee and fledgling birds, from magpies to owls.

Electric leaf blowers are surprisingly bad. I recently bought one and had to spend half an hour going through probably close to 100 devices that were way oversized for the battery pack they came with. The one I settled on has much less power than most of them but seems to do ok.

There's something about battery technology where the parameters are just slightly too complex for marketing people to communicate usable information to users. It's so frustrating.

You don’t have to ban it everywhere, just enough jurisdictions to where minimum remaining demand falls below what is commercially viable to sustain a business building combustion powered implements.

USAtoday is a propaganda rag. Gas powered tools are needed because electric tools still can't do large jobs very effectively. It has absolutely nothing to do woth proping up the oil industry. That's just a straw man used to push more control over your life and freedom of choice. Electric tools are 90% made of petroleum oil. They batteries are mined with petroleum oil. The batteries are charged by oil as well.

Like other areas of electrification, centralizing the generation of power used to charge is a significant step in the right direction

We are hopelessly addicted to petroleum but taking all of those little motors out of our neighborhoods is good and useful and we should do more of it. They are much more inefficient and pollute to a greater degree than generating that power in a plant

That said, I love my electric blower and trimmer. One even has a cord so no batteries needed.

But all the crews that service large areas and are out all day long working still will use gas for a long time. It’s just not practical at that scale.

> Electric tools are 90% made of petroleum oil. They batteries are mined with petroleum oil. The batteries are charged by oil as well.

These are the same weak and increasingly inaccurate with more time arguments that are constantly tossed around. It's so similar to a parrot that can't stop yapping its phrases. Fossil fuels are destroying the planet and they are replaceable - especially outside of the industrial markets.

It's also quite humorous to notice so many pro-fossil fuel posts having typos in them. It's no wonder propaganda works so well on the uneducated.

You can use a rake though.

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