As a greenie, there are plenty of things that I think are kind of dumb and misguided (say, automobiles), but at least I understand the thinking behind them, and hope that some day better alternatives (public transit, self driving cars, bicycle and scooter sharing) will make them obsolete.

But leaf blowers are unique in that they're not only obnoxious and wasteful, but also stupid to begin with. You’re spending money and time and effort and polluting both the environment AND mental environment to avoid raking, just so the wind can undo your efforts??

Leaf blowers make me profoundly misanthropic.

I will add to your burden of sadness: in some places with snow they pepper the beautiful snowy winter streets with grit so that the delicate automobiles are facilitated in their mad career. In the spring when it all melts they need to clean all this grit up... some of it is sweepable from the asphalt, but much has been displaced onto the margins and roadside lawns, so they need to rake it out. But what is this done with? Why, with nothing other than a horrible modified strimmer with four rubber blades which scrapes the debris into a pile. Like one of these: https://www.ebay.com/bhp/power-sweeper

If you think a leaf-blower is irritating you have never heard one of these f*s.

Leaf blowers are demonstrably faster than raking, though. So... I don't get your point.

Even more, it isn't like rakes don't have a horrible sound of their own, as soon as you get a single paved section involved.

"demonstrably"?

Please define your terms. I have seen the people wielding these monstrosties piss around for hours chasing one or two leaves or meaninglessly form pile of leaves that have no function other than to appear large so that the other inefficient human can stop only once to load them onto their gasoline chariot.

Most of this work could easily be either: 1) solved by refusing the scorched earth, anal standard of lawn care ; 2) good old fashioned, quiet wheel barrows and rakes operated by people paid a fair wage for manual labor instead of externalizing costs onto the rest of us.

I have seen the same with rakes. Done the same, truthfully.

Used even remotely competently, a blower beats a rake. Hands down.

Now, there is a solid argument that for small yards, a rake and broom are fine. And indeed, that is what I use when doing my yard. With a large yard, though, blower with bagging lawn mower could accomplish in one day and ten bags what would take three days and forty bags. Easy.

If you want to really supercharge leaf collection, use a large tarp instead of a wheelbarrow, then carry your plunder like santa. Wheelbarrows are a waste of energy for carrying leaves.

Companies are not going to give their employees lead blowers unless it is a lot more efficient.

When I saw Gardners using leaf blowers in SF, Pacific Heights, they mostly just blew the leafs onto the street.. how that's allowed is beyond me..

With a rake or broom you can remove the leafs/dust, a blower mostly just makes it someone else's problem.

Some cities collect leaves and all you need to do is rake them into the street. The city comes around and sucks them up. I know I've lived in at least one if not two that did this - one of those cities also offered free compost to people. I seem to recall them using a street sweeper vehicle to do this with. And honestly, if you already use the street sweepers, might as well do what you can with them especially if you were simply going to have people use special lawn refuse bags for their leaves anyway.

I think it depends on the lot, but while you certainly can blow leaves into someone else's yard or the street it's definitely possible to control things enough to blow it into a pile or into the woods

> Even more, it isn't like rakes don't have a horrible sound of their own, as soon as you get a single paved section involved.

I can't hear your rake through my headphones two blocks and three stories up.

That's when you swap for a broom. It makes a beautiful sound.

We have different definitions of beauty. :)

That said, I definitely have a push broom I use to finish off the sidewalk. Have to first rake, though, as i am moving a lot of leaves over it.

I’m glad that there are Morons like you in the worls to help skew down average intelligence.

My electric corded leaf blower would like to have a word

Your coal fired power station would like to have a word.

Your physics teacher would like to have a word about efficiency of two-stroke ICE vs electric engine + power station.

Fact: A completely coal-fired Tesla releases less emissions than an ICE car.

Not to mention an inefficient handheld 2-stroke motor

What's the ratio? How much better?

I can't find my own calculations but it was about 50% of an ICE car, even accounting for coal.

Here is a pretty interesting philosophical take on the hated leaf blower: http://julesboykoff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Boykoff_L...

Oh, I have an example for you:

One of my neighbors used a leaf blower just hours before the expected arrival of a hurricane.

Explain that one.

In any large group of people, most of them are idiots.

"Never underestimate the poor taste of the public"

I had a neighbor who would swat flies outside.. There's a lot of crazy idiots around. I am no longer surprised by their disturbing frequency of appearance.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

The Unabomber advocated disbanding industrialized agriculture which would starve most of the worlds population to death

The total collapse of society based on climate change could arguably kill billions. The costs of inaction are mounting.

I heard someone on HN say to treat climate change like a war. If we did we would make more drastic changes required, which under normal logic would be "we can't do that it will kill the economy..."

I wonder if the planet will be habitable in 1000 years time by 'traditional' humans. We may need to transcode ourselves into computers, or at least get pretty damn bionic.

If most of the world's population starved to death then our climate change challenge would be behind us.

We're are a civilization of people that can't maintain proper tire pressure in cars. There really is no hope.

As someone who has worked landscaping on commercial sites and large apartment buildings and been yelled at or treated like shit for using a leaf blower to do it. You go try raking a truck full of leaves without one, making sure you get every corner and crevice underneath bushes and back corners so you don't get yelled at by customers or the boss. Not that you don't have to rake it all after anyway into large tarps or garbage cans that you then drag and carry by hand. Now do this in pouring rain, or snow, or when the leaves are frozen.

Trust me it's not fun.

Now personally myself. I think it's stupid to remove leaves from a site rather than let them decay naturally and add their nutrients back into the soil. But when you're being paid to do something and you need to make money to keep living in a house. That leaf blower is really handy.

When I was younger, my mom had a house with a large house full of oak trees.

We had to rake the leaves, because, if they were allowed to decay on the ground, it would kill most the other plants.

There was a leaf blower, but we didn't use it for long - personally, I thought the rakes got the job done more quickly and thoroughly, even with that obnoxiously large yard. But then, I suppose I wasn't doing it professionally. Maybe with practice I'd have gotten better at it. The leaf blower was new; rakes are something I grew up with.

It was certainly more work to use a rake. I see that as an upside, though - it's always struck me as odd that people will spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make it so everyday tasks require minimal physical effort, and then spend even more money on home fitness equipment and gym memberships in order to artificially replace all the physical activity they were ostensibly trying to avoid in the first place. Again, though, that's personal use, not professional.

> it's always struck me as odd that people will spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make it so everyday tasks require minimal physical effort, and then spend even more money on home fitness equipment and gym memberships in order to artificially replace all the physical activity they were ostensibly trying to avoid in the first place.

A few days ago as I was doing some basic yard work when a friend stopped by and suggested I hire someone to do it instead. I told him exactly that, “If I pay someone to do this, I’ve got to pay for a gym memebership too.”

It’s also a nice change of pace to do something that not only doesn’t involve a computer, it doesn’t have any moving parts or machines at all. Very relaxing.

There is one additional perk to exercise as opposed to tasks. Work tends to involve straining physical repetitive labor. Dedicated exercise can be more targeted and fits differing constraints. Of course vanity is part of the reason for that optimization - just like a full body tan is more 'fashionable' than a farmer's tan working out can focus more on 'mirror muscles' than practicality.

Just look at Olympic weightlifters - they tend to look plump but they certainly are well strong as Olympic weightlifters.

"Just look at Olympic weightlifters - they tend to look plump but they certainly are well strong as Olympic weightlifters"

Did you mean powerlifters?

> it's always struck me as odd that people will spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make it so everyday tasks require minimal physical effort, and then spend even more money on home fitness equipment and gym memberships in order to artificially replace all the physical activity they were ostensibly trying to avoid in the first place.

There must be a name for this strange human condition. I marvel at people who spend ridiculius sums of money to get the latest, lightest carbon fiber paddle for their stand up paddle board.

a) you're trying to get exercise,a heavier paddle will give you more

b) if your goal is to go faster then almost anything will do it - try a kayak

It's the same reasoning used by computer enthusiast on why RGB led on any peripheral are now profitable.

The same reasoning for accessorizing cars to look like UFO.

If it's any consolation, I think we all agree this is a general human problem instead of a problem with the men doing the labor. Why does the company require this service? Why do customers request it? How can people think a few leaves are bad? Etc.

People have very strange ideas about landscaping, and that usually means bad things for the environment. eg: "I'm a fully functioning adult, but I couldn't bear to see two kinds of grass so I had to cover the whole lawn with a neurotoxin."

I kinda wanted to respond to all the comments generally here. I agree with most of what you all say. Landscaping, at least the way I spent a lot of time doing it is ridiculous. I have no idea why customers request the things they do, I honestly have no idea why people spend so much money making the outside space of their property into a sterile tidy space. It's never really sat well with me.

My keaat favourite part of landscaping was never the work or dealing with lousy people, it was the fact that people were paying so much money to have what was not only pointless work done much of the time but work that was actually detrimental to them having nice productive gardens and greenspaces that didn't require chemicals and constant work.

My background is in ecology and ecosystems management and restoration do s lot of the work i did as a landscapre really was at odds with a lot of the things I was trained to do professionally and a lot of the things I belief in morally.

I have to admit not all the work I did was like that, I spent a bit of time working for a company that specialized in making natural gardens, we didn't use power tools or spend much time rakinf and tidying, and honestly the work was far more rewarding, but I do really appreciate the need to use powertools and do these unpleasant things if that's what customers want.

It sucks. The traditional English garden or the idea of a proper landscaped exterior is really a terrible idea in a lot of says. I've never really liked the way a perfectly pruned and immaculate yard looks, even if i'm fairly good at making it look that way.

Working landscaping though is kind of like a lot of service work. You provide a service a lot of people want, you get treated like, shit for doing it and in the end the work you do is at best pointless at worse actively detrimental in a lot of ways.

The problem, like with a lot of thibgs, is people have this made up ideal of how their things and life should be, and they're willing to spend lots of money to make sure it's exactly how they want. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but the ideals of what people think is the 'thing to have' is definitely skewed towards a lot of pointless, expensive, polluting work that really doesn't need to be paid for.or done on such a scale as it is.

100%. I often wonder what the landscapers themselves actually think about leaf blowers and other power tools.

I'd love to work outside with my hands all day but not with those horribly loud power tools. They seem like fighting against nature somehow.

Right, I don't think the blame should be placed on the poor bastard who is forced to use the infernal machine on pain of being thrown out of his house. The problem needs to be addressed at a higher level. In this case, there is a simple solution: leaf blowers should be banned.

I call BS on the pouring rain and snow: wet, frozen leaves are not blowing anywhere.

You would get more hours raking and thus more income if you were not using leaf blowers: you are externalizing costs to the detriment of both your own income and the rest of us.

Wet leaves stick to paved / metalled surfaces such that rakes & brooms ride right over them.

Without a blower you're down on your knees lifting them with your fingers.

Been there, done that.

It's odd to see suburbanites raging against blower noise whilst just shrugging at traffic noise as 'necessary'. At least blowers don't operate between midnight and 05:00...

I see much more necessity in 24/7 transport than in leaf blowers.

Nah...a commercial leaf blower makes frozen leaves fly really good. We used one of the stihl ones. With a rake you lift large chunks of frozen solid frozen organic matter that you have to try and rake away a layer at a time. I'm telling anyone that doubts it to go try it. A whole apartment complex worth of frozen wet leaves. You've got 3 hours to get it all done before moving to the next site. Try it. Do it one day with a rake. Then head back next week late autumn after a good wind and rain storm and do it again with a leaf blower and see how much faster and easier it goes.

I agree it's better to let them decay in lots of cases.

Also, I try to give the benefit of the doubt to the people outside doing this every week, but I'm extremely annoyed. I don't really have a choice; I rent and everywhere one can rent, one has to be a part of this madness. I wouldn't by choice pay someone to do this.

Some trees (walnut) have poisonous leaves that can't be left to decay in place and must be treated and removed, but this is the best option in the majority of cases, yes.

I'm just wondering.. poisonous to who/what? Kids? Pets? How long are they poisonous for while decaying?

How long have people been 'treating and removing' them? Presumably the leaves were tolerable while on the tree, yet poisonous. It doesn't seem to stop people planting them. (A lot of questions, but there are a lot of experts on here!)

Normally to other plants, rarely for animals (see: poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac). In really extreme cases can be very dangerous even to burn it (but nobody has a manchineel in their garden). Walnut can poison the soil for a couple of years so is better put its fallen leaves on a isolated compost pile. It depends on the species and the chemistry of the soil.

Wow, thank you, I had no idea. The walnut tree uses the poison to kill competitors, up to 20m away or more.

Black Walnut: The Killer Tree https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/2005/jul/070701.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juglone

"Juglone is occasionally used as a herbicide. Traditionally, ...has been used as a natural dye for clothing and fabrics...and as ink. ...has also found use as a coloring agent for foods and...hair dyes. ...is currently being studied for its anticancer properties"

And is not only the walnut, a lot of common trees do this in fact. Pines for example.

Except when the leaves form a coating over grass that grows mold, and you are allergic to mold, which will also kill the grass. You don't have to remove every last leaf, just enough to give the grass breathing room.

In fact I just spent six hours today doing that... with a rake. We had a window where the snow cover lifted just long enough. It'll rain tomorrow, then freeze and snow again later next week.

Leaf blowers make working from home surprisingly difficult. I can be attempting to work on a given day in a quiet suburb of Menlo Park and completely unable to concentrate. The sheer pointlessness of it drives me nuts.

> creating a cloud for 30 minutes

I bike to work. During the local dry season (roughly April to November) I need to keep an ear out for leaf blowers on the way to work and adjust my route accordingly. Otherwise riding through one of their dust clouds is like dredging a chicken breast through flour.

A few times I had to interrupt my ride and return home for a second shower because of leaf blower dust storms. Luckly they have been banned in my town (together with anything with a 2 stroke engine). And hey, no leaf-apocalypse has happened after the ban.

Really? Where is this paradise you speak of?

Maybe there's hope for my area. They really are the most pointless and annoying things.

> I can almost forgive these during leaf season.

Sure, almost. But in the middle of summer? Or winter? Come on now. I lived at an apartment complex that started up leaf-blowers year round at 10am every single Tuesday. What's worse, I worked from home. Even now, having left several years ago, the sound of a leaf blower causes my blood pressure to spike. Destroy them all!

> 10am every single Tuesday

Consider your self lucky… my neighbor's service starts the engines every Tuesday at 7:30 AM sharp.

(BTW, if anyone has any tips how to best manage cross-town-border noise complaints, I'd love to hear them.)

> Or winter?

They're very effective and quick for snow removal.

I should clarify, this was in California. There was neither snow nor leaves to be blown. As far as I can tell, they were just blowing dust around.

30 minutes, if you're lucky. In SoCal, one set of gardeners might be done in that time, until another set rolls up another one of your neighbors yards and begins the process all over again. As I mentioned in another comment, this is one of the things that's made it tremendously difficult to work from home.

Everywhere I've lived with this "service", there's been no respect for potted plants either. They get the full violence of the wind.

There was even a group of these guys who came straight up to my door, open except for the screen, and blew right into the house. They arrived early and started blowing in that very spot, which is why I hadn't had time to close the door. Just jerks.

I don't have one. A few times a year, I wish I did, not for raking the lawn, which can be done quickly enough with a rake, but for clearing leaves out of garden beds--the rake does bring mulch and can bring plants along--and from a short gravel walk.