The gas leaf blower also is also burning gas, and hence adding that particulate matter in addition to what gets stirred up.

That makes sense. I am curious as to how big the difference the power source makes for a machine that’s purpose-made to kick up particulate matter up into the air from the ground.

2-stroke engines in general are awful for air quality.

https://phys.org/news/2014-05-two-stroke-scooters-super-poll...

I believe that! I am curious as to how big the difference the power source makes for a machine that’s purpose-made to kick up particulate matter up into the air from the ground though.

Did anyone imply there was a difference (besides electric ones possibly being less powerful)?

If you scroll up this thread you will see where the discussion began.

Purely anecdote, but my neighbor uses a gas leaf blower and we use an electric one, and our yards are broadly similar. The difference is notable.

How?

The electric blower yard probably still has leaves on it.

I'm all for electrifying yard tools, but electric blowers still aren't anywhere near a high end Stihl or Husqvarna in performance.

We both kick up a fair amount of fines, but there's also a noticeable amount of fairly dirty output from the gas blower.

It's in that CARB report posted above: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2018-11/Health%20...

Compare Table 3 to Table 5. PM emissions from exhaust are on the order of 1 gram per hour. Whereas fugitive dust emissions, depending on the surface, are 100s or 1000s of grams per hour.

It's not just burning gas; as a 2-stroke engine, it's burning a gas/oil mixture that is even dirtier than burning just gasoline.

I found a CARB report[1] that addresses this. TL;DR: nobody's directly measured the particulates ("fugitive dust") kicked up, but the estimates made from back-calculating measurements of dust present on road services suggest that the majority of PM10 and PM2.5 from a leaf blower are due to fugitive dust, and therefore will still be present in electric leaf blowers.

There isn't a lot of data on how much the chemical makeup of particulates affects health, nor on what the makeup of particulates likely to be kicked up by a leaf-blower are. At least some of the particulates from two-stroke engine emissions are known to be really bad (e.g. partially combusted lubricants). So the jury is out on if the particulate related health risks are dominated by the engine or the dust. If you think "all PM2.5 is bad" then it's almost certainly dominated by the dust though.

1: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2018-11/Health%20...

Thanks!

a bunch of nitrogen oxides that are pretty bad for people, a bunch of Co2, and a bunch more noise.