Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Students invent quieter leaf blower

hub.jhu.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 440 posts

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#151

Post by saagarjha »

kqr wrote: post #107
mlrtime wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just bought a battery powered lead blower from Costco. It's my first one and it's awesome! I use it all the time for things I didn't think I would. However, it is still very loud and doesn't last long enough for commercial use. One instance recently, had a few very aggressive wasps in the garage (Son is allergic). In the past I'd use some chemicals, the leaf blower got them out in seconds, it's so powerful it blew…

I'm a bit frightened to ask what surprising use cases you found for a lead blower. On a more constructive note, I don't know where people get the idea that battery powered means quiet. My vacuum is electric and far from quiet – why would a leaf blower be?

Cars?

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#152

Post by CalRobert »

teekert wrote: post #109
mlrtime wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it to dry my car which is ceramic coated, one of the best tools I have recently purchased.

I have never dried a car, does a car not dry by itself?

I have never dried my own cars but my dad and grandfather insisted on towel-drying cars to avoid water spots.

Though come to think of it, a leaf blower might not work for that, unless it's actually managing to remove the water mechanically and eliminating evaporation. I recall mechanized car-washes using blow driers so maybe this does, indeed, work.

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#154

Post by bryanlarsen »

cafard wrote: post #89
datavirtue wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been running the best of the best in tools and battery tech: Milwaukee. The blower and weed trimmer (especially) burn through very expensive batteries (XC8.0) very quickly. It is not a feasible replacement for even a moderate job. My yard is super small and I move quick and have learned to pull the batteries at 50% to keep from ruining them. But I have burnt up at least one $200 battery that will only charge t…

If your yard is that small, why not use devices powered by a cord? Our yard is middling, but the trimmer, with an extension cord, reaches everything that needs trimming. I confess I know nothing about leaf blowers. My wife talks about getting one, but we still use rakes.

I doubt it applies to leaf blowers unless you get one with a battery pack that mounts on your back, but battery powered snow blowers are considerably more powerful than cord powered snow blowers since a cord is limited to 1500W continuous.

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#155

Post by npteljes »

Aurornis wrote: post #40
lowercased wrote: post #15

Won't help much until these are mandated by law, or.. we just wait for a couple generations to die out. There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. Over time, the next couple generations may hopefully adopt more battery powered outdoor stuff (mowers, blowers, etc) beca…

> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. That’s an awfully uncharitable projection. The lawn business people I know would love to adopt full electric fleets of gear. They aren’t sending their teams out with gas engines because it’s a “fantasy escape world”. They d…

>Projecting all of this on to “fantasy escape world” is silly.

I kind of agree. How I see is that there's a lot of frustration in people in general, and many manage their internal turmoil by manifesting it into external stimulus. Many behave actively, organizedly anti-social ways, so much so that new words, Wikipedia articles have been created to describe the behavior, like "Rolling coal" or "Whistle tips".

Now, I think that these can be thought of as tips of an iceberg. The iceberg being unhandled emotional stress, a system that perpetually creates it, and the behaviors of people that handle it.

I agree that the business incentives are there to keep ICE around. ICE is mature technology, battery-powered are not, and since batteries have not coalesced or aren't regulated around a handful of standards, manufacturers use this to lock in customers into their own ecosystem, among other kinds of power struggles being present as well. I'm personally not confident that I can buy a replacement battery for a new device in 5 years for a fair price, as I expect that there is going to be a new battery standard, with which my "old" device will not be compatible with. So ICE makes a lot of sense still.

On another level, I think it's important to note that noise is power. It affects us on ancient, animalistic level. Loud noise means us danger, or at the very minimum something important to pay attention to. A low level of constant noise feels like safety. No noise is creepy, we better watch out. To be able to make a huge noise is powerful - people and animals usually have gestures explicitly for this reason, and it has been used in warfare too, both in the distant and close past.

So, people are sensitive to this power. Combined with the ability of increased mobility, or the safety that a metal chassis provides, it makes it an attractive way for people to feel like they are in power, or to reduce the powerlessness they feel in other parts of their life.

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

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

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#156

Post by ModernMech »

lowercased wrote: post #15

Won't help much until these are mandated by law, or.. we just wait for a couple generations to die out. There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. Over time, the next couple generations may hopefully adopt more battery powered outdoor stuff (mowers, blowers, etc) beca…

These were my neighbors growing up. Chain saws, quads, backhoes, bulldozers, fire engines, school busses -- anything with wheels and big motors they would be running all day long. Every day during the summer I'd wake up at 8am to 3-4 quads being driven around outside my window by the neighbor kids, and that would go on all day long until sunset.

That actually wasn't bad though compared to moving to San Francisco, where they decided to carve a narrow chunk out of the side of a solid-rock hill right below my window. Jackhammering all day from 7am until 5pm. I bought a sound meter and complained several times that they had exceeded the sound limits but no one cared.

It really affected my wife, we had just moved to SF and she had no where to go while I was at work. She tried libraries and parks and such but there were too many homeless there and they harassed her. She has trouble sleeping due to mental health issues and she usually sleeps from 4am to 12pm, but she couldn't do this due to the jackhammering outside of our window that started at the crack of dawn.

This meant she didn't sleep at all for months, and she ended up having a psychotic break, for which she was hospitalized. She was sent to a hospital in Santa Clara, and I drove there every day to see her.

Anyway, all of this is to say that noise issues are serious to some people, and there's really no limit to how much noise someone can make. You can complain but nothing happens.

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#158

Post by foobarian »

I got an electric leaf blower mostly to avoid the noise and partly to avoid gasoline engine issues (a Kobalt 80V blower). What baffles me is that here the designers had a chance to make something truly quiet but instead they blew it and used a super-high-RPM motor-powered narrow turbine placed inside the pipe. It sounds like a dental drill amplified through a set of loudspeakers.

I would kill to get a commercially designed blower powered with a large squirrel cage driven by a low-RPM brushless motor. I'm sure they exist by now and I imagine they are glorious. I'm not sure what these students did but if I was doing that project today that is the first thing I would try.

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#159

Post by agumonkey »

mapt wrote: post #149
Aurornis wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. That’s an awfully uncharitable projection. The lawn business people I know would love to adopt full electric fleets of gear. They aren’t sending their teams out with gas engines because it’s a “fantasy escape world”. They d…

We need LiFePO4 packs, we need them at a +200% markup ($300/kwh) rather than a +900% markup ($1000/kwh), and we need them mounted in a frame based on good backpacking backpacks with a wire running along your arm to the tool.

I also assume that human operating mowing will not last long. A tiny swarm of self operating mini rovers will probably do.

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#160

Post by [deleted] »

Aurornis wrote: post #40
lowercased wrote: post #15

Won't help much until these are mandated by law, or.. we just wait for a couple generations to die out. There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. Over time, the next couple generations may hopefully adopt more battery powered outdoor stuff (mowers, blowers, etc) beca…

> There's a section of folks who enjoy loud engines. It's their jam, they love being 'outdoors' with loud gas powered engines, big trucks, riding lawn mowers. It's a fantasy escape world for them. That’s an awfully uncharitable projection. The lawn business people I know would love to adopt full electric fleets of gear. They aren’t sending their teams out with gas engines because it’s a “fantasy escape world”. They d…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN