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Students invent quieter leaf blower

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Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#171

Post by lesuorac »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #100
mikeyouse wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many affluent areas have already banned gas leaf blowers and it’s incredible how quiet the battery powered replacements are. I was in Palm Springs recently and had nearly walked past a landscaper using one before if occurred to me just how quiet it was - didn’t even interrupt our conversation. I believe it was a Stihl backpack version (maybe https://www.stihlusa.com/products/blowers-and-shredder-vacs/... ) but yeah,…

It isn't so much the noise that bothers me, what I've never understood about leaf blowers is what are they meant to accomplish? When I watch people use them they either blow the leaves into the street or the neighbors yard. What do they think that does? Now on the other hand, I do own a very noisy leaf vacuum. But when I've collected a bag full I can just deposit the leaves in my collection container. They are taken…

Keep in mind; in some towns a truck comes around and collects the leaves from the street with a vacuum (although I guess your town doesn't?).

I have seen (predominately contractors) blow leaves into a tarp to take away on a truck though.

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#172

Post by trgn »

swayvil wrote: post #164
trgn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People letting an engine run, just because, they have such a weird quirk of the mind. It's bizarrely common. It's not just out of spite, although for some for sure it may be part of it. It seems out of a weird affection for things that are noisy, under their dominion.

Noise is proof that you're working. Which means that the boss/parent/supervisor won't come over and yell at you for not working. So there is that antianxiety effect. Ingrained from an early age. My friend in the trade explained it thus.

makes sense, thx!

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#173

Post by reustle »

haunter wrote: post #117
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…

We have a 1 acre garden. Electric gardening tools are just toys for this size. I'd love to use electric but nothing comes close to gas.

You just aren't looking at the full set of options available then. The Stihl electric line is used by contractors and cities all around the world, and are incredibly reliable / strong.

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#175

Post by sevenf0ur »

phillipcarter wrote: post #137
rascul wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaves can kill off whatever is growing beneath them and they can pose a safety issue in areas where people walk.

Rakes exist. It's (often but not always) slower work, but it's quieter.

Moving hundreds of pounds of leaves each season is backbreaking and time consuming work. The game changer is to rake the edges in and mulch them with a mower. Not quiet but it's quick.

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#176

Post by loceng »

foobarian wrote: post #158

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 de…

Elon Musk at one point once suggested Tesla would make a quiet leaf blower - due specifically to the noise.

I wonder if Tesla perhaps has a whole bunch of technologies they're developing incognito in the background - or if he's perhaps being limited for some artificial reasons?

It may just be a market size issue - and cities passing bylaws to disallow gas powered, only allow electric under a certain dBs is the fix; and for some reason aren't caught under existing noise pollution-nuisance laws.

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#178

Post by xxs »

sgarland wrote: post #70
TOMDM wrote: post #4

If these truly sound that much better I'd personally buy every gardener in a 3 block radius one of these myself just to get rid of the bloody gas ones.

There are problems with battery-powered tools (at least, leaf blowers) still, especially at the commercial level. For one, they just don’t have the runtime. I briefly had an 80V blower. On its highest power – which is the only way it could come close to a gas-powered model, it was barely able to get all of the leaves out of the yard (we had a tree with leaves that had needle-like protrusions, which made them quite ha…

A whole hour of runtime would be mean 1C discharge. 80V (which is likely 72V, but in the US it's ok to label the max voltage rather than the actual one) is made of 20 Li-Ion batteries in series. Lets say 2 in parallel, so total 40 batteries. I'd go with 3Ah per battery (could be more for 21700) and around 2Kgs weight. For 1h work that's ~430W of power which is rather under powered.

That fast charger (say 30min to charge) for this thing would be quite a thing to witness with over a kW of power draw.

About Stihl, it uses a 36V battery, so 10 Li-Ion in series. Which is half as powerful. I can't see a capacity higher than 36V/6Ah from Stihl. Now, it possibly uses multiple batteries, however, the issue with charging still remains the same.

Running a generator would be louder than the device, so imo that's a moot point. I'd consider using a massive power bank and/or lots of pre-charged batteries to carry the day but not an inverter.Taking enough batteries to swap and charging them in off-hours seems the only sensible approach (albeit not cheap)

Re: Students invent quieter leaf blower

#180

Post by destitude »

datavirtue wrote: post #56
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…

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…

There's also been a lot of counterfeit batteries sold on Amazon that are junk.
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