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A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

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Re: A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

#141

Post by feet »

protonbob wrote: post #90
feet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about banning grass lawns instead? They're incredibly wasteful. We could be using land to grow food or do other useful things

I think a good benefit of lawns is that it prevents too many bugs from growing in the lawn. However, if you live somewhere where you have to water a lawn I would agree with this.

Why are bugs a bad thing? From a human perspective I can understand the dislike of things like mosquitoes, but we seem to enjoy decimating ecosystems purely for our own benefit.

Re: A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

#142

Post by clairity »

matt-attack wrote: post #125

One thing that really pissed me off living in Los Angeles was the fact that leaf-blowers were technically "banned" but there was zero enforcement. Leaf-blowers are literally everywhere and at all times of the day. The noise pollution is just ridiculous. Especially offensive when I would watch a gardener using them in the street blowing cuttings into a, progressively, smaller and smaller pile, all so he could scoop th…

leaf blowers are low on my list of things to fix in LA, but i don't like them on balance mainly because of your last point. it's almost never faster or better to use a leaf blower over the combination of rake and broom. it's just flawed mental bias that a machine is 'less work' than manual tools.

in my neighborhood, laborers use blowers to blow shit randomly into the air and the gutters (and into my windows) rather than being picked up and put in the trash/compost bin. blowers create pollution via that random action as well as via their exhaust, and that pollution combined with their ineffectiveness make them a net negative to me, not the noise. while i don't love noise either, any outdoor labor will produce some noise, so noise is unavoidable, which is why it's limited to working hours by statute (after 8am).

car/motorcycle exhaust noise, on the other hand, is entirely artificial, unnecessary, aggressive, and offensive, and should not only be banned, but punished heavily.

Re: A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

#143

Post by nkrisc »

chrisseaton wrote: post #71
nkrisc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I don’t think that. What made you think I did? Because I stated something that can happen?

Because someone asked 'why do they do this in America when they don't do it in Europe' and your explanation was 'because if you have lawns trees can smother them'. That doesn't make sense as an explanation to the question unless you think having lawns and trees or not is a difference between Americans and Europeans. Otherwise how does it apply?

All I stated was that if you have a lawn, it is possible for uncollected leaves to kill or damage parts of your lawn.

I don't know why "they" don't do it in Europe, I have no idea where the commenter I replied to is from in Europe. I was just stating one reason why people do it here.

Q: "Why do people in America clean leaves off the lawn?" A: "Because it's possible it can damage the lawn if you don't in some circumstances."

Simple as that. No idea why people do or do not do it elsewhere.

Re: A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

#144

Post by nkrisc »

ericd wrote: post #120
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are video games, alcohol, candy, pogo sticks, and about a million other things. I get that climate doomers are hyper fixated on lawns ruining the planet and leading us all into the apocalypse but you should just be honest about believing that rather than using lazy and trite arguments.

Those other things have a mainly personal cost, lawns have large negative externalities. Especially the people who regularly have their lawn sprayed with pesticide/herbicide. Never fun getting caught in a downwind cloud of that stuff on a walk through the neighborhood.

Those things all have massive external costs. How much energy goes towards powering computers and other devices playing games? How much time, effort and money goes towards developing them? How much power is used to power the offices where the games are produced?

All that candy needs to be manufactured and transported, and then the waste of the packaging handled, all for essentially zero nutritional benefit compared to other food options.

We should perhaps ban everything that isn't strictly essential for life.

Re: A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

#145

Post by acuozzo »

afiori wrote: post #128
rektide wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These folks can have multiple batteries. That's the real answer, imo. Greenwork's Pro backpack's runtime is 37 minutes at full power on their 60V 8Ah battery (~1/2kWh). Yeah, it's a $300 battery. But with a 4 year warranty, and much longer expected life-time, buying 3-6 for each blower you've got is scary upfront but a drop in the bucket over time. There's some other sub-optimal options, but hopefully we don't see th…

The real solution is not to leaf blow your lawn.

I mostly use my electric leaf blower for my driveway, walkway, porch, and deck.

I can accomplish in a minute or two what would normally take 20+ minutes with a push broom.

Re: A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

#146

Post by prepend »

rektide wrote: post #101
koheripbal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with the electric ones is that those lawn care companies have crews that run leaf blowers all day long from one house to another. This is no longer possible as they take hours to recharge after each use. It works if each home owner buys a leaf blower of his own, but that's way less efficient from a manufacturing/maintenance perspective. We're just increasing inefficiencies.

These folks can have multiple batteries. That's the real answer, imo. Greenwork's Pro backpack's runtime is 37 minutes at full power on their 60V 8Ah battery (~1/2kWh). Yeah, it's a $300 battery. But with a 4 year warranty, and much longer expected life-time, buying 3-6 for each blower you've got is scary upfront but a drop in the bucket over time. There's some other sub-optimal options, but hopefully we don't see th…

The lawn crew that I use works 6-10 per day so that’s 9-15 batteries to buy, carry around and charge. And that’s just for one person. There’s normally two people with leaf blowers.

Hopefully there’s some industrial version as carrying 20 batteries and charging them five days a week is really expensive.

Re: A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

#147

Post by banana_giraffe »

prepend wrote: post #146
rektide wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These folks can have multiple batteries. That's the real answer, imo. Greenwork's Pro backpack's runtime is 37 minutes at full power on their 60V 8Ah battery (~1/2kWh). Yeah, it's a $300 battery. But with a 4 year warranty, and much longer expected life-time, buying 3-6 for each blower you've got is scary upfront but a drop in the bucket over time. There's some other sub-optimal options, but hopefully we don't see th…

The lawn crew that I use works 6-10 per day so that’s 9-15 batteries to buy, carry around and charge. And that’s just for one person. There’s normally two people with leaf blowers. Hopefully there’s some industrial version as carrying 20 batteries and charging them five days a week is really expensive.

My local lawn crew actually runs a cord to an outlet outside my house to charge their batteries for the next house. They were clear they do this when I hired them, but I'm super happy with it since I no longer need to worry about the noise for calls and the like.

Granted, it probably only makes sense for a smaller crew like the one I found, but I thought it was a nice solution.

Re: A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

#148

Post by xkcd-sucks »

showerst wrote: post #32

I live in DC, a few bits of info about why it makes sense here, and may not make sense in your home: 1. They didn't ban leaf blowers, the banned _gas_ leaf blowers. Electric ones are quieter, inexpensive, and work just as well nowadays. My building has an electric Milwaukee that was 200 bucks and lasts all afternoon on a battery or two. 2. This isn't about people wanting to manicure their lawns out in the burbs at 7a…

> Electric ones are quieter, inexpensive, and work just as well nowadays. My building has an electric Milwaukee that was 200 bucks and lasts all afternoon on a battery or two

Not really. I committed to the Milwaukee battery system and now have a leaf blower, a string trimmer, and a chainsaw, to maintain a few acres (nothing fancy just keeping it from being overrun with invasives). They all perform reasonably well in the instantaneous sense, but battery performance is a huge limiting factor. I get about 15-20 minutes of total runtime from everything at conservative speeds (turtle mode for the trimmer/blower, medium speed for the chainsaw).

But the bigger issue is heat dissipation, if you actually run them for 5 minutes in a row the battery heats up, drains super quickly, and the thermal failsafe shuts it down. Then the battery takes quite a long time to cool off during which time it can't be charged. To run these things at full load you need a collection of like 10 batteries (very expensive even if using "compatible" knockoffs) and a second person managing the battery logistics.

So, using these practically means running them in very short bursts with cooldown time in between, which is usually not conducive to efficient work patterns.

For the chainsaw, instead of felling a tree, then limbing/bucking it, then moving the wood to its storage place, it's more like do one or two cuts, move the pieces to storage, repeat - And a helper can't speed things up by moving wood as I'm bucking it. That being said, I typically don't drop more than 1 tree at a time and it is nice to not have to stop and restart a gas chainsaw.

The string trimmer is good for hitting small patches / edges separated by distance, but I actually bought another gas trimmer for mowing my rocky+stumpy hillside.

The leaf blower is basically garbage I regret buying; I went back to using a rake and have used the blower maybe once or twice for blowing powdery snow off of things and accelerating fires, mostly just because the thing is in my garage.

The one consistently good thing about them is it's possible to use them after dark without seeming like a total crackhead, which is nice I guess

Re: A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

#149

Post by rektide »

prepend wrote: post #146
rektide wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These folks can have multiple batteries. That's the real answer, imo. Greenwork's Pro backpack's runtime is 37 minutes at full power on their 60V 8Ah battery (~1/2kWh). Yeah, it's a $300 battery. But with a 4 year warranty, and much longer expected life-time, buying 3-6 for each blower you've got is scary upfront but a drop in the bucket over time. There's some other sub-optimal options, but hopefully we don't see th…

The lawn crew that I use works 6-10 per day so that’s 9-15 batteries to buy, carry around and charge. And that’s just for one person. There’s normally two people with leaf blowers. Hopefully there’s some industrial version as carrying 20 batteries and charging them five days a week is really expensive.

9 batteries by the numbers I presented runs to 5.5 hours. 15 batteries at 37 minutes a piece is 9.25 hours.

I can see that being a possibility for someplace like a college campus where one crew is literally just roving around an limited area for the day to maybe get in 5.5 hours of straight actual use, maybe, if the team is super well pipelined in what they are doing. But it seems like a fanciful/rare/contrived example. How many days of this a year does the crew work? For most lawn-care folks, I tend to think they have a lot of different sites to cover, and there's some transportation, and a variety of tasks other than leafblowing. I have a hard time imagining someone actually clocking 6 hours of actual full-throttle use of a leafblower on any day, much less day after day.

Even in exotic uses (unseen in the city in question/my own city, DC), I think adaption is less of a challenge than one might think.

Re: A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)

#150

Post by prepend »

rektide wrote: post #149
prepend wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lawn crew that I use works 6-10 per day so that’s 9-15 batteries to buy, carry around and charge. And that’s just for one person. There’s normally two people with leaf blowers. Hopefully there’s some industrial version as carrying 20 batteries and charging them five days a week is really expensive.

9 batteries by the numbers I presented runs to 5.5 hours. 15 batteries at 37 minutes a piece is 9.25 hours. I can see that being a possibility for someplace like a college campus where one crew is literally just roving around an limited area for the day to maybe get in 5.5 hours of straight actual use, maybe, if the team is super well pipelined in what they are doing. But it seems like a fanciful/rare/contrived examp…

I’m not a yard company but I’ve talked to the team that does my yard and they said (two of them) that they do 12-16 houses a day and each house takes about 30 minutes. Usually one is blowing the whole time while one mows and weedwhacks and then the second puts on a backpack. They have a long day from like 7am to 6pm.

So my example certainly isn’t contrived. But it’s just one example and the only one I know.

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