Sign me up for the blower hater brigade. I can almost forgive these during leaf season. I hate them being used in place of brooms for landscaping.
A ton of noise to move a very small mass of clippings, etc, creating a cloud for 30 minutes to do a less complete job, often just blowing it all into the street without concentrating it and picking it up. Maddening.
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??
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Not just leaf blowers -- there are hundreds of irritating sounds all around that we have little control over:
- TVs blaring in waiting rooms when you'd prefer to just sit in silence.
- Appliances and gadgets that make unnecessary beeps; my coffee maker makes some irritating chirps when the coffee is ready and a particularly unwanted second set of chirps 2 hours later to tell you that it's turning off.
- Trucks that make a shrill beep-beep-beep when they go in reverse. Think about snow clearing trucks at 3am if you live some place that's difficult to clear.
- Useless announcements and even ads on subways, buses, and flights; who needs instructions on how to attach your seatbelt on a flight (ridiculously sometimes given after takeoff).
- Autoplaying audio on websites. Fortunately, we've made progress on this one with browsers settings.
- Monthly fire alarm testing in some condos and office buildings. Surely, some way could be devised to test the system without disturbing thousands of people at once.
It's tragedy of the commons where the commons is the air space.
> Trucks that make a shrill beep-beep-beep when they go in reverse.
Trucks can't see directly behind them; the sound is so that pedestrians notice the truck backing up so that they don't get hit or crushed by the truck.
> It's tragedy of the commons where the commons is the air space.
Agreed. There should be a tax applied that's proportional to the level of annoyance generated by such things.
You missed off my two. Stereos that are 90% baseline turned up way too loud and the teen craze in my area of putting stolen megaphones on their bikes and playing 5 second snippets of music at incredible volume. You can hear them from several km with no exaggeration. The odd damaged individual does this to their car too.
And now many gas stations have video screens on every pump that include blaring audio. I was at one station in Minnesota that had about 10 loud screens all playing slightly out of sync in a cacophony - I can’t understand how people design and install systems like that thinking they’re normal or useful.
Autoplaying audio on websites at night is so stupid that they must have a good reason for doing this. It seems the perfect design to chase off people, get rid of the people that hangs on, and "optimize" the ratio between number of visits and resources needed
They changed the flight plans for SFO after that one jetliner crashed on landing partially due to unfamiliarity so they made the landing easier and less steep (saves fuel and even inexperienced pilots can do it - yay I guess), but now the approach is lower from 30+ miles out and almost every community gets to hear the jet planes going over head for 20 hours a day. I can hear them going overhead from pretty isolated parks on the other side of the mountain ridges, too. If you have a/c running at home one probably would not notice but if one does not it's louder than the street traffic noise for me.
The cynic in me thinks it was regulatory capture. Manufacturers of the beepers lobbied to make them required. Like scaffolding in New York. No proof though.
I bike to work. Leaf blowers almost kill me every time. Here in dusty Southern California I can spot a leaf blower half a mile away by the cloud of brown dust being picked up. While biking through it I hold my breath and squint my eyes – hoping for the best. It's a nightmare.
I'm convinced that these leaf blowers cause half of the particle pollution here in LA. One day, the leaf blowers blow the dust into the street towards the other neighbor, only so that the next day the other neighbor blows the same dust back to the other side again. This is a great business for the gardeners, they are paid for pushing the same dust around the block ad infinitum.
The second reason they are a nightmare for the environment is what they cause of water consumption. Yes, you read that right. The same dust pushed around lands onto the cars parked on the street, causing them to need much more frequent trip to the car wash than they otherwise would. It has a a massive impact.
California can not claim to care about the environment before they ban leaf blowers.
I don't want to ban leaf blowers, but I want to ban leaf blowers.
Maybe it's different elsewhere, but in California it seems our obsession with landscaping is pretty out of hand. It's normal for people in SoCal to hire workers who use multiple leaf blowers at once, and just walking by them is unpleasant to almost all the senses; the exhaust smells, the dust is dusty, they're loud as, and totally distracting from the scenery we should be enjoying. Property values must be maximized, thus all hedges must be cut to 90 degree angles with no rogue twigs or leaves. Let's not even get started on lawnmowing.
Oh god, the noise! One of the reasons I found it hard to consistently work from home was the fact that gardeners are basically present blowing leaves somewhere nearby every day. I could never escape them... I'd decide to take a break from work and shoot some hoops at the park down the road, only for there to be more gardeners there blowing leaves and mowing lawns.
Are a few leaves or grass trimmings here and there really so offensive to people? It's nature, and after a few days the wind or foot traffic will kick that stuff to the side. If the leaves must be blown, can the landscaping be at least limited to one day of the week so the other 7 days can be free of extra noise and dust?
If only we spent as much money collectively on the homeless problem and picking up actual trash as we do on the sisyphean task of blowing leaves.
Leaf blowers I can tolerate. Those fucking car stereos with their sub-woofers, that serve no other purpose than to demonstrate testosterone and dominate the environment with sound? Evil.
--
P.S. For the downvotes, I'll add Harleys and kin with "straight pipes".
They don't save lives. They shave days from others' lives, at each pass, in terms of stress.
--
P.P.S. Pardon my outburst -- or not. But people who don't live with these being inflicted on them should understand that when it's chronic and out of your control, it becomes a severe stress. And it's simply not necessary. It is another's choice to completely and abusively dis-respect you. And, they get enough "looks" from people around them to know what they are doing.
Basically it comes down to this: lawn grass is ground cover and leaves kill lawn grass. So you have to get them off. Getting them off with a rake sounds fine if you don't actually own a lawn and this is all academic. Otherwise you probably find raking very labor and time intensive. Firing up a blower to whoosh the leaves back into the forest where they came from is so much easier and faster. So obviously the real problem is owning an unproductive acre of suburban land that needs ground cover. Reply to this comment if you'd like to buy mine.
> Otherwise you probably find raking very labor and time intensive.
I find it to be a good excuse to spend time outdoors performing a meditative physical activity.
I would be mortified to subject my neighbors – 10 or so within 200 ft radius – to the hellish cacophony of a leaf blower. Even an electric one, which one of my neighbors uses, sounds like someone is running a cheap air compressor inside my home for hours on end.
I wonder how the author feels about leaf vacuums like this, which is what I use: http://a.co/d/dGh7M4R
Its electric, so no fumes, and since it sucks instead of blows I don't have to worry as much about annoying passers-by with dust. Sadly it still makes noise, of course, though its far quieter than the backpack blowers the author is talking about.
I'm wondering if this story made it to the top of HN because hackers and developers are more sensitive to noise than most people. I heard that all programmers at Microsoft would get private offices(&) because Bill Gates himself was so irritated by distracting sounds that he couldn't imagine productive work in an open office space.
The heat map in this article is hard to read/understand.
First, it shows Boston Harbor and Mystic River as water, but I can't find the Charles River, which makes it really hard to figure out what is where.
Second, the intensity at each point in the map with a survey response seems to be fixed to the exact value at that point, and then between points there's some sort of averaging taking place. In 2D charts, this would be like drawing a jagged line connecting each point to the points next to it.
For example, if I live at 1 Main St and I responded with a value of 10, and you live at 2 Main St (across the street) and gave it a 0, the map would deep red at my house, deep blue at your house, and yellow in the middle of the street.
Some parts of the heat map are broad regions of red or blue. Are those places where there was broad agreement in the poll? Or -- as I suspect -- are those just places where only a few people responded to the poll?
Other parts of the map are chaotically speckled with small blue and red dots. I figure this is because there are more survey responses in those places (it seems responses are clustered around the Red Line, and especially in Cambridge & Somerville). It's confusing to read, and I'm not sure what conclusions I can draw from it. I doubt there's this much fine variation between one block and the next with regard to leaf blower annoyance; but if there is, I doubt this survey or heat map accurately shows it.
I see that it's now possible to buy an electric leaf blower with a backpack battery. As battery tech gets cheaper over time, it seems likely that all 2-stroke devices could become obsolete.
I've had plenty of time to watch and listen to these things lately, Germans seem to have a soft spot for complex technological solutions to non-problems. And for hiring the cheapest labor possible, people who just don't give a flying crap; and handing them a pile of hair dryers and other gasoline driven tools to play with.
Walking by with my son is just not an option, he's very sensitive to sounds; and he wakes up screaming whenever one goes off outside the house. If anyone else made that much noise for something as meaningless, I'm pretty sure people would gang up on them.
>The crude little two-stroke engines used by most commercial backpack-style blowers are pollution bombs. “Simplest benchmark: running a leafblower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a F-150 pickup truck 3800 miles,” Fallows writes. “About one-third of the gasoline that goes into this sort of engine is spewed out, unburned, in an aerosol mixed with oil in the exhaust.”
This rings similar to things I read about food trucks. They run inefficient gas electrical generators. A single one running for a day can display dozens of cars switching to hybrids. Point is these small things are huge perpetrators of pollution that we forget when we regulate the car industry.
Pollution is not a single solution problem, everything must be accounted for.
I don't know. Maybe lawn care professionals know more about the best tools for lawn care than us hipster bloggers, engineer coders and Atlantic Media editors. Maybe people who have never pushed a broom or a mower for a living or, in fact, done a single day of manual labor in their lives should be a bit more circumspect in their advice to those that have.
There are a lot of good discussions on HN but this one is so clueless, condescending and elitist it leaves me cold. Its like running across a thread in a lawn care forum complaining that programers are lazy and stupid for using an IDE and decreeing all coding henceforth should be done only with vi, make and in assembly.
Maybe there should be a way to place the environmental cost of "lawn care professionals" activities on them so they can decide better if they want to use rakes or pay the neighbourhood to use leaf blowers for the suffering ans pollution they cause.
I don't think most "lawn care professionals" care whether they use a rake or a blower, because they get paid hourly, and their wage floor is set by other economic factors. They use a blower because the company employing them tells them to, so they can charge less and make a higher margin by being able to cram into each day more visits to lawns whose owners are sufficiently inconsiderate or powerless to accept externalizing the noisy consequences of this cost-saving measure onto their neighbors' eardrums.
The IDE analogy is a bad one, as the consequences of using an IDE are not visible to the consumer. A better analogy would be, people in a lawn care forum complaining about pop-over ads on lawn-care websites, 300 MB app installs to browse lawn-care store catalogues, and lawn-care online storefronts that double-charge purchases because they had the temerity to click the "back" button. And they'd be well within their right to complain about the negative externalities they must suffer as a consequence of rushed software development owing to mismanaged "agile" timeboxing and dark UI patterns designed by paperclip-maximizing sales teams.
There are some echo blowers which top out at about 64db—much less than the rest which are about 70db. Nicer sound than corded ones. I almost plunked down for one. Might just use a power washer instead to pull double duty. Really intrigued me why other mfgs don’t try to lower the noise and type ov noise.
Most people will buy based off of cost and weight rather than sound. In round numbers, no one knows what 70dB means relative to 64dB. But everyone knows what $30 or 3 extra pounds means. (Except for the majority of the world which doesn’t used $ or pounds of course), and bonus addendum, 70dB sounds about 50% louder than 64dB.
You know what I hate more than leaf blowers? People letting their homes and yards fall into disrepair which becomes a blight on the entire neighborhood. If the price for a nice neighborhood is hearing a lawn mower and leaf blower once in a while, I will gladly pay it.
This is finally ready to change. I just this summer got an Ego backpack electric blower after having very good experiences with their chainsaws. Having actually now used it for a season of cleanup and far more importantly the first winter snows done I'm delighted to say that at long last battery tech seems to be right on the edge of being a total replacement for filthy two stroke engines in all the typical applications. It's not quite powerful enough to handle all the same jobs, but it can do 95% of them and it's completely met my hopes in terms of being quiet, clean, reliable, and just better in all the ways I hated about two stroke (goodbye fuel mixing and spill issues and priming and...).
But given the comments I see so far I also want to add that those two stroke power tools have stuck around because they are insanely useful in a lot of contexts, particularly rural ones. I was highly skeptical of blowers in particular until I got one on sale a few years ago, and I hated how noisy it was and the fumes and all that right off. Yet here up north I was sold on it after the first season, with leaves actually being the least important by far aspect. The real value has been snow, a lot of people around here have decks, semi-covered porches, long walkways, and most do not have garages either. A powerful blower clears snow, even somewhat dense snow, not just fast but better, it gets into spaces between rough stone that are impossible to do with a shovel and that inevitably melt/compact and freeze indefinitely (direct sun doesn't do anything really when it's -10 to -20°F or lower) in slick ice. Walk behind snowblowers have a place as well, but can either fail to deal with a rough surface or can't get onto places like decks/porches (or you wouldn't want to anyway) at all. And they're big themselves. Couple of feet of snow on cars and other areas to clear before work is a lot quicker. As far as chainsaws, trees come down and need to be dealt with anyway, and are needed directly for firewood. But of course it's nice to be able to deal with this sort of thing whenever there is snow, and I would never run the blower late a night even with the nearest neighbor 600 feet away, it'd be rude.
I find certain kinds of external noise to drive me nuts, so I completely understand why a lot of people would question the entire use of power tools period. But when you're dealing with acres of field and forest, miles of dirt driveways and roads, are (along with your neighbors) mostly responsible for yourselves, and have parents and friends who are growing older and you need to make time to go help along with your own family, well power tools really make a tremendous quality of life difference. It just has really stunk (metaphorically and literally) that their power sources have been about the absolute worst and most archaic thing. However I think at this point electric is about there, and I think cities and even suburbs really could get away with demanding a shift to them and an end to two stroke use entirely. That was a lot harder without a drop in replacement, but the market foundation is ready and now could just use an extra kick. I'd definitely suggest people consider try to push ordinances there, it might be a lot more successful then in the past. If you have two stroke tools yourself consider looking at modern 40/56V+ battery replacements, and then demonstrating them personally to people. Seeing and hearing and smelling the difference has been very motivating for those I've showed so far. We had all been resigned to how things were, it's a big deal when people realize no, you don't have to deal with that anymore and you don't have to sacrifice the tool either. I can't wait for mowers and tractors to get electric next!
[+] [-] uptime|7 years ago|reply
A ton of noise to move a very small mass of clippings, etc, creating a cloud for 30 minutes to do a less complete job, often just blowing it all into the street without concentrating it and picking it up. Maddening.
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] grawprog|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] etrautmann|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geraldcombs|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ModernMech|7 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cix_pkez|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cafard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mysterypie|7 years ago|reply
- TVs blaring in waiting rooms when you'd prefer to just sit in silence.
- Appliances and gadgets that make unnecessary beeps; my coffee maker makes some irritating chirps when the coffee is ready and a particularly unwanted second set of chirps 2 hours later to tell you that it's turning off.
- Trucks that make a shrill beep-beep-beep when they go in reverse. Think about snow clearing trucks at 3am if you live some place that's difficult to clear.
- Useless announcements and even ads on subways, buses, and flights; who needs instructions on how to attach your seatbelt on a flight (ridiculously sometimes given after takeoff).
- Autoplaying audio on websites. Fortunately, we've made progress on this one with browsers settings.
- Monthly fire alarm testing in some condos and office buildings. Surely, some way could be devised to test the system without disturbing thousands of people at once.
It's tragedy of the commons where the commons is the air space.
[+] [-] jfim|7 years ago|reply
Trucks can't see directly behind them; the sound is so that pedestrians notice the truck backing up so that they don't get hit or crushed by the truck.
> It's tragedy of the commons where the commons is the air space.
Agreed. There should be a tax applied that's proportional to the level of annoyance generated by such things.
[+] [-] lostlogin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvaldes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenwoo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gavingmiller|7 years ago|reply
When I can, I turn the TVs off. No one has complained yet.
[+] [-] silviogutierrez|7 years ago|reply
The cynic in me thinks it was regulatory capture. Manufacturers of the beepers lobbied to make them required. Like scaffolding in New York. No proof though.
[+] [-] ancorevard|7 years ago|reply
I'm convinced that these leaf blowers cause half of the particle pollution here in LA. One day, the leaf blowers blow the dust into the street towards the other neighbor, only so that the next day the other neighbor blows the same dust back to the other side again. This is a great business for the gardeners, they are paid for pushing the same dust around the block ad infinitum.
The second reason they are a nightmare for the environment is what they cause of water consumption. Yes, you read that right. The same dust pushed around lands onto the cars parked on the street, causing them to need much more frequent trip to the car wash than they otherwise would. It has a a massive impact.
California can not claim to care about the environment before they ban leaf blowers.
[+] [-] ravenstine|7 years ago|reply
Maybe it's different elsewhere, but in California it seems our obsession with landscaping is pretty out of hand. It's normal for people in SoCal to hire workers who use multiple leaf blowers at once, and just walking by them is unpleasant to almost all the senses; the exhaust smells, the dust is dusty, they're loud as, and totally distracting from the scenery we should be enjoying. Property values must be maximized, thus all hedges must be cut to 90 degree angles with no rogue twigs or leaves. Let's not even get started on lawnmowing.
Oh god, the noise! One of the reasons I found it hard to consistently work from home was the fact that gardeners are basically present blowing leaves somewhere nearby every day. I could never escape them... I'd decide to take a break from work and shoot some hoops at the park down the road, only for there to be more gardeners there blowing leaves and mowing lawns.
Are a few leaves or grass trimmings here and there really so offensive to people? It's nature, and after a few days the wind or foot traffic will kick that stuff to the side. If the leaves must be blown, can the landscaping be at least limited to one day of the week so the other 7 days can be free of extra noise and dust?
If only we spent as much money collectively on the homeless problem and picking up actual trash as we do on the sisyphean task of blowing leaves.
[+] [-] pasbesoin|7 years ago|reply
--
P.S. For the downvotes, I'll add Harleys and kin with "straight pipes".
They don't save lives. They shave days from others' lives, at each pass, in terms of stress.
--
P.P.S. Pardon my outburst -- or not. But people who don't live with these being inflicted on them should understand that when it's chronic and out of your control, it becomes a severe stress. And it's simply not necessary. It is another's choice to completely and abusively dis-respect you. And, they get enough "looks" from people around them to know what they are doing.
[+] [-] crushcrashcrush|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frabbit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brokenmachine|7 years ago|reply
Leaf blowers I'm forced to endure more often, unfortunately.
[+] [-] markbnj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colanderman|7 years ago|reply
I find it to be a good excuse to spend time outdoors performing a meditative physical activity.
I would be mortified to subject my neighbors – 10 or so within 200 ft radius – to the hellish cacophony of a leaf blower. Even an electric one, which one of my neighbors uses, sounds like someone is running a cheap air compressor inside my home for hours on end.
[+] [-] jimmytucson|7 years ago|reply
Sounds like he spends a ton of time around lawns.
[+] [-] brokenmachine|7 years ago|reply
I'm inclined to suspect it might be because the landscapers are paid by the hour.
[+] [-] seccess|7 years ago|reply
Its electric, so no fumes, and since it sucks instead of blows I don't have to worry as much about annoying passers-by with dust. Sadly it still makes noise, of course, though its far quieter than the backpack blowers the author is talking about.
[+] [-] mysterypie|7 years ago|reply
(&) Is it still true today?
[+] [-] dantillberg|7 years ago|reply
First, it shows Boston Harbor and Mystic River as water, but I can't find the Charles River, which makes it really hard to figure out what is where.
Second, the intensity at each point in the map with a survey response seems to be fixed to the exact value at that point, and then between points there's some sort of averaging taking place. In 2D charts, this would be like drawing a jagged line connecting each point to the points next to it.
For example, if I live at 1 Main St and I responded with a value of 10, and you live at 2 Main St (across the street) and gave it a 0, the map would deep red at my house, deep blue at your house, and yellow in the middle of the street.
Some parts of the heat map are broad regions of red or blue. Are those places where there was broad agreement in the poll? Or -- as I suspect -- are those just places where only a few people responded to the poll?
Other parts of the map are chaotically speckled with small blue and red dots. I figure this is because there are more survey responses in those places (it seems responses are clustered around the Red Line, and especially in Cambridge & Somerville). It's confusing to read, and I'm not sure what conclusions I can draw from it. I doubt there's this much fine variation between one block and the next with regard to leaf blower annoyance; but if there is, I doubt this survey or heat map accurately shows it.
[+] [-] p1mrx|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sifoobar|7 years ago|reply
Walking by with my son is just not an option, he's very sensitive to sounds; and he wakes up screaming whenever one goes off outside the house. If anyone else made that much noise for something as meaningless, I'm pretty sure people would gang up on them.
[+] [-] hwillis|7 years ago|reply
uh no
[+] [-] Justsignedup|7 years ago|reply
Pollution is not a single solution problem, everything must be accounted for.
[+] [-] monotone666|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reddog|7 years ago|reply
There are a lot of good discussions on HN but this one is so clueless, condescending and elitist it leaves me cold. Its like running across a thread in a lawn care forum complaining that programers are lazy and stupid for using an IDE and decreeing all coding henceforth should be done only with vi, make and in assembly.
[+] [-] scotty79|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flanban|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colanderman|7 years ago|reply
The IDE analogy is a bad one, as the consequences of using an IDE are not visible to the consumer. A better analogy would be, people in a lawn care forum complaining about pop-over ads on lawn-care websites, 300 MB app installs to browse lawn-care store catalogues, and lawn-care online storefronts that double-charge purchases because they had the temerity to click the "back" button. And they'd be well within their right to complain about the negative externalities they must suffer as a consequence of rushed software development owing to mismanaged "agile" timeboxing and dark UI patterns designed by paperclip-maximizing sales teams.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] swampthinker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uptime|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jws|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brokenmachine|7 years ago|reply
A vacuum cleaner is 85db.
[+] [-] cm2012|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] algon33|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joejerryronnie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vbuwivbiu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xoa|7 years ago|reply
But given the comments I see so far I also want to add that those two stroke power tools have stuck around because they are insanely useful in a lot of contexts, particularly rural ones. I was highly skeptical of blowers in particular until I got one on sale a few years ago, and I hated how noisy it was and the fumes and all that right off. Yet here up north I was sold on it after the first season, with leaves actually being the least important by far aspect. The real value has been snow, a lot of people around here have decks, semi-covered porches, long walkways, and most do not have garages either. A powerful blower clears snow, even somewhat dense snow, not just fast but better, it gets into spaces between rough stone that are impossible to do with a shovel and that inevitably melt/compact and freeze indefinitely (direct sun doesn't do anything really when it's -10 to -20°F or lower) in slick ice. Walk behind snowblowers have a place as well, but can either fail to deal with a rough surface or can't get onto places like decks/porches (or you wouldn't want to anyway) at all. And they're big themselves. Couple of feet of snow on cars and other areas to clear before work is a lot quicker. As far as chainsaws, trees come down and need to be dealt with anyway, and are needed directly for firewood. But of course it's nice to be able to deal with this sort of thing whenever there is snow, and I would never run the blower late a night even with the nearest neighbor 600 feet away, it'd be rude.
I find certain kinds of external noise to drive me nuts, so I completely understand why a lot of people would question the entire use of power tools period. But when you're dealing with acres of field and forest, miles of dirt driveways and roads, are (along with your neighbors) mostly responsible for yourselves, and have parents and friends who are growing older and you need to make time to go help along with your own family, well power tools really make a tremendous quality of life difference. It just has really stunk (metaphorically and literally) that their power sources have been about the absolute worst and most archaic thing. However I think at this point electric is about there, and I think cities and even suburbs really could get away with demanding a shift to them and an end to two stroke use entirely. That was a lot harder without a drop in replacement, but the market foundation is ready and now could just use an extra kick. I'd definitely suggest people consider try to push ordinances there, it might be a lot more successful then in the past. If you have two stroke tools yourself consider looking at modern 40/56V+ battery replacements, and then demonstrating them personally to people. Seeing and hearing and smelling the difference has been very motivating for those I've showed so far. We had all been resigned to how things were, it's a big deal when people realize no, you don't have to deal with that anymore and you don't have to sacrifice the tool either. I can't wait for mowers and tractors to get electric next!