> 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 do it because gas engines are currently the only reasonable way to keep the crews running all day without spending thousands of dollars on batteries over and over again.

Current battery tech is hit or miss. The packs should be protected from over-discharge and last for hundreds of cycles, but in practice they got a lot of early failures. They also need extra packs to rotate while others are charging. At $100-200 per battery, they might be spending $1000 on batteries to operate a machine for a season, which would have bought them two gas powered machines and gas to operate them.

There’s also the issue of charging throughout the day. Getting a reliable charging setup that works on a truck inverter and getting crews to perfectly manage batteries throughout the day, including spares, is significantly harder than just filling up a gas tank.

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

You are talking about people working in a business.

I'm talking about neighbors living in rural/suburban areas.

EDIT: We have a lawn care guy. He does our half acre in under 30 minutes. Our neighbors who do it themselves - same half acre size - typically take 90-120 minutes. They'll just sit on a riding mower and let it idle for minutes, while looking up stuff on their phones. Or let it idle and go inside for a drink, while leaving it running. They enjoy riding around with a loud engine underneath, like a really slow motorcycle. This is not speculation, it's from talking to them.

The business people have an incentive to get in and out quickly - they can do more lawns that way.

The people who like loud engine noise have no such incentive. They have an incentive to have a lazy afternoon of lawn mowing.

There’s some overlap as well–I recently had an extended visit in my rural hometown, working by a window overlooking the main street. Something I noticed quickly was that a huge proportion of passing vehicles that happened to be loud enough for me to glance up were actually lawn service pickup trucks with loud, modified exhausts. It also became clear that I’ve been living in the city too long to remember how obnoxious the all-day-every-day drone of lawn equipment is, it sort of blew my mind.

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!

> That’s an awfully uncharitable projection.

Not the OP but I would agree with you if I was not told explicitly by several people that they love being outside with loud gas powered engines. These people happen to be my neighbors. There's a culture around small gas powered engines. People grew up with them, and learned engine repair on them, which helped them build a career. I have used battery powered leaf blower and a battery powered weed eater, and I have been told "that's nicer than anything else I've ever used, but I just love gas engines".

Assuming “a section of folks who enjoy loud engines” was meant to apply to your section of lawn business people who don’t is also uncharitable.

>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

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 them outside far enough they couldn't get back and just flew off.

> I use it all the time for things I didn't think I would

The very existence of a power tool, even when inert, laying (nay, waiting!, biding!) on the shelf, it shapes your mind, aspirations, disposition.

Truly supernatural, a fetish, a cursed monkey paw in the curiosity shop.

Inspirational words, but I'm not giving up my power drill. Long ago my family had a brace and bit, but it's long gone, and would be awkward to use where I use the drill.

The great thing about your well written comment is that you can replace 'power tool' with about anything and it becomes just as meaningful as before!

A temptation, in the biblical sense.

It just is. You don't need a theoretical explanation, just go turn on a gas leaf blower and a battery operated one and see for yourself. The internal cumbustion engine is much louder than the actual blower mechanism.

Hah thanks, no matter how many times I re-read my posts I manage to miss something.

A lead blower would require a lot of battery power for sure.

Because its not running off of repeated explosions.

Have you compared your electric vacuum to your gas powered one?

Cars?

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.

That's horrific.

I meant as a job for large surfaces. Keep mowing your lawn if you want to, but in that case a battery powered one will probably be enough.

>That’s an awfully uncharitable projection.

It's neither uncharitable nor a projection. My dad is one of these - the loudness is entirely the point, by his own admission. He told me this. He intentionally buys the loudest most powerful/obnoxious tools he can rather than the most practical and dicks around with them.

My dad is also the laziest man on the planet and does ZERO housework. He only does lawn work because it's an opportunity for him to play with his toys.

>The lawn business people I know

Nobody's talking about people with lawn businesses. Businesses will want to just get the work done and move onto the next client.

Exactly. This is the sort of person I was talking about.

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 to 75% now. That happened in the first season. Otherwise, performance is good.

> I have been running the best of the best in tools and battery tech: Milwaukee.

I've found Makita to be better for my line of work at least. I love my older Milwaukee tools. My 10" chopsaw from the early 90s is a solid beast, as well as my worm drive. Newer Milwaukee is a crapshoot, I've had three dead batteries from them, none from Makita. Two burnt out super sawzalls, and a miter saw with no idea what true is.

I will say Milwaukee tools have more power to them, but my Makita ones are more reliable. Less frills, less price too.

I am biased as I do more finishing then rough work, so I have an understanding that Milwaukee is better/quicker for that, but I'll stick with Makita for battery tools. I can go two, three days on a single charge with my miter.

The batteries from eg Ego and Greenworks are way larger than anything Milwaukee puts out.

You're talking about an 18V battery, maybe up to 8Ah. About 144Wh.

My batteries on my blower and trimmer and lawn mower use 56V batteries, up to 12Ah. About 672Wh. The smallest battery I have for it is 280Wh.

Milwaukee might make some decent power tools, but they're still batteries designed for a drill or some other smaller handheld tool used for short stints. Companies focusing on lawn care products have much different battery packs.

The higher voltage lawn care product lines typically have much larger batteries that are not strained doing a modest urban yard.

When we moved into a new in city home a few years ago, I wanted to keep things quiet and electric. I bought a ryobi leaf blower and lawn mower, with four 40v 6.0ah batteries. Our lawn is neither small nor big - not sure on sq ft but it’s far from huge.

It takes me about 6-8 gull charges to complete mowing and blowing. Leaf blowing is by far the more energy intensive. During the fall I have to space out the work in order to charge. Granted my property has a lot of tree cover and therefore always has a lot of leafs and debris.

Needless to say I regret my decision.

One of the problems with the blower is that it has a standard mode that is effectively useless, barely usable for even clippings. You have to run it at “max” charge for it to be remotely effective.

Edit: I have a previous year version of the RY404170-LB backpack blower. It eats batteries like candy.

When we moved into a new home a few years ago, I wanted to keep things quiet and electric. I bought an Ego lawn mower, multi-head trimmer/edger, and blower. A 56V 8Ah and a 4Ah battery. Once again, our lawn isn't small or big, fairly average 80s suburban lot.

I pretty much never need to recharge the batteries when working. I haven't needed to do much maintenance to it at all, just sharpening the mowing blade. Even after a few years the batteries still have plenty of charge to mow, trim, edge, and blow both yards. I don't normally have enough battery to do all that and do the hedge trimmer for a while though, I'll normally go inside and cool off for 15-20min and then go back out if I need to handle that. The fast charger can get a pretty good charge in 20 minutes

For what it's worth, automowers are great. I had a Husqvarna 330X doing .75 acres and was very happy with it. I don't even know how far it got on a charge to be honest, it just charged itself so I never had to worry about it.

Those look amazing. We have a rather long and complicated and hilly lawn and due to trees. Do you think a roomier like the 330x can handle a more complicated lawn layout?

Perhaps, ours had a gazebo, vegetable garden, dozen or so trees, and a very long rectangular path we mowed for access and it managed well. We spent some time getting it clear of rocks and divots though.

> best of the best in tools and battery tech: Milwaukee.

Is Milwaukee better? I always understood Milwaukee (Red), Dewalt (Yellow), and Makita (Teal) to basically be interchangeable for most products and it just depended on who you ask and which color team they were on.

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

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.

Convenience is a big reason. People look at me when I use rakes in the garden. Just to save some time I ended up getting a cordless leaf blower but my wife thought she might find it fun too. The area we have to clear was never going to support the maintenance of a gas-powered blower.

Separately, I was tired of the stand up vacuums for smaller jobs so got a corded stick vacuum. It's still a bit of a hassle even though I use it frequently to avoid messes getting out of control with the kids and pets. I know that if it was cordless it would get much more proactive usage by others. The design of the corded vac could be improved to make it easier but there is little incentive to do that.

A cord is limited to the amount of power you can get from mains. When you need a lot of power a battery can deliver - for a few minutes, then you have to charge for an hour.

>> That’s an awfully uncharitable projection.

I took this to mean my father-in-law, but not a paid business or situation where these things are a necessity. He is a lawyer who's worked remote since 2000 only leaves home for necessities and outside hobbies, but has all kinds of equipment including a tractor and snow plow. Of course, he has a ride-on mower and enough other equipment to start a landscaping business.

this is quite a straightforward reality for many people and calling it a “fantasy escape world” and “uncharitable” is itself miserly and uncharitable, and classic HN rules-lawyering in a nutshell.

like yes people do like using loud power tools for the sake of using loud power tools, most people would consider them at least moderately fun.

It sounds like the key part of the idea could apply to gas blowers, right?

A massive amount of the noise of a gas blower is the gas motor part of the thing.

Yes, though perhaps there's possible middle ground, like 4-stroke motors plus this tech.

I have seen people riding loudest lawn mowers wearing noise cancellation headphones. Probably they just want to torcher neighbors.

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.

Earplugs really do work! Pay the money to get good ones.

Respectfully, no, earplugs do not work when they are jackhammering a mountain outside of your window. I shouldn't have to dull my senses just to live in society because some people have no consideration of making others uncomfortable in their own homes.

As a car-person, gear head / petrol head, etc., this has always been somewhat baffling to me. I've always been in it for the speed, the exciting sensation of your body moving through space. Lots of things end up being kind of cool by association: fat tires, wings, loud exhaust, a lopey idle. But to me they were only interesting because of what they implied, something that can go fast. Some people add those things without being able to go fast, which I've always found distasteful, a thing frequently derided as "all show and no go". It took me a while to accept that some people really are in it for the noise. I can't really knock it, I'm getting a sensory experience that I enjoy but can't quite explain, and I suppose they are too. But keep it away from my house. ;-)

Once I was riding my motorcycle to work, and another guy rode passed me on his motorcycle. His exhaust was so loud it gave me a headache almost instantly. I can't imagine how much it must hurt to actually ride the thing.

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.

A higher end robomower can handle an acre

I was out weeding my garden yesterday evening and there was some pleasant bird song around me. And the droning of a gas mower a block away. And someone zooming back and forth on their crotch rocket on the main street in the other direction. At least the mower sound probably wasn't intentional...

You should hear my electric makita, it’s loud as hell and sounds like a banshee from Halo.

Still quieter than gas. More like a very loud hair dryer.

Leaf blowers are already mostly electric, and they are annoying as hell. People will take time to replace them, but I assure you they aren’t loved at all.

Curious - why dont people love them? I assume just not as powerful as gas?

They chew through batteries so fast and they have a really high pitched sound ~16kHz that gives me tinnitus when I use it without ear protection. I suppose the same would happen with a gas one, but I was hoping to avoid wearing ear protection.

I don't understand this, isn't most of the noise coming from the air and not the engine in the leaf blowers?

It's both. This design focuses on quieting the airflow. From TFA:

The team started working last September. They hoped to improve an electric or battery-powered leaf blower, which is already much quieter than the notorious gas-powered ones, where the sound can carry over an average suburban block.

No. Nearly all of it is the engine.

I don't believe that part - the ones shown in the picture/videos are brushless motors, quite efficient (90%) and really silent on their right own.

The noise comes from the need to move air (and the noise is just air waves), along with certain vibrations. A brushless motor is super silent if you exclude the fan(s) cooling it.

Electric doesn't have engine. It has a motor. Gas has an engine.

https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/whats-the... by the way...

Which is why I said engine, not motor.

The topic is an electric leaf blower though. While a gas leaf blower is louder the difference isn't as most of the noise is the blower.

Generally being a nuisance can be illegal, depending on the circumstances.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuisance

If there's a quiet option and someone deliberately uses a noisy one, could that be considered a nuisance?

Not in rural areas. People shoot guns at 1am and... "god given freedoms" and "piss off back to the city y'all" and all that are trotted out anytime a complaint is made.

Again, it may change in another couple generations, but it'll be slow.

I lived in cities for four decades and rural areas for two. Hearing late night gunshots was routine in cities. I think it's happened once in hearing from my rural home. My neighbor is a state biologist who put down a sick coyote.

Or course it can happen a lot if you get the wrong neighbors. But that's more of a risk in the city where you have so many more neighbors.

Wow, which cities? I've lived between cities and the sticks in the U.S. almost my entire life and while I've never once heard gunfire in a city, in the country it's a daily routine (occasionally, if rarely, even fully automatic).

I live in oakcliff in Dallas (area SW of downtown but still in Dallas proper). Gunshots every night and automatic weapons fire once a month. Police have completely given up, granted it’s all celebratory and usually not crime related. For example, when the cowboys score a touchdown you’ll hear a burst of gunfire.

If they're only shooting when the Cowboys score, at least they'll save money on ammo.

You had some pretty well-off rural neighbors if they shot guns daily. Ammunition isn't cheap. I've lived in a rural area for a long time, and, yes maybe once a week or month a neighbor will practice their marksmanship, but thankfully it isn't a daily occurrence.

The neighbors in rural places I've lived haven't been terribly well-off, as far as I could tell, but they clearly have had different priorities.

It gets massively cheaper when those priorities include reloading your own ammo.

My most well off neighbor is the most prolific shooter I know. He shoots targets almost daily with his .22, and I don't hear it at all from 1/3 mile away. He doesn't use a suppressor, but some kind of quieter round. I guess that means slower.

This is true. The trade off is time, but reloading is cheaper. Maybe he uses subsonic loads.

Besides the caliber, that can also be due to topography and wind.

I lived in downtown San Jose for ten years and someone was shot to death right behind my apartment. San Jose isn't all that unsafe either, relatively speaking.

San Jose, Burbank, Albuquerque. Not so much in Santa Cruz or the Denver suburbs.

It might just be a meme, but supposedly it's very common in Chicago?

In absolute numbers but by rate, it is behind St Louis, Milwaukee, Detroit and Cleveland.

I'm genuinely sorry you have assholes for neighbors.

If it's any consolation, not every rural area is like that, at least around here people just want to be left alone.

Personally I'd buy one of these in an instant, I like being able to enjoy the peace and quiet!

Shooting guns here at 1am would get you a phone call to see if you're okay.

Making something officially transgressive often makes the thing more attractive.

Is one supposed to avoid purposefully releasing diesel particulates by rapidly increasing engine speed? Yes and people sometimes still do it for whatever reason.

Battery stuff is just fine on the power aspect. However price weight kill you. Gas is light for the amount of runtime you get, while a battery is very heavy. A contractor will need more than $1000 worth of batteries to get through a day per person or $4 worth of gasoline.

I don't think this is nearly the same thing as people being obnoxious with their motorcycle or car exhausts.

What I'd really say is maybe we should rethink if blowers are even useful or necessary at all over the old broom and scoop.

Many times I see landscapers use them to simply blow dust and leaves everywhere, including into busy streets, rather than using them to try and collect all detritus into a single pile for collection.

If that's more commonly the case, then why use them at all?

No. Some commercial folks also use leaf blowers, and those people just use them, because they get paid to clear some leaves.