Everywhere I am there is a guy running a leaf blower. At my house, leaf blowers everywhere all day long. At work, of course, leaf blowers blowing dirt and allergens into the air. It’s such a special noise, it goes through walls and headphones so effectively. They are the most pervasive, annoying things on the planet. I hate them more than mosquitoes.
I literally just emailed my local parks and rec because they built a park immediately behind my once peaceful house.
I begged them to stop leaf blowing every single day. There arent even any trees. They are just out there every day blowing the grass. Usually before 7am.
The response I got was basically “sit and spin. If you don’t like it, call the cops, but they are city too so they won’t do anything.”
Find out where the mayor lives, and just wander aimlessly around with a leaf blower outside their house at 6am.
Oh believe me, my neighbors and I REALLY want to.
As much as I would love if you guys did that, practically guaranteed you’d all be fucked in some way because “rules for thee not for me”
Can’t be having filthy peasants disturbing the very hard working politicians and local rich people 🙄
God I hate how the world works.
Precisely.
They promised complete privacy hedges when they announced the park.
They put in 7 immature trees along a half mile of fenceline.
Neighbors have been calling cops non stop about the illegal activity at night. They showed up once to harass the neighbors and ignore the people in the park.
It’s all been a big ol fuck you to the homeowners.
Edit: And for the record, I’m not even a homeowner.
I can’t afford a home to own.
My neighbors all own.
I rent.
So I’m cut off at the knees when it comes to actually approaching the city.
“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it”
That sucks, I hope things get better for you and your neighbors, even if I doubt it, sadly.
I guess it’s war then.
Go out there and talk to them while they are working. Be a fucking nuisance with your questions about their personal life, the blowers they have, the amount of fuel they use, what blower you’d recommend. Constantly say what or huh. After each conversation, ask them what time they are coming back and say see you then. It’s most likely a ‘busy’ task to keep their boss off their back…
They should buy those leafblower silencers those students developed ^^
They don’t do shit about the sound and smell of the two stroke motors. That’s the sound that pierces noise canceling headphones.
Here’s a “fun” story: my old place had at least four different agencies doing leaf blowing of a fire lane right out my window.
- The condo I was in hired one weekly
- The condo across the lane hired one weekly.
- The city hired one weekly.
- The county(?) hired one weekly. (Or maybe the fire dept? Not sure but it was four a week total)
Despite a ban in Culver City, they all used gas blowers (yes, the city even paid for one) and the gas fumes went directly into my window and lingered because it was essentially an alley and I was on the second floor directly above. I had to close my window almost every day, even during heat waves, but the noise echoed loud enough that it barely mattered.
I’m so glad to have moved.
I’m from The Netherlands. Every autumn there’s a whole leaf lower army coming out of nowhere, municipality workers who start way too early, and instead of running the damn thing constantly, they are playing with the gas making them even more annoying then bikers screaming for attention. Wrrrrr wrrrr Wrrrrr Wrrrrr wrrrrrrrrrrr wrrrr. They are moving leafs from one side to the other, then to move them back again. They are paid by the hour, not by the amount of work they do, so they are just messing around waking up everyone at 7am which is horrible for anyone working late or night shifts. Hours and hours. They are even blowing leafs in parks, clearing grass and dirt spots from leafs, destroying the natural decomposing and fungi creating great compost for next year’s greenery. It’s so fucking useless, it’s so fucking annoying, it’s so fucking stupid, yet every year they manage to get more and more leaf blowers out, all running on diesel, moving leafs around pointlessly. The leafs are all put in big round baskets. While they are blowing all the leafs around, the wind blows all the leafs out of those baskets again, creating a circle of never ending leaf blowing.
I saw this post and I immediately fell a great anger boiling up from deep inside of me. I had to vent this anger, as you’ve seen. I probably need therapy because of leaf blowers. If you ever hear of a Dutch leaf blower massacre, you can assume it was me.
There, I did it. Have a nice day, keep kalm and kill leaf blowers.
Edit: grammer/typos
All summer it’s the weekly lawn mowers and then it’s the leaf blowers and year round it’s all of the neighbors constantly using drills and saws and other equipment.
I may be overstimulated in this country.
I agree 100%, I’ve had similiar rants :D
Had to check i didn’t write this in a fugue state. 100% can relate.
I hate suns with the passion of 1000 leaf blowers.
Sorry, I just had to.
I think that’s actually more passion
Ask your city to ban them
I’m conflicted on this one. My hatred aside, the guy running the leaf blower is just trying to feed his family. I like @mipadaitu’s idea about the silencers. I doubt lawn companies would adopt them without them being mandatory or the same price as not silencing them somehow.
The guy feeding his family can feed his family with a rake.
Or even an electric leaf blower. They’re like half the noise.
They work absurdly well, too. Ours takes the same battery pack as the lawnmower and a few other things and it’s basically inaudible if you don’t have direct line of sight on the unit.
Wish that worked. I was in a city that had banned gas blowers but they still used them instead of the quieter electric ones. Cities never seem to enforce that stuff, and maybe because it’s difficult to enforce.
The biggest problem with leaf blowers is that they’re absurdly useful. They’re incredibly good at what they do and a thousand times more efficient than a brush
I use one professionally, so answer me this - if you hired me to clear leaves off your driveway and I said I can do it in half an hour with a leaf blower, or two and a half hours with a brush… which one would you be willing to pay me for?
Noise pollution is bad for public health. This is what economists call an externality. Your use of the leaf blower affects more people than just the customer. The government should tax leaf blower use to fund public healthcare, and you should pass the cost onto the client so they’re paying for the externalities of the convenience
Counterpoint - I live in the middle of fuckin nowhere, as do my customers
Cities and rural areas shouldn’t have the same laws so blow away IMO.
Counterargument: I’d hire you to leafblow 2.5 hrs more area
🤔 That’s three hours then. No deal
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
As a professional, what are your thoughts on the backpack-style electric blowers?
The council guys have been using them in the town near me, they said they had some shit ones before, complained about them, and were given Stihl ones instead.
They said they’re fine but you can’t just refill them when you’re away from the depot
So, we had an office whose building enclosed a tiny parking lot, maybe six or seven spaces. Two guys showed up with leaf blowers. Our location put us on the edge of the space with a door and windows making the noise quite prominent.
An hour in, my buddy said something to the effect of, “I wish they’d be done soon. They’re giving me a headache.” Queue other buddy cracking up hysterically. Turns out, he’d surreptitiously tuned our stereo (hooked up to a computer) to a youtube channel of leaf blowers blowing for hours. None of us caught on. The actual guys with blowers had been gone for a long time.
It’s still one of the funniest pranks anyone has pulled on me and I’m still mad at him for it.
Also the fact that they don’t actually clean up any leaves, they move them to the neighbors house.
I know everyone hates HOAs because they’re usually petty and dumb, but this is where I think they’d actually be helpful. Designate certain neighborhoods as “quiet zones” where similarly obnoxious activities (that have reasonable, quiet alternatives) are banned: no motorized leaf blowers, lawn mowers, souped-up motorcycles or muscle cars. If you want to own one of those things, don’t move into that neighborhood.
I’ve come to realize many people feel “forced” to move to incredibly space- and resource-inefficient (and thereby ecologically-damaging) places like suburbs and exurbs for basically two reasons: better schools, and in an attempt to escape asshole neighbors. Sometimes it’s so that they can themselves be the asshole neighbors, but generally people are trying to live in a “nice” neighborhood not over usual HOA things like house siding color and properly-concealed trash cans, but rather for a general desire for peace and quiet. I know I dream about living on 40 acres not so I can start a dairy farm, but to escape the various forms of pollution (primarily noise, air, and light) emitted by my current neighbors. But I wouldn’t feel the need to do that if my neighbors had similar desires as I and limited things like car idling, porch lights, and landscape-related noise. Meanwhile the neighbors upset at me for keeping my yard wild to support wildlife could have a neighbor with similarly bland yard maintenance standards.
I know everyone hates HOAs because they’re usually petty and dumb, but this is where I think they’d actually be helpful. Designate certain neighborhoods as “quiet zones” where similarly obnoxious activities (that have reasonable, quiet alternatives) are banned: no motorized leaf blowers, lawn mowers, souped-up motorcycles or muscle cars.
Or… hear me out… we can have laws on emissions and noise pollution (which mostly already exist in cities) and cops/government officials that actually enforce them (and by “enforce” I don’t mean shoot somebody after arriving on-scene) instead of relying on a private entity to dictate what happens in your living space
That would be great IF you could convince the city that thoroughly-entrenched tools like leaf blowers and lawn mowers and motorized vehicles fell under nuisance laws. Chances are the mayor and most of city council use these things (or pay someone who uses them). The problem is that most people either love these things or don’t find them obnoxious enough to warrant action. Even if you somehow could get them to fall under nuisance laws, enforcement would be complaint-based, and who’s going to risk pissing off their neighbor for being a snitch Karen?
OK Squidward.
e: Squidward big mad
seemingly half of all independent businesses in the burbs are landscaping, and landscaping is to HOAs what Christianity is to cunts everywhere, so … It makes sense
Noise cancelling headphones. Literally designed to knock out constant droning sounds like leaf blowers or machinery.
Still, I agree. Leaf blowers are just noise and regular pollution generators and don’t really serve a meaningful purpose like good ol’ fashioned raking. Or at least, I’ve never in my life actually seen anyone with a leaf blower, at home or professional, bagging what they’re removing. They just blow it somewhere that it becomes someone else’s problem.
Pretty much standard procedure here. If you hire a lawn service, they’re bringing a shredder to feed it all into so they can take it away in fewer truckloads
As a landscape professional, I can assure you that we will very often blow things into centralized areas to make it easier to bag/can up and haul off.
I definitely advocate for now cancelling headphones, especially as someone with really bad misophonia.
Sadly, leaf blowers are one of the most penetrative sounds for active noise cancelling, but it’s still way better than nothing
Leaf blowers in small yards are pointless, agreed. I would never use one in the suburbs.
But I do own one and I use it at my family’s farm, for one day every autumn. It would take 3-4 days just to rake the leaves, with the blower I can easily create large piles here and there. Then I gather all the piles and take them to my leaf compost heap.
Before the blower this used to take a full week. Now I can clear all the lawns in just two days.
Let me guess. America?
Accurate.
Doesn’t need to be. Europe says hello! I’ve got a chap close by with a massive stone “garden” who blows leaves on a daily basis. Town will come by playing ghost busters too, thank $deity not too often in spring and summer though.
Gas run ones for sure. I have a battery operated job that’s perfect for cleanup but doesn’t fill the neighborhood with WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRR
You need to get your own leaf blower and blow back
