[HN Gopher] Students invent quieter leaf blower
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Students invent quieter leaf blower
Author : perpil
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-05-16 03:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (hub.jhu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (hub.jhu.edu)
| jkonline wrote:
| First, it's an attachment that could fit on nearly all blowers.
|
| Second, it dampens the noise while retaining all the force.
|
| If this works out, it will be amazing! Kudos to the student
| teams!
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Looking forward to being put on a list for purchasing a leaf
| blower silencer.
| euroderf wrote:
| Not to mention the 3D print files.
| stubish wrote:
| Patented and licensed, so not coming to a neighborhood near you
| unless mandated by local government. Because while people want
| their neighbors to use it, in enough cases they won't pay the
| extra and rationalize it somehow.
| PostOnce wrote:
| You wouldn't download a quieter leaf-blower...
|
| unless of course you had a 3D printer
| ezekg wrote:
| ATF: you got a tax stamp for that suppressor?
| odyssey7 wrote:
| HOAs that hire landscapers are a good market segment for this
| imo. Also, large commercial properties.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| Minor nitpick about the reporting:
|
| > The team reduced the overall leaf blower noise by about two
| decibels, making the machine sound 37% quieter.
|
| While a 2 dB reduction in noise does represent a 37% reduction in
| acoustic power, our perception of sound is logarithmic so this is
| extremely unlikely to "sound 37% quieter"-- Assuming the
| reduction is from 50 dB to 48 dB, it will _sound_ about 4%
| quieter.
|
| Much more significant is the 12 dB reduction in the "shrill and
| annoying" frequency range. While the 94% reduction there is
| probably also overstated for the same reason, the initial power
| level in that range will be only a portion of the overall noise
| output-- I wouldn't be surprised if there's a 50-75% perceived
| reduction of noise in this range.
| cuttysnark wrote:
| In the video, we see the students briefly rotating the model in
| the CAD software--with translucency on--it looks like the one
| main stream is divided into many spiral chambers which then
| exit distributed along the rim of the attachment's opposite
| side.
|
| With that in mind, I wonder how much, if at all, the reduction
| would be if the entire nozzle were designed this way, instead
| of just the end bit.
| soperj wrote:
| 60db is normal conversation/background music level. I don't
| know why you'd assume a leaf blower would start at 50db?
| gumby wrote:
| > Much more significant is the 12 dB reduction in the "shrill
| and annoying" frequency range.
|
| Those higher frequencies travel farther than the lower
| frequencies, so cutting them has a bigger perceived effect (and
| this is all about perceived effect, I believe, not the health
| effects of the operator).
|
| Just agreeing with you that acoustics is complicated and non
| unidimensional.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Is leaf blowing a worldwide nuisance or an American thing?
|
| I hate it. And it serves no ecological purpose.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| Worldwide.
|
| Sucks to be an earthling trapped here with leaf blower jerks.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| France. I know my city workers use them to clean the streets in
| autumn. Wet leaves are slipery. Then people mostly use rakes
| AFAIK, or the lawn mower.
|
| Though I know some tools, such as branch shredders are
| regulated in some residential areas, but I don't frequent
| those.
| glxxyz wrote:
| I blow the leaves off my gravel driveway that winds through
| woodland. I got 2 Ryobi electric leaf blowers free with
| different cordless tools and so I dual wield them as I walk
| down the driveway a few times every fall.
|
| I don't care about leaves on the lawn.
| toast0 wrote:
| > And it serves no ecological purpose.
|
| At least from my experience, it's not done for ecological
| purposes. It's primarialy done to clear pathways for safety,
| maintenance, and aesthetics.
|
| Some people do blow a whole lawn, but that never struck me as
| useful. Cleaning up the path is nice though, and depending on
| your paths, makes plenty of noise already.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Safety on paths makes sense, but in many neighborhoods,
| that's doable with a rake in a few minutes vs an hour to do
| the lawn with a blower.
|
| My neighborhood has a landscape crew do the leaves in the
| common areas 3x season. If we just had them do the paths and
| parking lot, it would be half the time (or less) with
| blowers.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| Honestly I expect to see a Dyson Leaf Blower.
| alucardo wrote:
| I didn't know of electric-battery-powered leaf blowers! Here in
| France i always suffer gas engine blowers which are so annoyingly
| loud and smelly.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| I'm in Australia and someone near me has an electric one.
|
| Although quieter than the gas ones, it's still far from silent
| and the noise is still annoying but higher pitch. Like a high-
| pitched vacuum cleaner noise.
|
| Most people have the much louder gas ones though, they're the
| worst, and anecdotally the people operating the gas ones seem
| to rev them up and down more which makes it even more annoying.
|
| Every time I hear one, I have nothing but negative thoughts
| about the person using them, and disgust for the society that
| allows them to ruin the environment for such minimal benefit.
|
| A rake works almost silently... but then you can't irritate
| everyone within a kilometer radius.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| The problem with electric leaf blowers is that they're no good
| for people who need to blow leaves all day; and most of the
| leaf blowing is (in my experience) contracted out rather than
| done by home owners.
|
| I have an electric blower that I use for getting leaves off my
| decks (you can't rake a deck and it's actually a remarkable
| pain in the ass to brush leaves off a deck) but if I got a
| contractor in to do my garden (which I don't, they just get
| mowed over) then they would certainly have a gas blower.
| xutopia wrote:
| Dewalt has battery packs that are quickly interchangeable and
| pods with rows of batteries that can be recharged inside a
| car or truck while on the go. I'm hoping this becomes adopted
| more and more as the tech is already here.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Proprietary batteries with a format that changes subtly
| from model to model are not the answer.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| After reading all comments, not rushing to the comments, I have
| to say, I have a quiet leaf blower to, it is, as mentioned in
| this thread somewhere else, a rake and I would appreciate if more
| people would use one.
| jasode wrote:
| _> a rake and I would appreciate if more people would use one._
|
| Most of the leaf blower noise in neighborhoods is cleaning up
| tiny grass clippings off of driveways and sidewalks instead of
| handling the Fall season's dead leaves, like this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak5VoB-ceeU&t=0m06s
|
| Rakes don't help with grass cuttings. People could use brooms
| to sweep up the grass but homeowners and lawn crews don't do it
| that way because -- like the rake -- it requires more work and
| takes a lot longer than using noisy blowers.
| fullstop wrote:
| Another option is a hose, but that may be considered more
| wasteful.
|
| I have a leaf blower, and I use it for about 5 minutes a week
| in the summer to clear grass clippings from walkways after I
| mow. I don't like being "that guy", so I pretty much run
| around the yard with it in order to finish as quickly as
| possible.
|
| I know that the electric leaf blowers are quieter, but my
| neighbor's makes a high pitched squeal which bothers me more.
| I think that she has some sort of condition, because she's
| literally using the thing for about three hours a day. I
| don't know how many battery packs she has, but she runs it
| until it dies, swaps the pack, and gets back to it. It's not
| a huge yard, maybe 1/3 of an acre, but she is compelled to
| get every blade of grass off of her driveway.
| collinvandyck76 wrote:
| There's a guy in my neighborhood (who uses a backpack
| blower) and this is his main hobby. I really don't
| understand the appeal of doing what is a pretty monotonous
| task for such a long amount of time, given that in mere
| hours much of the pristine front yard moves back into
| "chaos".
|
| I understand the satisfaction from being meticulous about
| things like this, but i don't understand the extreme end of
| it.
| 8xeh wrote:
| Most of the leaf blower noise in my neighborhood is the one
| or two guys on the crew who's job it is to run the leaf
| blower while the other guys are doing the lawn mowing or
| edging.
|
| If it was that guy's job to use a rake and broom instead of a
| leaf blower, the same amount of cleaning would be done.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why rake at all? Mulch them instead. Raking them into a bag to
| have removed from your property to add to a landfill just seems
| like a very strange decision to me.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| Raking them into a pile, shredding them, and putting the
| mulch in a compost pile allows me to move the nitrogen into
| my garden. Maybe that starves part of my lawn, but the grass
| seems to be doing just fine - and moving natural nutrients to
| my garden helps me avoid using chemical fertilizers when
| growing food.
|
| I am agreeing with you, for the record. It seems silly to
| throw leaves in a landfill.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I do a combination of both. I have a compost pile that is
| fed by collecting the clippings from my mulching mower from
| half of my mow-able area, and then the rest is just mulched
| and left in place. Essentially, anything to not rake! The
| only time I rake/bag is from the leaves that collect along
| the curb. I'm on a cul-de-sac, so I get a lot collecting
| there. I don't use these for compost from all of the
| liquids from parked cars, trash, and other gross stuff that
| I wouldn't want in my garden.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Depends on the state of the property. On a low water and au
| naturel yard, sure. Manicured lawns and sterility are all
| about anthropocentrism while expending concealed absurd
| treasure and effort without much concern for the soil losing
| nutrients. Or it's the middle class still clinging onto
| disappearing symbols American dream of how "rich" they are
| like the French aristocracy once did. You should've seen how
| deep green with a tint of blue my dad's 30' x 40' front lawn
| of Bolero dwarf fescue was, which required mowing twice a
| week in the summer by you know who, tens of thousands of
| gallons of water, and regular fertilizing.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| I mulch, but it's slower and requires more frequent mowing.
| The first mowing of the year (I always wait too long) is
| nearly impossible with a push mower mulching.
| cnity wrote:
| Hear hear. Rakes can be more efficient[0], provide an upper-
| body workout, minimise impact to the environment, make next to
| no sound, cost almost nothing, and provide a relaxing
| experience if you know how to embrace it.
|
| I suppose these days people take techno-efficiency over all
| else to the point of ruining the environment, other people's
| peace, their own air quality, their own wallet, and so on, all
| so that they can blow the leaves off of their lawn in a
| supposedly shorter time or for slightly less effort.
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-XqbXi7tNo
| nomel wrote:
| Slightly less effort? Have you used a leaf blower before?
| It's a 30 minute to 3 minute sort of difference.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Extremely large rakes and brooms exist that can be used to
| clear areas efficiently with proper technique. In the past, I
| had to tend to a 3/4 acre property with pine trees and at least
| a 1/2 acre of lawn.
| giogadi wrote:
| Congrats to these students for producing a clever solution to a
| real practical problem! I hope that the students will own the
| patent, and not the university. Many schools have a way of taking
| ownership of absolutely anything their students come up with.
|
| That said, I prefer just raking up leaves manually. It makes no
| noise, it's quiet, and it's good exercise.
| ansmithz42 wrote:
| I agree completely! My favorite weed killer is my own two hands
| and a weeder. Having said that, I live in Arizona and the
| dominant landscape design here is trees and bushes planted with
| rocks for the ground cover. A leaf rake is real good at picking
| up both the leaves and the rocks. I wish there was a leaf rake
| that didn't pick up the rocks. I have grudgingly bought an
| electric leaf blower because of the rocks :-(
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > That said, I prefer just raking up leaves manually. It makes
| no noise, it's quiet, and it's good exercise.
|
| I think a lot of folks in these discussions think only of
| lawns. That's a pretty small portion of where leaf blowers get
| used, in my experience. The lawn mower takes care of most of
| the leaves on the lawn, the blower gets used around bushes and
| other places a rake won't work at all.
| rgrmrts wrote:
| A few years back Moxie (of Signal) put up a video[0] of a quiet
| leaf blower which was pretty sweet. His design appears to be
| quieter than this one. Either way this is great, as a person
| highly sensitive of sound I support all technologies that reduce
| excessive noise.
|
| [0]: https://x.com/moxie/status/1582154037700399104
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I can't help but notice in that video that it's really not
| moving the leaves too much, and that's on the most ideal
| surface you could have.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That's a good observation. Making a quieter leaf blower by
| greatly reducing its output is pretty easy. But the
| professional landscaping crews getting paid by the hour won't
| choose a tool that makes their job take 5x as long.
| Terr_ wrote:
| [delayed]
| whicks wrote:
| Dupe from yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40377201 (400+ comments)
| chrsig wrote:
| This is perhaps the most practically useful thing to come out of
| academia since the technology that allowed for the leaf blower.
|
| They're the worst. A noise pollution posterchild.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Leaf blowers are probably one of the most annoying inventions
| ever.
| not_good_coder wrote:
| Can someone explain why it's going to take 2 years to bring a
| piece of plastic to the market?
| genman wrote:
| Direct link to noise comparison in the video
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISgHpUDeLBw&t=64s
| amelius wrote:
| Can we apply this to vacuum cleaners too?
| jononomo wrote:
| I watched the demo video, and, IMHO, even the muffled version of
| the leaf blower is way too loud.
| akjetma wrote:
| This is great. I live in a dense suburb and the weekend is just a
| cacophony of deafening noise from leafblowers, table saws,
| pressure washers, lawn mowers, etc. My neighbor had a team of
| people grinding and cutting stone slabs for their patio from 9-5
| last weekend. Wish people would chill out.
|
| As a side note, leafblowers aren't just disruptive to the sound
| environment:
| https://twitter.com/touchmoonflower/status/17242321111447757...
| goda90 wrote:
| I haven't put any leaves out on my curb the last two years, but
| I still use my electric leaf blower. Early in the season, I use
| my mower to mulch some of the first leaves to fall into the
| lawn(which consists of grass, clover, violets, dandelions,
| etc). But eventually there are just too many leaves to mulch,
| and they would smother everything, so I blow them into big
| piles. Then we take the dogs out to play in the piles. Then we
| scoop them up with tarps and spread them all over my veggie
| garden beds. In fact I went and "stole" some leaves from the
| piles my neighbors put on the curb to get even more coverage of
| my gardens. Now in spring, the leaves have smothered a lot of
| weeds, and the ones that do grow are easier to pull because
| they have to push through the leaves and the dirt stays moist
| longer. I see a lot of insect life living in the leaves as I go
| about weeding. I hope the ecosystem is strong to balance out
| pests on my veggies.
| seper8 wrote:
| One thing i never understood: Why a blower instead of a vacuum
| type of device...?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Speed, mostly. There are blowers that also act as vacuums. It
| works okay, but still pretty slow, if you blow it all into a
| pile first. You could do better with a wide device that worked
| like a lawn mower, but that would only be useful for a fraction
| of the areas you are trying to clean up.
| cwmma wrote:
| they exist, I have a one that works both ways, it can blow
| leaves and it can suck in and mulch the leaves into a bag. Some
| reasons you don't see it as much include
|
| 1. mine jams extremely easily when sticks or wet leaves get
| into it 2. their ability to actually move leaves is
| significantly less when in suck mode vs blow mode, this is not
| specific to moving leaves, try sucking sugar throw a straw vs
| blowing it, blowing moves stuff MUCH more.
| cwmma wrote:
| It's mentioned in the article but easy to miss, this is an
| improvement on the already much much quieter electric leaf
| blowers that are readily available. The ones you are thinking of
| are two stroke gas powered ones which are loud as fuck and
| terrible for the environment, anyone using one of those could
| have gotten a quieter electric one but chose not to, which means
| they definitely aren't going to use this improved electric one.
| jdc0589 wrote:
| You are right, and I agree with the last bit for the record.
|
| But, keep in mind that "just going electric" isn't a good
| option universally. It's MUCH more expensive to put together an
| electric setup and the number of batteries necessary to do any
| significant amount of work than it is to buy even a mid range
| backpack 2-stroke blower. Especially if you do what a lot of
| people do and look for used equipment to save a ton of $.
|
| If you have a small yard or are only ever doing stuff like
| blowing off a deck/patio/sidewalk/driveway: battery 100%. if
| you need to do any significant amount of leaf management in a
| larger area: good luck.
|
| I have an m18 electric, and gas Echo backpack. If im cleaning
| off a sidewalk/patio, cleaning gutters, etc.. im 100% using the
| electric. Otherwise....not so much. I don't even clean up grass
| clippings, mulch and cut frequently enough that they aren't an
| issue.
| aftbit wrote:
| Yeah except the electric ones that I've used kinda suck. I have
| an electric leaf blower from Ego and a gas backpack one. The
| electric one is awesome for blowing the grass off the driveway
| after mowing or other light tasks. OTOH I used it to manage the
| leaves in our quarter acre or so backyard last year, and it
| took me three charge cycles using two batteries each every time
| I tried to move the leaves. I ended up just raking both years.
| Last year I finally bought a backpack blower after trying one
| out with a friend on a much smaller property. It blows harder
| and has the endurance to actually finish the job.
| MarlonPro wrote:
| If I had the financial resources, I would buy every yard service
| company that serves my immediate neighborhood, specifically those
| that love to do their work at 7 AM on Saturdays.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Only one minor thing wrong; it's still a leaf blower.
| covercash wrote:
| How does it compare to the ultra quiet electric leaf blower that
| was on HN 7 months ago?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932971
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| About 10 years ago, I remember seeing someone using an electric
| leaf blower connected by extension cord to a Honda generator
| strapped down to a furniture dolly to circumvent the gas-powered
| leaf blower ban. It was still pretty damn loud and annoying, but
| less than the oft muffler-less, 2-stroke modified leaf blowers
| most gardening crews use unconcerned with emissions or noise
| pollution.
| brvsft wrote:
| So shitty neighbors can be slightly less loud. :)
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