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.

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

Gas run ones for sure. I have a battery operated job that’s perfect for cleanup but doesn’t fill the neighborhood with WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Also the fact that they don’t actually clean up any leaves, they move them to the neighbors house.

I have one that I use mostly during leaf season since I have several trees and a bad back. Using a leaf blower, I can clean up the yard in less than 10 minutes. Manually raking would take a few hours and thwn I’d be unable to move around for a while. I just blow the leafy goodness onto flower beds though so they can act as mulch.

We know when spring has hit in our typical suburban neighborhood. The constant drone of small engines. Mowers. Leaf blowers. Trimmers. Doesn’t matter the day, you can always hear at least one somewhere, but weekends are obviously the worst.

I’m doing my best to go electric. Electric trimmers are fantastic if you get a decent one. I’d like to get an electric blower, but reviews seem to indicate they’re not quite there yet in terms of power and useful time. We’ve got a large-ish lot, and an EV mower that could last long enough would easily be high 4-figures. Can’t swing that when I’ve already got a paid-for gas one, but I’d love to go all electric.

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?

You know…leaf blowers have feelings too and I think it would be appropriate to apologize for your hurtful words…Time to head to Alaska boys/girls/?s

I hate suns with the passion of 1000 leaf blowers.

Sorry, I just had to.

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.

1. The condo I was in hired one weekly
2. The condo across the lane hired one weekly.
3. The city hired one weekly.
4. 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.

https://newatlas.com/around-the-home/leaf-blower-silencer-quieter-black-decker/

You might enjoy this recent discovery.

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.”

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.