We've got one (electric). It's ... noisy, but not quite at the same level (at least to my ears). And... my wife uses it but... 5-10 minutes - we have the same size yard as the neighbors, but they seem to love taking 30+ minutes to redo the same areas over and over. It doesn't need to take more than 10 minutes.
It makes sense in a large park but not for personal use? Sounds like you're ok with scaling the noise to the size of the job? It's really not a marginal 15 minutes if you're dealing with any number or large trees. Then there's the removal to deal with. I use a walk-behind mulcher. The machine is running for the same amount of time a blower would (or less), but at the end the leaves are mulched in a bag that I can dump along the edge of the lawn to compost. The material disappears in less than a year. I don't like that I'm making noise for several hours every fall, but it would actually take four times as long to rake and bag it (I'm serious about that number).
I have deferred for years pulling the trigger on a blower to clean the interminable tree cruft off the driveway, though. In light of this thread, I will have to think even harder before going that route. I do appreciate quiet.
Similar - couple of neighbors of mine enjoy the leaf blowing and riding mowers. I mean... it's not speculation, one said "oh, i love it - it's my relaxation time". And... when he can, he'll spend 2-3 hrs putzing around riding and blowing whatever he can. We have the same size yard, and have a company which is paid by the job. They can do the whole same size in about under 30 minutes (often just with 1 person - 2 folks it's often 20 minutes).
There's little we can do when someone gets pleasure out of running a loud motor for hours at a time. He started a leaf blower, then left it running next to our window while he went inside for about 10 minutes (bathroom visit probably?). Just... insanity.
Most of my neighbors hire leaf blower toting professional landscaping crews to clear their lawns on a regular basis. The process takes maybe 10 minutes for weekly blowouts, and maybe 45-60 minutes for seasonal jobs.
I thought this was obnoxious, until one of my neighbors decided to do the work themselves. It took them an entire long weekend of (what seemed like) 9-5 blowing to clear their lot.
I understand the noise complaint, I work from home and I hear them all week as my various neighbor's gardeners arrive throughout each day. That said... I have an electric one that is awesome and it's much quieter than the 2-stroke I used to have. Leaf blowers do serve a purpose but the electric ones are a great improvement on noise and pollution.
Our HOA requires weekly (during growing season) lawn mowings. So on top of the $450/mo, we also have to fork over $30-50/wk to some maintenance company. They take around 10 minutes to do the entire lawn, mow, edge, weed, and pickup. I cannot complain about the speed, or the cost actually.
My neighbor has a family member come and do their lawn (I offered my guys to them for free, and they turned it down). So every Wednesday or Thursday, for nearly 4 hours, there are various 2-stroke engines going on. It is a HUGE noise, and my home office faces their house so for most of the day I'm having to ask people to repeat themselves because I cannot hear them over the sound of the neighbor's lawn equipment.
The electric ones i've seen are still damn noisy. If you want to make a fan worth a damn to move leaves and debris, you are gonna make some noise no matter how it's powered, evidenced by the fact that it's recommended to wear ear protection still with electric lawn care equipment.
The bigger issue imo is that we incentivize the wrong things. Money and time instead of quality and a job well done. It's faster to blow loudly than to rake silently. A silent landscaping company powered by reel mowers and rakes would clear less properties per man hour, but maybe there is in fact a market there for that premium, nearly silent service.
I recently bought a new house where I had to care for the yard (previously owned in a HoA which handled yard care) and tried an electric leaf blower. It made it no more than 10 mins on a charge and the batteries took 8-10 hours to get back to 100%.
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.
It mows for about two hours and charges its battery for about two hours. The charging station has to be connected to power. It drives slowly. Watch a YouTube video. They all go at a very sedate speed. If your garden is smaller than the recommended size for a robot then it should be no issue all.
Sure, it is slow, but eight or so hours of work time five days a week will get your lawn mowed. And, again, since it’s silent it’s not really an issue that it’s driving around. (But maybe don’t get one if you have pets or toddlers.)
Not all gardens are ideal. Many inclines lead to problems, as do thin connecting paths between different parts of the garden. But if your garden is quite straightforward (or even quite a bit more complicated then that) it’s not an issue.
Digging in the boundary cable is quite a bit of work (as you can imagine) and fiddling with it to make it all work perfectly, too, but I think my parents still spent less time taking care of the lawn last summer when they set it up than when they still had to mow. (Also, only the places where my parents were overly ambitious and wanted it to do things not recommended in the manual were there actual issues.)
If you have lawn going right up to some sort of wall or fence you will be left with a thin stripe of unmowed grass. My parents just quickly mow that every couple weeks, it’s not a big deal.
This tech has been around for decades, so it’s pretty proven. Besides my parents I know a couple other people who use it.
Electric mowers are much less noisy. But lawn services don't use them and in my area - central NJ burbs - I would estimate 50% or more hire a lawn service.
Much faster than a rake depending on what you use them for. We use them to clear driveways and pathways all the time where I live in the bay area - you'd be spending 30+ minutes for a 1 minute job with a leaf blower.
I prefer the 1 minute of leaf blower versus the 30+ minutes of hearing a rake. Rakes are pretty loud too.
I have an electric weed trimmer, lawn mower and leaf blower. They are quite a bit less noise than gas equivalents I used growing up. The one huge downside is that these devices are pretty big energy consumers and battery life is horrible.
My yard is tiny and I’ll routinely go through 2 240WHr batteries each time I cleanup my yard. I couldn’t imagine how annoying that would be with an actual big yard. Also good luck if you go on vacation and come back to tall grass, my electric mower (I have one from Ryobi) that struggles to increase the torque well enough to handle it.
Most landscaping trucks are pretty beat on with tools going in and out, heavy equipment dropping bucket loads of stuff into the beds, etc.
But let's assume they are small scale personal beater pickup trucks. If they can't afford a nicer work truck and aren't able to purchase professional grade equipment, do you think they will be able to afford electric alternatives and extra batteries, etc?
Regardless, pro or consumer, they are all the same level of loud you are annoyed with. If you think it's bad as the person hearing your neighbors yard being mowed, think of what the operator is dealing with (ear protection is a must).
Maybe I'm indifferent because I used to do landscaping and spent time around all kinds of loud machines, but imo it's not that big of a deal. It is loud, I'll give you that. But pro mowers are fast, because more lawns is more money. So on a regular city or suburb lawn they are in and out in 5-10 minutes. Walk inside, or close the window, or run an errand. Sometimes people's occupation is an inconvenience to us, but it's a tiny fraction of your day and there are plenty of things you can do to minimize it.
As obnoxious as they are, no. Leaf blowers are WAAAAY worse.
I mean I do agree that gas lawn mowers are noisy obnoxious smokey things that blow dust around. But a leaf blower's whole purpose in life is to blow dirt around - and at full blast they're way louder than the loudest lawn mower.
Plus the lawn mower takes like 10-30 minutes to mow a yard in most yards out here. Probably 15 if the person operating it is doing it quickly.
Leaf blower though? I can see those jerks using those things for a good 45 minutes or so! Ugh.
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.
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.
We are one of the few families in our neighborhood who still use rakes. Nearly everyone else hires landscaping crews who use the gas powered models. A few homeowners have electrics, which are quieter but take far longer to finish the job - sometimes hours.
i have one. It works about a 1/4 as well as a gas one.
Using a rake takes me 2 days to rake my yard. (about 16 hours)
An electric blower, 1.5 days (roughly 10-12 hours)
A gas blower takes me about 4 hours.
I have 2 medical conditions going on right now and can't pay someone $200 every single time i need my yard picked up. I spend enough in medical bills right now.
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