• astrsk@kbin.social
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    2 months ago

    Too bad these innovations wont make it down to the workers that stores hire from 11pm to 3am to clean the store parking lot across from me.

    • Nora@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      Good thing is you could 3d print some and give them to them. If they use a compatible blower that is. Or if you’re handy with modeling you could probably modify the attachment part.

  • twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    Fuck leaf blowers. I don’t care if they’re quieter. The term here is “polishing a turd.” They son’t really solve any problems. They’re not good at removing debris, but just blowing it to a place where someone else will deal with it.

    Also… removing debris on its own is a dubious pursuit, since “debris” could also be termed “stuff that holds moisture longer and slows the effect of drying soil during drought conditions.”

      • Ozone6363@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I want you to think about how many leaf blowers are actually being used, and how many hours even the most inefficient small engine would have to run to compare to a single semi-truck route.

        It’s so incredibly fucked how you people miss the forest for the trees.

        • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 months ago

          Do you have any solid information to provide or are you just making vague allusions toward some unsubstantiated assumptions so you can justify to yourself being a judgmental ass?

          It’s so incredibly fucked how “you people” are judgmental shits who are busy jerking yourself off every time you can “well ackshally” someone.

        • twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          So I promise I’m not trying to be a dick here. While what you’re saying is essentially reasonable, it’s actually not true.

          The amount of emissions in these small, wildly inefficient engines is considerably worse than even a large pickup truck. The reason is because emissions standards, including the introduction of catalytic converters, etc. don’t apply to lawn equipment. The result is that these don’t actually burn fuel correctly, and spew out lots of harmful pollutants in a way that even large ICE vehicles don’t.

          https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-car-vs-truck-vs-leaf-blower.html#:~:text=Distilling the above results%2C the,than the crew cab pickup.

          https://grist.org/technology/lawn-equipment-pollution-report/

          Like sure, there are larger sources of emissions, but I’m kinda in favor of making changes that would offer a large benefit proportionate to the amount of lifestyle change needed to make the switch. As in, making this switch would be easier than not. These emissions produce no benefit to us, and they cost us a weird amount of money to produce.

          • Ozone6363@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            So I promise I’m not trying to be a dick, but do you actually understand the results from the articles you posted?

            A basic mass balance on the claims implies a very narrow interpretation of “emissions”. It doesn’t even pass the most basic sniff test, come on.

            Not only do those articles completely ignore CO2, what about the energy required to manufacture and transport the fuel in the first place?

            Those studies focus on NOx emissions, a very small subset of overall environmental impact. They basically cherry pick the fuck out of what consitutes as an “emission”, and ignores the massive difference in greenhouse gasses produced.

            There are claims that running a leaf blower for 30 minutes produces as much “emissions” as driving a Raptor like 1 thousand miles.

            Lmao, if you think a quarter gallon of gas from the leaf blower is “worse” than 100 gallons of fuel the truck would burn, you have to be mad.

            Think about it for more than a couple seconds.

            And even funnier about this, the solution for this shit is already here. Aside from commercial landscaping companies, electric is already taking over. Its basically a non-issue as far as realists are concerned.

        • StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          This is an alert from the Summer’s Eve Emergency Broadcast System. This is not a test. I repeat, this is not a test.

          Reddit has experienced a Level Spez douche release which impacted Lemmy.world approximately 96 hours ago. Lemmy users may observe increased douche activity, including but not limited to: unjustified smugness, irrelevant and erroreous corrections, bad arguments, ego fragility, unwarranted hostility, and assorted douchebaggery. Users are advised to remain calm, refrain from engaging encountered douches in serious conversation, and to liberally use the block feature.

    • blubfisch@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      I actually see street cleaning teams here in Germany regularly where one person blows the dirt out from bike racks and from under parked cars and the other person sits in the big street sweeper to pick up the dirt. I think this is a very valid use for blowers. The blowers are electric, but I sure would.not mind them a bit more quiet.

  • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    For the people not reading the article. This is not about gas leaf blowers.

    The challenge was to take an electric leaf blower and make it even quieter.

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I don’t mind the electric ones, but I had a neighbour that would fire up a two-stroke backpack monster at 6 AM any morning there was the barest skiff of snow. And he’d try for hours blowing heavier snow that he could have had shovelled in 15 minutes. He was generally just an asshole neighbour all around.

      • espentan@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        They probably weren’t too concerned with the emissions from the leaf blowers themselves, but the dust and whatnot they whip up into the air.

        • Baphomet_The_Blasphemer@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Most gas-powered leaf blowers use two-cycle engines, which produce hundreds of times more hazardous pollutants and fine particulates than cars. Leaf blowers overtook automobiles as the number one source of air pollution in California during 2020.

  • Black_Gulaman@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    Why not use a rake? It exercises you and doesn’t pollute. Plus it can make you laugh if you see someone walk into it and gets slapped cartoon style in the face.

  • Dendr0@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    “Patent pending” and already picked up by a major manufacturer. So what this means is basically while it could be a good thing… the article is basically an advertisement for an upcoming product.

    Not nearly as good a thing until it gets copied/the patent gets worked around. Also, zero explanation of what was actually done to accomplish this, so again, leaning more towards “this is just advertisement with extra steps”.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Good engineering and industrial design programs find opportunities for students to work with real companies on real products.

      Back in the day I used to be the student that published stuff like this to our product design department’s website. The point wasn’t to demo tech or sell a product, it was to make the program look like something worth applying to and donating to.

      If a brand was name dropped, it wasn’t because we wanted to sell their thing. It was because we wanted to let applicants and alumni know that we were offering real world experience with recognizable companies. It’s basically like a reverse internship. Department faculty finds companies to bring to the students, as opposed to students applying to companies.

    • Wrench@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Man. People will be negative about everything.

      New breakthrough that may change the entire landscape of an industry? Oh, we hear about breakthroughs every few weeks. Call me if it actually makes it to market.

      New apparently game changing breakthrough that’s already being taken to market? Boo advertising, we should just quiet launch it and see if anyone notices? Seriously?

      • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        IMHO, the thing that’s being promoted here isn’t the leaf blower. It’s the university’s engineering program and the opportunities it’s providing for students.

        I kind of doubt someone has this University blog post in their deck of Spring 2024 leaf blower marketing initiatives.

        This is the kind of stuff that the people managing internships handle in a company. Companies do this for talent acquisition. They don’t even do it for the cheap labor, because coaching students usually gobbles up a lot of your IC’s time.

  • A_A@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    what they did :

    “Our product takes in a full blow of air and separates it,” said team member Leen Alfaoury. “Some of that air comes out as it is, and part of it comes out shifted. The combination of these two sections of the air makes the blower less noisy.”

    Adds Chacon: “It ultimately dampens the sound as it leaves, but it keeps all that force, which is the beauty of it.”

    Their design cuts the most shrill and annoying frequencies by about 12 decibels, which all but removes them, making them 94% quieter.

    • curiousPJ@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I wonder if that shares the same physics as silvent’s compressed air guns.

      Silvent’s air nozzles reduce the sound level when blowing with compressed air compared to blowing through open pipes. This is due in part to the reduction in noisy turbulence from using Silvent’s air nozzles, and also because of the nozzles’ special design. Silvent’s air nozzles pass the compressed air through small holes and slots, which raises the sound to frequencies beyond what the human ear can perceive. This allows us to make blowing with compressed air both quiet and efficient.

      Could use an even quieter compressed air gun

      • A_A@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        No, not the same … in your paragraph you describe an increase of the frequency at a level human hearing do not perceive while the other made cancellation of a given frequency using phase shifting and recombination.