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.
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.