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.
Give then a Nobel Prize!
Too bad no one invented rakes yet.
This is like comparing sweeping to a proper vacuum cleaner
Kinda, although recent vacuum cleaners are way less noisier than gas-powered leaf-blowers.
Well now I want a gas-powered vacuum
Jackhammers are so loud, haven’t they heard of a hammer yet? I am very smart btw.
What do leaf blowers do that rakes don’t? I don’t remember the last time I saw or heard a leaf blower.
Jackhammer and a hammer are not doing the same job. Pickaxe is more akin to a jackhammer.
Okay
Jackhammers are so loud, haven’t they heard of a pickaxe yet? I am very smart btw.
You ever tied using a metal rack on pavement? It’s about as pleasant as nails on a chalkboard.
This does nothing to address the lovely whirl of a 2 stroke.
Electric leafblowers exist. That problem is already solved.
Wat? I can’t hear you over the eeeeeeeEEEEEEEEeeEeeeEeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEUUMMbumbumbumbumbumbumbumbumeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Middlebrow dismissal. These are designed for electric blowers.
It’s almost like it’s a requirement for every landscaping company to use the most noisy, ear destroying, gas-powered leaf blower that they can buy that can be heard from 2 city blocks over.
Probably. lol. You look out the window to see what’s making all that racket, and you see their logo on their truck / shirts.
Especially gas-powered as they can then rev them all the time, raising the annoyance to completely new levels.
Gas powered is still vastly superior for things like leafblowers. A good gas one can last 15 years and take a total of $40 in maintenance parts for that entire time, all while blowing harder. High end battery powered ones will last 45 minutes and need a couple hundred dollars worth of replacement batteries every few years. My stihl from 1997 still works like it’s new.
Just one nitpick – usually one can swap out batteries and continue to use the tool.
30 minutes from a $100 battery vs an hour from a $1.25 in fuel, no recharging, and no batteries that go bad.
For 99% of applications, a corded electric blower with an extension cord is far superior than every other option.
I actually own one of these but never use it because extension cords are such a pain in the ass especially if you need to stretch it all throughout the yard. I really only bought it because my dryer duct was clogged with 20 years worth of lint and this blew it right out.
Sure, if you need less power and want to deal with the extension cord, and where you’re blowing is within 100 feet of an outlet. Doesn’t work well for gutters or large properties or houses with only 1 or 2 outlets outside.
Huh. I can’t think of 297 other uses for a leaf blower, so I guess your 99% claim might be a bit…overblown.
How high are your fucking gutters?
Cue right wingers protesting the new “woke” leaf blowers.
Cue the left-wingers being rage-baited about the right wingers protesting the new “woke” leaf blowers.
All the while the leaf blower manufacturer is getting free publicity.
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I’ll let my gas powered leaf blower running all day now to make your woke blower useless. Get owned, sucker
There certainly are plenty of people who use those things because they enjoy being obnoxious twats.
Seeing how some very particular relatives are, I wonder if much of the gas leaf blower cloud is less “watch me stick it to the libs” and more “look at me, I’m cleaning my yard, that makes me better than you”
And by “cleaning my yard” they really mean “blowing whatever I consider a mess onto whatever is beside my yard, or in the general vicinity for the dust”.
The same kind of morons rolling coal and destroying their engines.
I instantly imagined someone rolling coal with their leaf blower… you know it’s going to happen, even if they’re not diesel.
I use things that work (even if you find them loud or annoying) because typically over engineered things (like the ‘quiet’ leafblower) are most likely very problematic and will fail. I just do not trust anything new anymore. Companies did this and forced me to stop caring about ‘innovation’ with their constant lies and fraud.
Yeah, I figure that’s the kind of thing they’re going to say.
I use things that work
Blowing leaves around instead of removing it, isn’t ideal then.
Do you think a leaf BLOWER sucks leaves up or does anything but blow them wherever you point the machine?
Your thinking of a leaf vacuum which the article is NOT referring too…
What was the point of your reply, I really don’t get it…
Leafblowers are used to collect it into a pile which is then raked/shoveled into a bin. The blower is much faster and less effort than the rake at collecting everything into the pile.
No, that’s what a rake does.
Everyone I see using them merely uses it to blow the detritus into the street. What you’re saying makes a lot of sense, but people don’t do that
No we obviously need more cheap plastics and shitty rubber grips that will turn to sticky goo in five years, as well as control circuitry with a dozen corners cut.
Hey, don’t diss Fisher Price toys. The old ones from 40+ years ago were solid. So much so that the iconic telephone on wheels and with eyes is still around.
Modern day crap though? Oh I’m with you!
Maybe the garbage brands. Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, etc are very well made, and significantly more powerful than they were 5-10 years ago.
This is very true. I just know my neighbour wouldn’t choose a quieter option if he had the chance
Blowing coal lel
No, they’ve moved on to “DEI” as their racist dogwhistle now. Keep up.
“I’d never even heard of this 2 weeks ago, but after watching a single 90-second segment on Fox News, it’s all I can talk about and clearly the reason why the country is failing!”
Coming soon: The all new, all American, COAL powered leaf blower.
Now with a slide whistle and megaphone attachments for extra annoying noises.
Whistle goes, “Woo, woo,” but that’s only in the mo’ning.
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pasta powered leaf blower
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.
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
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.
wtf is shifting?
The wording is comically awkward and imprecise. But if I had to guess, they figured out a way to fiddle with how the air is routed through the secondary portion such that the emitted noise is phase-shifted to cancel out the frequencies they’re targeting.
Seems baffling
deleted by creator
But you can’t deny it has a certain flow to it
Whoever made that title should be launched into a volcano on the moon
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.”
The majority of use my leaf blower gets I blowing grass clippings from the street back into my lawn. It keeps cyclists safe and doesn’t make a mess on public travel ways. I think for that purpose they are a great solution.
Yeah the rakes don’t like it too much when you use them on the road too
A broom works fine for that.
Yeah, I use it to blow leaves off my walking path and into my flower/mulch beds. Prevents me from slipping and helps my plants
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.
The gasoline powered blowers are also one of the worst polluting motors in common use.
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.
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://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.
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.
Savage turnaround
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.
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Absolutely. And all those emissions are taking place very close to a human’s face.
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.
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.
how they did it:
they used an electric motor.
They started with an electric leaf blower as a baseline. Theirs is 40% quieter than the current electric leaf blowers on the market.
that’s pretty cool.
Unfortunately not very many people seem to use electric leaf blowers here, and even if you were to transmute that addition to an ICE blower it wouldn’t make a difference considering that the engine would still be loud as fuck.
Now do the trimmers and the lawnmowers
What about hair dryers?
The sad thing is the students who actually did the work will probably see no financial gain from this. Students pay to take a class and then a company pays the university for access to the students and the students ideas and work is used by a company with no financial benefit to the students. Everyone makes out except the students.
Actually unless they made it working for the university its normal for students to retain their IP rights.
I worked at a UC and companies retained all IP across all UCs and my undergrad school from the east coast was the same way. I’ve never heard of a university that let students keep their IP. I would imagine it would be hard to attract outside companies since the companies pay to be a part of the program. Can you point to a university program that allows students to retain their IP for senior design projects? I know if a student is doing a project through the school for a different class like a lab and they invent something or are volunteering the university has no claim to it but senior design is different.
Sure: https://www.research.psu.edu/otm/student_IP_guidance
This is something I’ve remember over hearing as well from a FOSS advocate as bit of complexity they deal with.
How come there are no student unions?
Then they’d have to start paying student ath-a-leets. 😉
“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”.
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.
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?
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.
I invented a leaf blower that is 100% silent and is shaped like a rake.
Interesting, my rake makes some sounds when I use it. It’s pretty loud on hard surfaces.
That’s way too expensive. I just use my fingers.
Can I borrow them to clean my yard? I promise I’ll get them right back to you.
Let me just rake up all this sand and grass clippings.
Too bad there isn’t one shaped like a broom.
