[Closed] Leaf blowers.

A rake and some nice exercise out in the fresh air? Much quieter and kinder to our environment! And… cheaper!!!

They are part of the eco chain , leave them be , what is your pressing problem ?

They're worse than e-bikes!

I never understood the point of leaf blowers. They don't remove anything, they just redistribute shit. They're the gardening equivalent of Izal toilet paper.

I never understood the point of leaf blowers.

I'm inclined to agree - if you want to get rid of leaves get a garden vac, if you want them just off the lawn, set the mower blade high.

The campsite I often work at just bought a new Honda lawn mower which has extra blades, giving it the capability of obliterating leaves by shredding them into tiny pieces. They then get absorbed into the ground to feed it . . .

I use the lawnmower on high setting to pick them up and compost.

For those saying 'leave them', you clearly don't have the beech and sycamores that overhang our garden. I would have a lawn like sirromj's within a season if I wasn't on it quickly.

If you have 18v DeWalt cordless tools then they also do a leaf blower which is pretty good

@cloudnine, been looking at dewalt for a cordless drill.

Any idea how long a 4ah battery would last.

To all the environmentalists I have suffered for 25 years doing it by hand and it kills me. Too many trees

I never understood the point of leaf blowers. They don’t remove anything, they just redistribute shit

I’m in agreement with this. Utterly stupid invention. Leaves falling from trees is part of a natural cycle. Just leave (ha) them be.

Get a nice loud petrol blower to blow all your leaves in to the road. Great way to spend a Sunday morning.

@MadBillMcMad
Last about 20 mins on constant use.
I think they did a few blower models.. make sure its the most powerful one if you go down that route

I don't think they're utterly pointless, it's just that many people use them to shift their leaf problem somewhere else rather than blowing them into a pile that they can then rake up. Obviously a rake also works, or a lawnmower, or nature. I don't recall it being a massive issue about 20 years ago when we lived in a house surrounded by oak trees, a couple of rakings in the autumn was all it took.

Use a pair of Stihl BR600 and a BR200 at work. The BR200 is useless, I wouldn’t even use it to dry my hair, the 600’s are great but heavy and £££.

Hand held ones are ok but they do make your arm and hand ache after a short while. I’ve not used any battery powered ones yet but would like to as I’d like to switch over to them eventually

I bought the Screwfix special Titan the other day. It sucks as well as blows (ooh, matron gif)

It's great for the money to be fair, added bonus of being a two stroke so it rips.

Difficult to rake or mow gravel drives...

I have a petrol blower... i am a worthless eco vandal.

Also have a petrol mower, strimmer, ride on mower, chipper, chainsaw its a wonder Greta hasn't been around to brick my single glazed windows.

Also got a log burner.... and two diesel vehicles.

I have probably caused a 1 degree shift.

Just remembered oil central heating and an Aga....

I *think* the idea is you blow the leaves into a pile and then pick them up. Either way, I've just bought a Stihl leaf vacuum. Its got a shredder built into it to reduce the volume. Seems pretty good on the limited stuff which has dropped off so far.

Many gardeners seem to rate the Makita backpacks. I think they're four stroke so will take normal petrol. I'd be looking at battery now and probably due to the range of 18v I'd consider going for the Makitas and if they do a twin 18v then I'd get that. The duration won't be as long as petrol before requiring a recharge but they'd be quieter.

As it is I have a handheld Stihl BG-86 which is noisy but pretty effective. It has vacuum and mulch mode too which can be useful in some cases.

I've got a mains plug in Black & Decker that I've had for about 15 years. A combined blower and vacuum shredder. We used to have a massive sycamore tree in the middle of our front lawn that dumped about 2 tonnes of helicopters and leaves over the drive every year. Blowing them into a pile then shredding them for composting in bin bags worked well.

We've since moved and the leaves here are either not an issue or easily rakeable.

It's now consigned to drying duties after I've washed my motorbike. But God it's loud!! I have to wear ear defenders when using it and I swear it's twice as loud as any petrol version. Thankfully I'm in the cuds and have no neighbours to annoy.

I got a Stihl 2 stroke hand held one after a bad experience with a corded one from b&q. It’s great and has a bag for suction too.

I’ve got lots of trees and a big gravel drive that I relaid a few yrs ago and there’s no other way realistically especially if the leaves get wet and run in to the drive.

Blow to a corner, scoop into a builders bag and tip into a chicken wire corral. Or blow onto the lawn and mow over and dump in corral/ compost.

Fix the root of the problem, chop the trees down.

I have a medium (100 year old) oak tree in my back garden. I tried using the lawnmower - bag fills up too quickly.

I've now got a Stihl 2-stroke blower. I blow the leaves in to big piles a metre high and scoop them into 1 tonne bags. 4 bags normally does it. I tried just moving them using a leaf rake but it takes much longer.

Black and Decker electric blower/vac. Regularly used, mulches the leaves as it passes into the bags, and these then go into my compost bin. Vac is mainly used, but the blower is used to blow muck off the drive or paths into the borders.

I've got a Stihl BG86 C-E 2 stroke. Since getting it, it's made a vast difference in keeping things tidy. I've got 4 very big Beech trees plus Sycamore, Oak, Maple  and Chesnut. Some in our garden, some in our neighbours.  When they drop there is a thick carpet if left.

Raking that amount takes serious time and effort.  The Stihl make life a lot easier. I blow them into areas bebind the tree and shrubs and mainly let them rot down. Some I bag up and dump.  Doing a bit of raking is fine if it's just a small amount of leaves, when it's a mountain it's hard work.   And no,the trees can't be cut down...they've got TPOs.

I would have a lawn like sirromj’s

Another forum legend is born 🤣

Cougar
Full Member
I never understood the point of leaf blowers. They don’t remove anything, they just redistribute shit. They’re the gardening equivalent of Izal toilet paper

"Tory Gardening" - just ****s the problem off onto those without the resources to blow them back in your direction

Fix the root of the problem, chop the trees down.

This is a solution I'd love to employ. Unfortunately we have an oversized horse chestnut tree overhanging our garden which has a TPO so no-one can touch it, and which drops crap all year round and particularly in the Autumn; we're about to enter the conker season and it will shortly look like armageddon out there. When we first moved in and the tree was much smaller I tried just leaving the leaves but they don't rot down or magically disappear as I'd hoped, and I got fed up with taking 6 car loads down to the council compost heap each autumn so I now have a 2-stroke Stihl hand-held shredding blower-sucker thing that reduced the size of the waste sufficiently to get rid over a month or 3 in the composting bin. But just to counter the love for Stihl, the blower has been a pain; apart from the noise it was always a bugger to start, got clogged easily when sucking and now the casing's cracked. If Stihl hadn't rescinded on their insistence that spare parts are only available to be fitted by their dealers it would have been scrapped by now; fortunately a generic replacement carb has made it just about usable. I also have a Worx battery blower that's more neighbour-friendly and much easier to use particularly when blowing leaves out of the gutters or on to the lawn for the lawnmover to pick up, but I already had several batteries so short run time isn't an issue.

Bosch combined blower and vac here - it's great. Blow them into a pile then vac them up which shreds them so they take about 1/3 of the volume. More likely to then fit them all in the brown bin, or less bags for the tip.

We have a battery one. But then we also have a gravel driveway and area round the back. When the billions of leaves fall on the drive they rot over winter and provide a nice base for a multitude of weeds. So i just blow them onto the lawn and then mulch them with the mower to rot there instead.

Rakes and gravel don't really mix (or rather they do... which is the problem)

Needed a cordless long reach hedge trimmer, so I bought a Stihl one with a spare battery a bare tool bga56 at the same time. Played with a few options on FR Jones.

Obviously hedges growing is part of the natural order of things, and I should just leave them be, along with the grass, weeds in the paving, roots pushing up the paving blocks and into the drains, leaves from half a dozen big trees overhanging sides of the garden carpeting the garden and blocking the gutters and the drains. and the Willow that grows around the phone line from the pole in the street unless I pollard it every year.

I don't leave all those things be, because I'm a monster.

One battery works for 20 mins, half an hour in the blower. I probably wouldn't have bought one on it's own, but as a bare tool add-on to something else I needed, it was more worth it, and it's been useful for a bunch of other things. Saves stomping on some parts of the lawn that get waterlogged in autumn, too. Rake still gets a lot of use, but it's nice to mix things up.

And I don't use the mower because I'd be stopping every few yards to empty the grass bin.

for problem trees , there is always a solution , stump killer , you need to bore a hole in the trunk , add stump killer , re seal , wait for all leaves etc to drop, shouldn’t happen again .......

Got some Stihl BG86, the blistering on the nozzle gives away there main use 🔥😂

Also used for blowing snow off the vehicles and away from workshop doors. Occasionally for blowing tree cutting debris into one spot.

Best use of leaf blowers I have seen in Parisian parks. Bus load of guys turn up with leaf blowers, head for the edges and then blow it all to a suction truck in the middle.

Another vote for mains powered blower and vac combined. Blows into corners and then vacuum up and into brown bin. I do it every week or so, though we have no grass now since getting a dog, but a large deck and patio and front and rear plastic lawns 🤣

Don't know how big your garden is? I guess it must be a park to rule out a battery blower. We have just got a Husky battery blower that runs for 20 minutes at work.

Funny someone should say 'chop the tree down'. We had a massive twin trunk tree opposite our house on the corner of the neighbour's land. Given our house position we used to end up with at least a foot deep of leaves at the front of the house, especially when it was windy. Anyway, neighbout got some cowboys in to trim the tree, but introduced disease to it, and it fell down about 5 years ago. We've now many less leaves to clear up.

I have four Lime (Tila) trees across the front of my garden, each around 45ft tall. The fruit and bract drop is nearly done and if I lift them it'll fill a wheelie bin more or less. In about a month the leaf drop will drop in earnest which will fill a wheelie bin a day if I get chance and motivation to do it. Add to that the prevailing wind brings in plenty from the 80 or so Limes on the street and plenty more from the park across the road with 400 or so trees of various types. Doe to this year's usual excuses the green bins have been suspended and we've just been told there will be three collections between now and March. I'm thinking of adding flagpoles or tall aerials to the cars so we can find them easier after a good southwesterly. I use a mains Flymo and a petrol mower with mulching blade, but if the runtimes on battery vac/mulchers get up beyond 40 minutes, I'll have one. Mulch is fine, but nothing grows under 4ft of leaves except very juicy earthworms.

Leaf blowers.

Are a waste of time unless you have a corner to blow them into. Even then you have to process them somehow.

Just mow the lawn with the mower blades up (if it is a lawn, of course).

They are part of the eco chain

If you mow them up they make a nice component in compost.

If you rake them up and store them to rot down they make even better compost.

I think the solutions and situations vary massively from small gardens with perhaps a couple of smallish trees to bigger gardens with, and surrounded by, lots of big trees.

We have about 30 metre long front garden with really big trees. The other year we returned home after about a month in France coinciding with the time the major leaf fall had happened. You could hardly see a square metre of the garden that wasn't covered in a deep layer of leaves.  A bit of raking was not the solution to this.

I spent 9 years on the local council and one of my jobs was clearing the leaves when they fell in the parks/housing estate. We used tractors, rakes, and eventually, leaf blowers when the council finally coughed up for them and still had to do a hell of a lot of hand raking in areas as blowers would only blow so much until it's too thick then it was dragging the piles with rakes into open areas so the tractors could collect them. So I know what is possible with a rake with what you can clear. And the blowers 30 years ago were nowhere near as good as the blowers you get today.

But if a blower makes your life easier then why not get one.