April 27, 2023
A man in unincorporated Antioch in Illinois was charged on Tuesday with shooting and killing his neighbor over a noisy leaf blower earlier this month. 59-year-old William Martys was working in his yard with a leaf blower when he was shot in the head and killed during an argument with his neighbor, 79-year-old Ettore Lacchei, who the Lake County Sheriff's Office said had "various perceived grievances" with Martys.
The plug-in blowers have been around for decades at this point. And now with the battery-powered models for suburbanites that don't want to use an extension cord, in a sane society new gas blowers would be banned.
Idk why average home owner would buy a gas one now. I bought a battery one and it was cheaper then gas, I don't have to mess with maintaining the engine or starting it or keeping another dangerous fuel around, its very light, and the charge is both pretty fast and enough for basically constantly blowing a normal sized lot.
0 reasons for anyone except lawn companies to own gas. Even then, they sell bigger ones and have fancy multi-battery chargers now. Some companies even advertise as all electric and were charging the same down in Florida.
Yeah I'd never hire a company that would use gas blowers, the noise pollution is fucking insane. If I had a plan to stay at my last apartment any longer than I did I would have really let them have it for fucking up my Tuesday mornings every week from the company they hired.
Every Tuesday morning I have to fight the urge to [redacted] my leasing office when I’m woken up at 7:30 by leaf blowers
The fucking engine care! I still have 2 tools that are gas powered, a snow blower (way too much snow here for an electric) and a generator (fucking power grid is dogshit).
There's always something wrong with the fucking things, they can get hard to start, you gotta prep them for storage, it's just such a goddamn hassle.
I feel like the percentage of people who actually do their own yard work is rapidly approaching zero, between wealthy homeowners too lazy/old/rich to do it themselves and people renting
The total cost of ownership of an ice mower/trimmer/blower/chainsaw is lower.
The biggest problem is finding a shop that’ll work on electronics of any kind at all, let alone at an affordable rate. Even the most rural county has a small engine shop somewhere.
On the one hand electric lawn equipment has fewer moving parts to fail and require maintenance, on the other the things that fail are massive: motor, battery, control board. When one of those drops out it’s unlikely you’ll find a replacement at all, let alone for a price lower than buying an entire replacement unit.
Of course the type of engineering and economics that lead to this situation has been in effect for low end ice equipment for the last ten years or so as well.
E: I just had someone bring in a nonfunctional electric trimmer that needs a complete tear down and cleaning because it got left out in the rain. Electric stuff has a completely different storage requirement than ice. Leave the gas pushmower out in the lawn over the winter (gotta keep those property values down)? Just drain the tank, replace the 50 cents worth of tubing that rotted, fill it back up and get going! At worst you gotta clean the carburetor or replace it if it’s a new one with a plastic carb. Still ~$20 in annual maintenance.
Leave an electric mower or trimmer out in the weather for a week and its gonna need significant work.
I know people “should” put their shit in a shed or inside, but plenty of people grew up with the ice maintenance ideas firmly established and knowing how to barely take care of their equipment can’t be underestimated.