1. My yard is heavily shaded by trees (so I have a lot of leaves). The grass under trees is fragile. A leaf blower will remove the leaves and leave the grass. Raking takes much of the grass along with the leaves. Housing Inspections has given me a warning in the past because I don't have enough grass in my yard, despite seeding it three years in a row. Raking the leaves just means another citation from Housing Inspections the following spring/summer because more than half the grass will have been raked up with the leaves.
2. The leaf blower does a better job and does it faster.
3. The electric leaf blower that I use is supposedly better for the environment than the gas models.
4. The leaf blower is also excellent for clearing snow from my driveway in the winter--up to about 3" deep fluffy snow is easily removed. Since snow shoveling is supposed to be so dangerous for those who are elderly or ill, the leaf blower is a very handy solution. I don't regard myself as elderly or ill, though. In my case, it's just a really fast way to clear the snow before I go to work.
5. As has been said here before, the electric models make a steady sound that is easier to tune out than those whose sound and volume changes constantly.
I have neighbors who think it is great fun to shoot off fireworks between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. for about two weeks in the middle of the summer. Others park their cars and leave their radios running at volumes that shake the glass in my windows. This happens at all hours of the day and night. My leaf blower seems pretty innocuous compared to those. I use it about 4 to 6 times a year for perhaps 1 to 2 hours at a time max. When used for snow removal, it only takes 20 minutes. Nobody does much about the fireworks or the boom cars. Why focus on someone who is trying to take care of their property and keep the city beautiful?
Dottie Titus, Jordan
On Jan 6, 2005, at 12:18 AM, Dan wrote:
Mike Wrote:
At first, when I read this post, I thought it was some sort of joke. ThenI
realized: these people are serious. For crying out loud, is this some sortnoise
of real issue? I mean, they're leaf blowers. Sure, they make a little
areevery now and again, but so do jackhammers, snowblowers, lawnmowers, hoopties on Lake Street, and about a hundred other things. Surely there
willbetter things for the city council to work on.
If the city council spends ANY time on this, it will be official: they
annointed Busybodies with simply not enough to do, and should be
dismissed.
Absolutely 100% agree. This is silly. If leaf-blowers need any regulating,
it's just to prohibit their operation in the middle of the night, but noise
ordinances already cover that. See how many landscaping companies will do
business in Minneapolis if they can't use leaf-blowers!
Dan McGrath Longfellow http://www.smokeoutgary.org
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