Should you use a battery-powered leaf blower?

Battery-powered leaf blowers make significantly less noise.

Yes, battery-powered leaf blowers still make noise. They can exceed over 80 decibels. But the noise from these rechargeable blowers doesn’t travel as far. And from what I’ve seen, their output averages in the mid-frequency range: about 500-600 Hertz. Your neighbors down the block are less likely to be tormented by low-frequency noise blasting through their walls. And gas-powered leaf blowers create a lot of low-frequency noise that travels much farther, like the sound of dirt bikes.

Why I bought a cheap battery-powered leaf blower

A few times per year, the winds in my area get really strong. And the leaves in my neighborhood get blown in front of our building and over the storm drain nearby. Although I’m a firm believer in sweeping, the task is sometimes too big to manage with manual tools. After seeing other people in the neighborhood using lightweight leaf blowers, I decided to look online for an inexpensive one. And there were a lot of them priced at $100 or less! I bought a no-name brand, which came with two 21v batteries and a charger.

Decibel testing and comparing leaf blowers

I don’t have a gas-powered leaf blower to compare against a battery-powered leaf blower, but this YouTuber made a short video test, and he used a decibel meter to compare the difference in decibels and acoustics. I decided to test my own blower using the Decibel Meter app on my phone, which also shows the frequency range of the sound in addition to decibels. Then I compared it to a hair dryer, because that’s what some of the battery leaf blowers seem like to me: a giant hair dryer.

Watch the Soundproofist video:

Observations

The leaf blower was up to 12 decibels louder than the hair dryer. And the hair dryer also operated at a higher frequency than the leaf blower: about 100 Hertz higher. But what really surprised me was how effectively and powerfully the cheap leaf blower did the job. It could blow leaves about 10 feet away, so I only needed to turn it on sparingly to keep from scattering the pile of leaves I’d already made.

Conclusion

I still advocate for quietly raking leaves whenever possible. But if you need a more-powerful tool, make sure it’s battery-powered. And finally, if your local community or Parks and Recreation department is still using gas-powered leaf blowers and making a lot of noise, contact Quiet Communities for pointers on how to work with city officials to go “greener.”