Leaf blower rage has been a local issue, with individual towns and communities banning the noisy power equipment. But it reaches a national reader with Tad Friend’s article “Blowback: The Great Suburban Leaf War” in the October 25 issue of the New Yorker.
 
As you might expect, Friend delivers an insightful social commentary on the debate, for example quoting one anti-blower homeowner thus: “The caricature is that we’re some privileged upper-crust couple eating Brie on our deck and imposing our will on those below. I’m two generations away from immigrants from Eastern Europe who fixed shoes! We’re not super-green enviro-Nazis. We’re big fans of the internal-combustion engine. ... All we object to is the leaf blower!”
 
All in all, the article is a colorful read that neatly frames the debate. But we take issue with two small points. The first is the depiction of blower rage as a California condition. “The great majority of the cities that have banned blowers are in California, and the ones that aren’t, like Aspen, Colorado, might as well be,” Friend writes. In fact, Consumer Reports has counted at least eight states with leaf-blower regulations, and the number of communities in New York with a ban is starting to rival California. 
 
We also quibble with Friend’s reference to a study in which “a grandmother using a rake and broom took only twenty percent longer to clean a test plot than a gardener with a blower.” Our very own Peter Sawchuk got quite different results when he conducted a blower versus rake test, as the video demonstrates. That’s one reason we continue to review leaf blowers, though our noise tests go beyond the industry’s to really identify the quietest models on the market.
 
—Daniel DiClerico