Recently we moved to a new house. We went from a house built in the late 1960’s with a honey locust tree in the front yard and a cherry tree in the back yard. The sum total of our leaf clean up in the fall was about two brown paper yard waste bags. Honestly most of the leaves were racked into a pile and my daughter would spend hours jumping or sliding into them, until the first snow fall covered them up.
Now we are in a 1940’s era suburb with huge oak trees. These trees watched the houses around them being built. Which I love. The stories they could tell! Oh but the leaves that they drop, it is amazing the quantity. We are really lucky that the city comes around twice to collect them, so we just have to get them to the street. Definitely a lot of work though to rake them. Which is why we are in hunt for finding the perfect leaf blower.
Many leaf blowers are gas powered with a two stroke engine. They are very much not eco friendly though. A study by Edmunds showed that the average gas powered leaf blower emits 299 times the hydrocarbons and 23 times the carbon monoxide that a Ford F-150 pickup truck does! Yikes, time to look into an electric powered one for sure. I know that the electricity has to come from the power plant, but they do scrub their emissions before releasing them to the environment.
I began my search on Consumer Reports. They recommended the Toro Ultra Blower Vac 51599 as their top rated corded, electric leaf blower. My next stop is to head on over to Amazon to check out more about this leaf blower: price, availability, and ratings. It doesn’t look like the 51599 is available anymore and it has been replaced by the Toro Ultra Blower 51609.
They have it in stock and it is Prime eligible, meaning I can have it in two days if I order now (you must have a Prime membership for this). The price is nice coming in at just under $70. The list price is $119.99, so that is a $50 savings. It is instock and is sold and ships by Amazon.
I love that there is a video to tell me more about the leaf blower:
Not only is it a leaf blower, it is also a leaf vacuum. If you need to bag your leaves, this is a great as it has a shredder to break the leaves down smaller. It claims that it can make 16 bags of leaves into 1. I also like the little cord attachment that it comes with to keep everything tidy and in it’s place when you are not using it.
Scrolling down I can see that there are over 550 reviews and 345 of them are five star. Doing a cross check over at Home Depot it has many stellar reviews over there too, averaging 4.3 (out of 5) stars with over 640 reviews. This is looking to be more and more the right choice for our yard.
In fact, we ordered one today and hopefully it will be here soon so that we can try it out and start moving some fall leaves. I really hope this information has helped. Let me know what your fall leaf removal strategy is in the comments below. I would love to know!
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