We do love our knowledge, so we be sure to gather and analyze producer specs alongside our personal take a look at knowledge. There are two details of information that we accumulate for leaf blowers: The primary is the sound stage.
As a contributor to restrictions being positioned on outside instruments throughout the nation, extreme noise could be fairly a trouble. That is why we run a sound stage take a look at for every mannequin, inserting it at roughly the gap you may look forward to finding such a product working out of your ear. We place it perpendicular to the sound stage meter and report the outcomes. You’ll be able to see these leads to the graph above, the place it is clear that Ryobi’s blower is, by far, the quietest of all of the items we examined. Every thing else sits in a cluster as they race for the loudest leaf blower — a title presently held by the Enhulk Max Professional Collection 58V.
That is the place our propulsion cannon is available in. Sure, we may have grabbed some leaves and a few unfastened particles and blown it round our take a look at areas, and stated, “Hey, this factor blows leaves,” however we needed to go one step additional and see how the leaf blowers’ output translated to uncooked energy.
CNET’s air cannon for leaf blower testing.
To do that, we constructed an air cannon largely from 3-inch PVC. Facilities included are an air gate, so we will ramp up every unit and launch all of the air into the cannon immediately, and a restriction plate, to maintain the projectile from getting into the core of the equipment. There’s additionally a base for balancing and a 5-foot barrel for launching the projectile.
The projectile itself is a spherical plastic tube (just like these pneumatic-driven tube containers at financial institution drive-throughs) containing a sand combination and, in whole, weighs 210 grams.
Here is Eric from our lab demonstrating the air cannon in motion. Every coloured line represents the longest common distance achieved by every mannequin — of all of them, the Greenworks Professional leaf blower shot our weight the farthest. All of these excessive scores had been achieved within the respective blower’s turbo mode, aside from the DeWalt leaf blower, which solely has a single setting.
We load the projectile into the cannon, safe the leaf blower nozzle into the enter port, ramp the leaf blower as much as full power within the chosen mode, open the air gate and foomp. We measure the gap the projectile travels from its resting location inside the cannon to the spot of the preliminary affect on the ground. We common this distance over a number of makes an attempt. Voila.
We examined every leaf blower at each regular and turbo settings, noting that the DK2 leaf blower and the DeWalt Max Flexvolt 3 every solely provide a single setting. The colourful visualization above exhibits the utmost common distance achieved by every model and makes it clear that our high decide from Greenworks blew the competitors away so far as air energy is worried, practically capturing our weight so far as the professional-grade DK2 blower, which prices properly over $1,500. Yow will discover the total outcomes from each rounds of checks within the graph beneath.
The take a look at outcomes are fascinating right here once you begin evaluating specs. Take the Milwaukee and Craftsman blowers, for example. The marketed specs for CFM and mph are practically the identical — 120 and 450 for Milwaukee and barely decrease numbers of 110 and 410 for Craftsman. Our take a look at knowledge exhibits Craftsman outperforming Milwaukee by greater than 12 ft in regular mode and outperforming it by greater than 10 ft in turbo mode.
