Toro Electric Leaf Blower
I’ve decided that I’m going to stop waiting for the free time to work on my dream projects and start blogging about what I’m actually doing. And unless there’s snow on the ground, if it’s the weekend then I’m using my Toro Electric Leaf Blower.
And if I had a nickel for every hour that I’ve used the leaf blower, I’d have a lot of nickels. I’m serious, every weekend and sometimes during the week too, I’m using that damn leaf blower. I’d have a lot more blog posts and cool projects done if I didn’t spend all of my time cleaning up my yard. But it’s probably a good thing too because those cool projects I that I want to do usually involve my margarita machine.
Now let me explain. I’m not cursed with constantly falling leaves like in some sort of eternal NJ autumn. No, but there’s always something to clean up in my suburban yard. Right now at this time of year the yard is covered with pollen and tree litter. So I break out the leaf blower. We have an oriental beech tree that is huge and makes a huge mess. The tree is a good hundred years old, that’s my uneducated guess but it’s too big to give it a hug. probably take 2 or 3 people to get their arms around it. This thing drops ridiculous amounts of these little stringy puff ball things. I can honestly fill a few garbage cans with all the puffs that fall to ground.
In the burbs, you have to keep a neat front yard or you’re labeled as “that neighbor”. And I’m the only fool in my neighborhood who doesn’t have a landscaping crew do a weekly clean up of my yard. Nope, I’m out there for hours and hours with my crew of me and the Toro Electric Leaf Blower. Why don’t I hire someone? Hey buy one my cookbooks and tell your friends to buy one too and then maybe it’ll be in the budget.
This post is starting to sound like a griping session about how much of my life I’ve wasted on using the leaf blower. But I guess I can also review my leaf blower while I’m at it. It’s a Toro 51619 Ultra Blower/Vac and it’s works great. It’s one of those that comes with a bag and an extra tube so you can convert it to vacuum/mulching mode. I don’t use the vacuum mode all that often but it does work well. Even at age 48, it’s still a lot quicker for me to bend and pick up the piles of leaves than to use a leaf blower vacuum. Check back in with me when I’m 55 and I’ll probably be raving about the vacuum.
I know the trend is for everything to be cordless but I don’t mind the electric power cord. I have a couple of hundred feet of extension cords in my garage. I’ve never tried one of those gas powered backpack models but I’m sure they probably smell like gas and get hot and they’re a lot louder. So I stick with my electric model. When I picked it out it said on the box that it blew 225 mph which was faster than the gas model. I’m not sure that believing everything that the marketing department is feeding you is a great way to gauge the power of these things but that’s what I did. It definitely has a lot of power. I can move leaves, sticks, stuff that falls out of the trees and sometimes I even use it to dry my car after I wash it. On a black car, water marks are the enemy and my leaf blower takes care of that.
Oh and those cordless rechargeable battery models probably work great in a small yard with a quick clean up. But let me refer you to the top of this article. I’m using this thing all the time. I even clean out my garage with it after I use my table saw.
Update
Looking at Amazon I see they made a few changes since I bought mine which was about 7 years ago. By the way, it is very reliable since I’ve been using it all the time for the past 7 years. It seems like the new version is red. Mine is black. But they’ve upped the ante and now it can blow 250 mph. Wow, that’s great. The metal impeller blade sounds like a good feature too. Probably works better at mulching now.
So take it from me, if you live in the suburbs and need a leaf blower, even if you hate how much you have to use it, go with the Toro Electric Leaf Blower. You won’t be disappointed.