There is hearing damaging noise and there is stress-inducing noise, neither good for you. Hearing damaging noise depends on the dose, which depends on but the level (dB) and length of exposure. You are unlikey to experience permanent noise induced hearing loss from hearing your neighbor’s leaf blower outside through an open window. The level is likely too low and duration is relatively short (likely less than 30 min?)
There is plenty of scientific literature on the effects of noise on other health matters (e.g. hypertension) some of it showing small but measurable effects. It’s a difficult topic because you need to tease out other factors which may coexist with noise, like air pollution for example.
The WHO is currently looking at noise as a public health issue.
I work part-time, and often from home - so yes, the “series of lawn care companies coming at various times throughout the week” is new noise pollution to me. Add in my obsessive neighbor who does his own lawn after work hours and on the week-end, and the lawn care noise is pretty much 7 days a week.
I grew up spending summers at the family beach house at the Jersey Shore. It was an old home, right by the ocean. We had no A/C and I loved to hear the sound of the waves through my open bedroom window. Now many of the old homes have been torn down, new duplexes built in their place, and everyone runs the A/C constantly. When we open the windows of our beach rental, I don’t hear the ocean - I hear the din of all the A/C compressors. Makes me very sad.
Yes, the leaf blowers and lawn mowers are annoying but, seriously, how long does it last. Everyone on our street has a lawn care company. We have large lots and even at that, ours takes our guys less than a half hour to complete the mowing and blowing. It’s not like this is going on all day/everyday or even for their entire visit.
Always a Mom: We get our lawn done and they are out within 10 minutes, blowing included. So it’s a couple of minutes at most. Leaf blowers don’t bother me at all.
Lots of people do their own “leaf blowing” and are not nearly as fast as companies. My neighbor spends all day Saturday, as far as I can tell, blowing every stray–anything–into oblivion. All. Day.
Oh my goodness. That would be annoying if it went on all day. That wasn’t what I was picturing because, thankfully, we don’t have such an offender in this neighborhood.
My neighbor seems to spend an inordinate amount of time with his mower and blower too. I’m not quite sure what he’s doing, he seems to mow every day. I’m thinking it must be a hobby of some sort, he’s at the end of a peninsula and no one besides the mailman can even see his yard.
My neighbor is definitely obsessive about it. The person whom we bought the (second and eventually retirement) house was, too. Perfect geometric edges everywhere–lawn must have been soaked in pesticides (blah!). In the ten years we’ve had it, we’ve roughened up the edges (I’m more of an English country garden type), stopped the pesticides and fertilizers so the lawn is not “perfect” anymore, and planted vegetable gardens everywhere, including in the front.
So I’m sure there’s an online discussion somewhere where the neighbor complains about us!
In our old 'hood, yard machinery sounds blasted all Sunday long - it was a chain reaction of sorts. Neighbor one wakes up and decides to mow the lawn (an acre or so of it) before the rains move in. Then the wife of neighbor two hears his lawnmower and begins to nag her husband that the lawn needs mowing. By the time neighbor one is done, neighbor two fires up his mower. Then neighbor three wakes up and decides that her lawn needs a haircut, so off she goes. And so on!
At the new place, folks either have tiny lawns or have elaborate landscaping and patios. We don’t own a single blade of grass, and I am happy about that fact. We do have a few trees that shed all sorts of stuff, so we have a leaf blower - a Li ion battery powered one. It sounds like a large hair dryer, not like a jet engine. I will never buy another piece of gasoline powered yard machinery.
Ha, we have an obsessive neighbor, too! It’s the snowblower all winter and the leafblower or lawnmower all summer. One time he was away, so DH thought he would do the guy a favor and clear his driveway of snow. When the guy got back, he came over and said, “Please don’t ever do that again…” And yes, our “front lawn” is basically woods, so I’m sure it drives him nuts to look out his window at our yard.
No, he’s just odd. We’ve lived across the street from them for 22 years and still don’t understand them at all!! Maybe it’s a Texan trying to get along with Yankees?
Glad to know I’m not alone about the obsessive neighbor with the blower!! Mine blows the snow off his front lawn. Seriously. And every.single.leaf all year long!!
Our yard backs up to the little league fields, which take a long time to cut (5 fields), so between that and the OCD neighbor and a few others who do their own mowing, it’s much more than just a few 10 minute shots per week. But I wouldn’t trade the sounds of the kids playing ball for anything - love that happy noise!
I have a battery powered leaf blower too, to blast out one small gutter and part of a roof. It’s so small, that the battery doesn’t last very long. I sweep first and blow away the remaining stuff. H uses it to jumpstart our big green egg grill too, lol.
I can’t believe someone blows the snow off their yard! Where does it go?
He blows the snow off his lawn when it’s down to maybe an inch or less - either because that’s all we got, or the bigger accumulation has mostly melted. He blows it into the street. Most of it probably melts during the blowing process.
"My neighbor seems to spend an inordinate amount of time with his mower and blower too. I’m not quite sure what he’s doing, he seems to mow every day. "
We have one guy down the street that’s like that. He’s also the only one who doesn’t have a lawn care company, probably because none would be able to live up to his standards. If he’s not mowing, he’s obsessively trimming. Seriously, dude, native plants were not meant to be perfect little balls! It’s unnatural and disconcerting.
For a while there was a vacant property across the street and down a bit from him. Apparently the bushes on this vacant property being untrimmed bugged him because for about a year until the property was sold, he’d trim those bushes, too. Hedge in a perfect, level line and individual bushes in creepy little balls. This is a guy who really needs to get another hobby. But then again, weird stuff like this happens in the Land of the Retired. You can’t even imagine how crazy the HOAs get around here with their hordes of people who have literally nothing to do other than monitor each other and measure each other’s grass… Scary stuff.
I knew gardening people who called those things “green meatballs”. They also would complain about “mulch volcanoes”. Those are actually bad for the trees!
This discussion makes me thankful my crazy next door neighbor is an obsessive raker. She rakes almost every day when there is not snow on the ground. She has a huge muscle on one arm from all the raking. Imagine if she was using a leaf blower every day!
