!8: Prices Homelite Blowers Parts: January 2012

!±8± 3 Things About Backpack Blowers You Need to Know

For a long time now, both the professional landscapers and serious gardeners have been using backpack blowers to help them in maintaining their grounds and landscapes. Keeping the flower gardens, lawns and ornamental trees well groomed and beautiful leaving hobbyists and home gardeners, to enjoy and wonder how do, they do that. There are two basic types of blowers commonly used by these serious minded individuals; they are the electric-powered models for delicate work or the gas-powered models for the bigger projects. Electric blowers are convenient for use in and around tight spaces, and require less effort, making them easier to handle. The gas-powered blowers, on the other hand, are quite a bit more powerful, making them the best choice for larger jobs, which requires a bit more strength to use. As you continue reading this article, you will discover what the pros know about blowers, and why they use the models they do.

Where do Leaf Blowers get their Power

1. How power is made To better understand where power comes from; think about it this way, air is forced through the nozzle on the end of a blower's discharge tube. This nozzle is smaller than the rest of the discharge tube. For example, let us just say, the size of a drinking straw. This will increase the air speed coming out of the nozzle; it could reach speeds as much as 300 miles per hour (mph). This kind of speed would be good for blowing debris out of cracks in a sidewalk or concrete driveway. That much air speed creates a great deal of pressure in a relatively small area, but it would not have enough power to blow the leaves in your yard very well. The drinking straw sized opening would increase the air pressure (measured in miles per hour); but, it would cause a huge loss of air volume. The cleaning jobs we want to use a blower for require both air pressure measured in miles per hour, (mph) and air volume measured in cubic feet per minute, (cfm).

2. CFM alone is not a good measure of how powerful a blower is. Simply increasing the size of a blower's discharge tube nozzle will increase cfm. For instance, the size of a soccer ball, subsequently the blower could, conceivably put out 600 cfm. Set up this way, it might work well for sweeping dust or other lightweight debris off a driveway or sidewalk, but without adequate air pressure, the blower would have a hard time blowing anything other than dust, leaves, and bits of paper or other lightweight debris. It would be more like a gentle summer breeze, and simply would not have the power to do anything more.

3. Blowers need both, mph and cfm working together to produce power. Mph provides the necessary pressure required to get dirt and debris moving, loosening matted leaves from your yard, bits of paper from your driveway and dust, dirt and leaves from your garage and patio. Optimum levels of cfm provide air volume required to keep the debris moving with the stream of air. The more power a blower has the faster and more efficiently you will finish your clean-up chores, saving you valuable time that you want to spend doing all the other important stuff.

Why Use a Backpack Blower

Large commercial duty gas powered blowers produce up to 700 cfm and 200 mph, making them extremely powerful, where they perform cleaning chores like blowing leaves, cleaning parking lots and stadium seating. However, mounting the powerful blowers on a backpack frame and distributing the weight evenly across the operator's shoulders and back makes the additional weight of the larger gas-powered engine and increased power much easier to handle. Coupled with an ergonomically designed handle assembly, including a variable speed throttle control, attached to the blower discharge tube work to make backpack blowers handle as if they were an extension of your right arm.

Smaller homeowner models are available in either two stroke or four stroke engine configurations. For the folks who would rather avoid mixing gas and oil, there are the blowers that use a four-stroke engine, which runs on regular unleaded gas. Still yet, there are the two stroke engine models for those of us that already have trimmers, chainsaws and mini cultivators, who are already accustomed to mixing the two-cycle fuel. With lightweight models starting at around nineteen pounds, and one-hundred and fifty mph they are much easier to operate for an afternoon's worth of work than a similarly performing hand-held blower is.