I want to get one of these garden blowers, the ones that suck too. I intend on doing the leaves in the garden but also down the side of the house there is a tarmmac area where all the leaves and debris fall. If I were to put the machine on suck to gather it all up, would the small stones from the tarmac knacker the motor in the machine? Or are they designed to cope with small amounts of stones? Thanks
They usually are "clean fan" designs - so the stuff sucked up does not go through the motor fan. Some have a nylon wire strimmer type affair for shredding leaves just before they go into the waste bag - but these are not affected by stones, and can be removed if required. I have found you can lift leaves of gravel, and they usually don't have the suck to get much gravel anyway.
Mine has a 'dirty fan' and I hate the damned noisy thing. My wife sometimes uses it and I hate the noise of stones hitting the fan. On examination it has been suffering.
As a blower it is quite good though.
I had the opportunity of having a go with one of these a few weeks ago: I found it disappointingly weak on the sucking, but more importantly I found the whole thing extremely bulky and awkward to handle. (Never mind it being Yet Another Gizmo to find storage for.) So I was relieved to be able to think "No, I do NOT need one of those!"
Without wishing to cause any offence Ben, I've always though garden vacs to be a bit "anal" ... after all, outdoors is outdoors ... leaves 'n' stuff is what it's all about.
Having said that ...
I use my pressure washer for blowing leaves off our (3/4") gravel: I use the normal wide-angle fixing at high pressure, and I keep well back, so that the main thing hitting them is the airwave: you can blow them into piles. You need practice in order to avoid ricocheting gravel all over the place,but it does work [well enough for me].
Cheers John
To have a clean airstream fan, a machine would need to have a rigid case around the debris bag. Anything with an exposed debris bag has the fan in the dirty airstream where any stones will hit it.
NT
Mine has a flexi bag and a clean fan! Its one of those cheap orange (flmo?, its ten years old and I don't recall the make) things. It works by blowing the air down one pipe in the orange case, it exits inside the case in a direction going back up the other pipe towards the bag. This draws in a lot of air through the nozzle and sucks stuff up. It works in a similar way to that Dyson "invention", the bladeless fan.
Thus spake Another John ( snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com) unto the assembled multitudes:
Me too - I bought one (admittedly a cheap one) and it was cumbersome, inefficient and basically *useless*. I went back to using a rake. Useful bit of exercise!
In message , snipped-for-privacy@DENTURESsussex.ac.uk writes
Son with new house bought one of these and as far as I know has only used it once and declared it useless as a sucking device. Said many of the leaves were stuck to the path and didn't budge.
But, behind the Webb mower that he found in the shed, and I keep asking about, was a thing labelled "Billy Goat Industries " with a 6HP Briggs and Stratton engine. It looks a bit like something Stephenson might have invented to suck the wrong sort of leaves off the track. When we get round to trying to start it no doubt I'll be back with more questions
Something a bit like this then?
Chris
I can confirm if a stone or stones are sucked up by the user it will disintegrate the fan and said fan will explode a hole through the side of the unit. This is exactly what happened when I lent mine to a not so bright friend.
Yet another good reason for never lending out any tools to family/ friends.
Dave.
In message , Chris J Dixon writes
It looks like a similar older model without the hose over the top, and with smooth cast iron wheels (slightly wobbly), so I think the 6HP just sucks and doesn't pull you along. We haven't had time to look at why the engine doesn't seem to start.
Mine has three modes.. blow, useful for getting leaves into a pile. suck, useful for getting the leaves up. blow and suck at the same time.. it has a small jet that lifts wet leaves and stuff off the paths and they then get sucked into the bag.
Excellent device. I work part time in a school with 6 large trees and spend a lot of my time in the autumn pushing one of these around. We had a B&S engined model but now have a Honda engined model which is much more powerful and easier to manage. Designed in USA to suck leaves off lawns but we use it on hard surfaces. Engine power (and therefore suction) is controlable, we also use it for litter collection - it will easily digest a 0.5 litre drinks bottle. Our last one did eventually develop a split fan casing as it will also suck up stones or anthing with a rough surface - horse chestnuts no, but the casings yes. Not a problem as the kids pick up the conkers
Malcolm
My experience too.
Dave
Agreed - and the benefit of dirty fan in these leaf vacs is that the fan shreds the leaves - reducing their bulk considerably. Otherwise the bag would fill in minutes.
Wonderful piece of kit! Similar to the Parker Vac. Will pick up a milk bottle & render it unto dust.
Mine (B&Q badged flymo), has a non enclosed bag, but uses a venturi / bernoulli principle to create a "suck" at the far end by blowing over an aperture. Hence clean fan, but no enclosure. The leaf shredding is done by a separate line trimmer style cutter.
They do not have to have a rigid bag to be clean fans! Likewise they do not have to have dirty fans to shred!
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "The Medway Handyman" saying something like:
Verily Dairies, I assume?
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