As the fall season rolls around, the once lush trees will shed their leaves. While a beautiful scene to watch, it also sends a load of work your war as you try to clean up the endless barrage of leaf fall. Every crack and crevice can be overrun by leaves and can be difficult to remove. Brooms can do the job well in most cases, but you still have massive piles to pick up after you are done. Wouldn’t it be great to just vacuum up all those leaves and be done in just a few minutes? There’s a product called the vacuum blower that not only acts as a blower but can suck up outdoor material as well. After a simple conversion process, the blower will be ready to suck up leaves. After blowing the leaves into a pile, you can suck them all up at varying speed levels, depending on the toughness of the job. A bag is attached to the unit which conveniently catches all of the leaves for quick disposal.
Another thing that separates a blower vacuum from manual methods is that this machine mulches, or crushes up the leaves as they are consumed. This greatly reduces the volume of refuse you have to deal with later, and leaves more room in your trash can. The mulched material also works great as composting material to be placed into a compost bin. You not only clean your yard, but can obtain free, nutritious compost at the same time!
The leaf shredder reduced the volume of the leaves greatly. The Toro 51599 for example can take 16 bags worth and reduce it to one. Variable speed is an important feature when you’re working outside. Both the blowing and vacuuming aspects of the machine can be controlled at variable speeds. If you are removing debris from you flower bed, you will want to set the machine on low power as to not damage the flowers. However, in grassy areas, debris often gets ground in and is hard to remove. In this case you would set it to high power to pull it into the suction chamber. This is all controlled with a dial on the front.
You may be concerned with the unit sucking up rocks and damaging the impeller. The leaf blower vac has a special tube that is attached before vacuuming. It features a wide diameter opening that reduces the air flow volume enough so that heavy rocks cannot be picked up, but leaves can.