Cate Blanchett Would Hate This List of the Best Leaf Blowers in 2024

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We are well into fall, leaves, leaves and more leaves are steadily falling, getting everywhere and making your garden, your drive and other areas around your home messy. While they can add a touch of color to your house, wet leaves can also attract bugs and other creepy crawlies that you might not appreciate. That's where leaf blowers come in and, yes, they are much more efficient than a rake.

If you've spent any of your life in the suburban or more rural areas of the US, it's tough to remember a time when leaf blowers weren't a thing. Even if your family didn't own one, it's likely that your friend, neighbor or random guy down the street probably did. Although larger walk-behind versions were available as early as the 1950s, the more traditional backpack and handheld types didn't appear until the 1970s, according to the October 1977 issue of Popular Science.

The landscape is changing. All those leaf blowers we remember from years past were gas-powered. Today, some cities and states have outlawed gas-powered leaf blowers outright, and some areas restrict the days and times you can use any type of leaf blower. This is a development that surely makes Oscar-winning actor Cate Blanchett very happy -- she despises the tool, as seen in this viral TikTok montage.

A rake can do the job at less of a price, but leaf blowers are helpful tools for keeping your yard neat and tidy with far more speed and efficiency. They also offer more variety, with a ton of different types and great options available, so choosing the right one can be tough. For one thing, choosing between gas leaf blowers or their electric counterparts is all about whether one suits your needs. Even so, our top pick is the Greenworks Pro 80-volt cordless leaf blower. This leaf blower has an energy-efficient design and best-in-class air power. Other factors, such as relative value, noise level and weight, are also important to consider while shopping for a new leaf blower.

Even today, leaf blowers are one of the quickest and most effective ways of moving leaves and other bits of debris around on your property. They're much better than the other traditional methods such as raking and sweeping, though a fair bit noisier, so be aware of when you're going to use them. We've tested several of the standard electric models available on the market today, considering things like how much power their airflow actually offers and other common concerns like battery life and how loud each unit gets. Let's look at the best leaf blowers for your home and yard care needs.

We do love our data, so we make sure to collect and analyze manufacturer specs alongside our own test data. There are two main points of data that we collect for leaf blowers: The first is the sound level.

As a contributor to restrictions being placed on outdoor tools across the country, excessive noise can be quite a bother. That's why we run a sound level test for each model, placing it at approximately the distance you might expect to find this type of product operating from your ear. We position it perpendicular to the sound level meter and record the results. You can see those results in the graph above, where it's clear that Ryobi's blower is, by far, the quietest of all the units we tested. Everything else sits in a cluster as they race for the loudest leaf blower -- a title currently held by the Enhulk Max Pro Series 58V.

This is where our propulsion cannon comes in. Yes, we could have grabbed some leaves and some loose debris and blown it around our test spaces, and said, "Hey, this thing blows leaves," but we wanted to go one step further and see how the leaf blowers' output translated to raw power.

A custom-built air cannon made from PVC pipe sits atop a wooden frame. It's shaped like a big checkmark. We stick a leaf blower's nozzle into the bottom end and rev it up, then pull a handle to open a valve, which lets all of that air power propel a weight out of the top.

To do this, we built an air cannon mostly from 3-inch PVC. Amenities included are an air gate, so we can ramp up each unit and release all the air into the cannon instantly, and a restriction plate, to keep the projectile from entering the core of the apparatus. There's also a base for balancing and a 5-foot barrel for launching the projectile.

The projectile itself is a round plastic tube (similar to those pneumatic-driven tube containers at bank drive-throughs) containing a sand mixture and, in total, weighs 210 grams.

A visualization shows the maximum average distance that each of six electric leaf blowers were able to shoot a 210g weight when used to power a custom-built air cannon. The top distance goes to the 80V Greenworks Pro leaf blower, which blasted that weight well over thirty feet.

We load the projectile into the cannon, secure the leaf blower nozzle into the input port, ramp the leaf blower up to full strength in the selected mode, open the air gate and foomp. We measure the distance the projectile travels from its resting location within the cannon to the spot of the initial impact on the floor. We average this distance over multiple attempts. Voila.

We tested each leaf blower at both normal and turbo settings, noting that the DK2 leaf blower and the DeWalt Max Flexvolt 3 each only offer a single setting. The colorful visualization above shows the maximum average distance achieved by each brand and makes it clear that our top pick from Greenworks blew the competition away as far as air power is concerned, nearly shooting our weight as far as the professional-grade DK2 blower, which costs well over $1,500. You can find the full results from both rounds of tests in the graph below.

The test results are interesting here when you start comparing specs. Take the Milwaukee and Craftsman blowers, for instance. The advertised specs for CFM and mph are nearly the same -- 120 and 450 for Milwaukee and slightly lower numbers of 110 and 410 for Craftsman. Our test data shows Craftsman outperforming Milwaukee by more than 12 feet in normal mode and outperforming it by more than 10 feet in turbo mode.

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