Landscaping noise and working from home

The single biggest shift in how people experience landscaping has nothing to do with landscaping. It is that a large share of the neighbourhood is now home during the working day, in a room with a window, on calls.

What a gas blower does to a home office

A commercial gas backpack blower runs near 100 decibels at the operator. Two properties away, through a closed double-glazed window, it still reads as intrusive, because the two-stroke tone sits in a frequency range that glass does not attenuate well and that the human ear is very good at picking out.

It is not just volume. It is a fluctuating, high-pitched sound that the brain keeps re-noticing, which is precisely why it is impossible to work through in a way that steady traffic noise is not.

Steady noise fades into the background. Two-stroke noise does not, and that is the whole problem.

The knock-on effects nobody plans for

• Calls rescheduled or muted mid-sentence
• Children napping, woken
• Shift workers sleeping during the day, woken
• Neighbours who resent the property owner rather than the contractor
• In condo buildings, a steady stream of complaints to the property manager

What the alternative sounds like

A battery blower sits around 65 decibels near the operator, roughly the level of a conversation at a metre. At the distance a neighbour experiences it, it registers as background rather than as an event. A battery mower is around 75, comparable to a vacuum cleaner in the next room.

On a street where three properties are being maintained on the same morning, that difference is the difference between a normal Saturday and an unusable one.

Why we lead with this

The environmental argument for battery equipment is real, but it is abstract. Most people cannot perceive an emissions difference. Everyone can perceive the noise difference, immediately, on the first visit.

That is the benefit we would want if we were the client, so it is the one we lead with.