Ah, the sounds of summer: birds chirping, children’s laughter, and the ungodly noise of my neighbor’s blower as he blows the dirt and detritus from his driveway for the umpteenth time. The cacophony is enough to rouse our deaf dog and make my ears ring for hours on end. Don’t get me wrong, we own a blower as well but, out of consideration for our neighbors, opted for a low noise type – an ECHO PB-250 LN blower with a mere 65 decibels. That’s 75% quieter than the din that my neighbor’s puts out.

Lower noise level wasn’t the only reason we chose this blower. Choosing a leaf blower for maintenance around the home includes other considerations as well. For instance, this particular unit is lightweight with an exclusive curved blower tube that provides rotational control to reduce user fatigue along with an ergonomic 3-position handle. Having user friendly features like this makes it the perfect blower not only for my husband but for me.

ECHO really put in some research engineering this low noise blower. The design includes absorbent materials to do away with the horrendous whine associated with older types of gas powered blowers. Exhaust sounds are muted with an ingenious muffler and patented sound attenuator to quiet the air intake system. And the fan and cowling were reconfigured to lessen the noise of the airflow system, all without loss of power, efficiency or performance.

Sure, we could have opted for an electric or battery powered blower, but most of these seem to lack the power we needed to tackle tough jobs. And, of course, the bane of corded blowers is, well, the cord. Not only does a cord limit where you can go, but it’s easy to get discombobulated and accidently slice through it”¦or maybe that’s just me.

Now that we have our quieter, user AND neighbor friendly ECHO blower, we’ve come up with other uses for it besides blowing leaves. My husband uses it like a giant blow dryer to dry the car, and he found it made cleaning the gutters a snap too. Oh, and while for heavy snowfall you need to bring out the big guns, when we have a smattering of light snow, our ECHO blower makes short work of clearing the walkways and patio.

With more than 40 years of experience in developing and manufacturing professional outdoor power equipment, it’s clear that ECHO should be your choice for a leaf blower too. A quick trip to your home improvement store and you’re on your way to a tool that does so much more than blow leaves.