Abstract

Leaf blowers are essential gardening tools that blow leaves and other contaminating materials. Our goal through this survey was to compute consumers’ preferences for “green” Leaf blowers instead of gas leaf blowers. Green leaf blowers are corded electric (plug-in) and cordless electric (battery-powered), hence leaf blowers that don’t produce greenhouse gas emissions. We were also interested in seeing how: weight,airspeed,run time and leaf blower shape affect consumers’ preferences. Our findings were concluded from 155 respondents’ feedback. We found that consumers’ preferred green leaf blowers, as battery leaf blowers scored highest at our utility model,coming next were runtime then airspeed. Our consumers’ did not prefer high weight,price,and handheld leaf blowers respectively.

Introduction

Leaf blowers, commonly known as blowers, are gardening tools that blow air through a nozzle for cleaning yards from leaves, grass cuttings, dirt, and sometimes even snow. They come in different sizes and shapes depending on the work volume. Mainly the mechanics of these tools: air is blown through powered engines with different air-power and airspeed depending on workload. Some blowers work as vacuums that suck leaves and grass cuttings through a tube and then shred them into small pieces that are kept in a bag. Through this project, we will only focus on air blowers. Leaf blowers vary in size, shape, power type, and design. In this project, we will classify them based on how they are powered by gas leaf blowers and green leaf blowers (corded electric and cordless electric -battery-powered-leaf blowers).

Types of Leaf Blowers

Leaf blowers Types

Leaf blowers Types

Product Attributes & Decision Variables

We are especially interested to know our consumer’s preferences concerning green blowers; that is why power type is a major player in deciding all other specifications and was given special attention. For other attributes, we focused on price, weight, shape, runtime, and airspeed as our primary analysis attributes. We chose these attributes because they were repeatedly mentioned in consumers’ feedback comments on top leaf blowers selling websites.[1]

Below are the levels of the attributes:

Attributes Continuous/Discrete Value/Range
Power Type Discrete Gas, battery, plugin
Price Continuous 40 - 275 USD
Shape Discrete Handheld, Backpack
Weight Continuous 4 - 40 lbs
Runtime Continuous 8 - 1000 mins
airspeed Continuous 50-270 MPH

Survey Design

1. Eligibility

Our eligible population was chosen based of: - People who answered “yes” to our consent age question - People who answered “yes” to our consent understand the question - People who answered “yes” to owning a leaf blower now, in the past or interested in buying a leaf blower in the future. We wanted to filter through and get to people interested in buying a leaf blower. The survey is designed to dig in depth into consumer preferences when buying a leaf blower, though anyone with no interest would not ideally engage with our survey.

2. Respondent information

Along with our choice question, which will be demonstrated in other parts of this report, we were interested in obtaining the following information: - What do our consumers think about banning leaf blowers.

With rising concerns about pollution, noise or others. This question was attempted to weigh our consumers’ general motion on leaf blowers; we found that 41.9% preferred banning gas leaf blowers, which is a high percentage.