Is it possible to use a leaf blower as a supercharger?

for your car out of a leafblower? So let's start by talking about what a supercharger is. A supercharger is something you normally find on high performance street cars or race cars or something. It's basically just an air compressor, and the idea is for it to compress the air going into the engine so that the air inside the cylinder is at a higher pressure than it normally would be. And since there's more air in the cylinder, you can put more gas in the cylinder and burn it and

get more power out of an engine. So, if you have a normally aspirated engine an engine without a supercharger, it can process a certain amount of gasoline and produce a certain amount of power. Because of the amount of air that gets into each cylinder. If you were to double the amount of air in each cylinder, then you can burn twice as much gas and the engine can produce in theory, twice as much power, and it can do that even though the engine really hasn't gained that

much weight. You know, normally you would have to double the size of the engine to get double the power. Here, you add the supercharger, which is a fairly small piece of equipment, and you double the power of the engine. So you really increase the power to weight ratio of that engine quite a bit. Okay, so I've been interrupted here by someone in the background who's asking what the

differences between a supercharger and a turbocharger. So a supercharger gets its power usually from a belt that's attached to the engine, so the engine is directly powering the air compressor. In a turbocharger, there's a turbine that's attached to the exhaust system, so the flow of exhaust gases is what provides the power for the air compressor in that case. And there are advantages and disadvantages to the two different systems.

But supercharging is a very popular and common way to boost the performance of an engine by compressing the air that goes into it. So the problem with a supercharger or a turbocharger is that it's not that easy to add one on to an existing engine. They're pretty expensive, like thousands of dollars. You have to do a lot of plumbing work with the uh intake or the exhaust system or both. You have to fit it under the hood,

which sometimes isn't that easy, and so on. It's a it's a big project to add a supercharger or a turbo charger to an existing engine, and it's not for the faint of heart. So the question here is could you use something that's a lot more common and a lot less expensive and a lot more readily available, like a leaf blower to accomplish the job of a supercharger and get more performance out of your engine at a

low cost. And this question is prompted by the fact that a article made the rounds on the internet a couple of weeks ago where a guy had taken a corvette and he had actually put two leaf blowers on it so that he could increase the amount of air going into the engine. And this leaf blower supercharger actually did seem to work. Now it's not gonna work as well as a real supercharger because leaf blowers can only

produce so much pressure. Uh you might get say one pound per square inch one p s I or maybe two p s i at the very most out of a leaf blower, and that's going to increase engine performance by say ten percent, which is nothing to sneeze at if you have a two hundred horse power engine. Now you have a two horsepower engine. But the interesting thing is that it is possible and it does actually work.

You can spend you know, two hundred dollars on a leaf blower, stick it in your engine compartment, increase your performance by by ten percent. That's that's not a bad trade off. So what are the problems with this idea? One problem is that most leaf blowers are incredibly loud and noisy, and there's no easy way to solve that problem, so you'd have to live with a certain amount of

noise coming from your blower. The other thing is that leaf blowers aren't necessarily made to be super reliable devices, and after you use one for a couple of hours or a couple of days, it might be that the plastic impeller explodes and shoots pieces of plastic into your air intake or something like that, but it is nonetheless an interesting kind of thought question about producing inexpensive supercharger like devices that are either electrically powered or small gas

engine powered to increase the performance of your engine pretty inexpensively. So let's say you were to try this. You go out, you buy a leaf blower, You stick it in your engine compartment, and run the air outlet of the leaf blower into the air intake of your engine, and you seal it up so you get a good amount of the pressure coming out of the leaf blower going into the engine without any leaks. Is it going to actually work?

And the question there comes down to the computer that's controlling your engine, the e c U or the engine control unit inside your car. There is a computer that's controlling the fuel injectors that are pumping the fuel into each of the cylinders, and that e c U can be either unsophisticated or sophisticated. A sophisticated one will look at the amount of fuel that's going in and the amount of oxygen that's coming out in the exhaust stream, and it can adjust the amount of fuel depending on

the amount of air that's coming into the engine. So with a sophisticated ECU, what's gonna happen is you blow more air into the engine. The e CU detects that there's more air available, it pumps more gasoline into the cylinder to take advantage of that extra air, and presto, you get more performance out of your engine. Automatically. The e c U handles the whole thing for you. And since there's not that much boost here, you know, one or two ps i, there's not that big of a

change that the e CU is having to handle. If you have a less sophisticated ECU, it's not going to do that. It doesn't have the mental capacity to look at the oxygen coming out in the exhaust stream and adjust the fuel and so on, and so you're gonna end up with no additional power, probably and possibly with a lean fuel mixture in the cylinder, which could cause

the image engine damage. So you would want to check your ECU before you tried this and make sure that it's sophisticated enough to handle what you're asking it to do. If you do that, and if you take some kind of precautions, say a screen or something that's going to catch any plastic that gets blown into the engine. If the UH leafblower catastrophically fails, then if you're the experimental type, this might be a fun experiment to try, just to

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