Leaves, Leaves and Leaves. During the fall that is the only thing on my mind. I love when the leaves change colors, but hate having to rake and bag them. There are a lot of products on the market that can help with the clean up and today we are talking about one of them, the Toro Ultraplus Blower/Vac 51621.
Yes, this is a 3 in one machine. The Toro blows, sucks and bags your yard material. During this fall I had a chance to use the machine and have to say it does a great job. I really don’t use the blow feature of this machine as I have a cordless blower that is just much easier to use. However the sucking and bagging is what I have used the most. However I am sure you want to hear about the blower. As a blower, this does a great job. This produces a 250 mph wind speed, pretty fast. Toro also includes an oscillating attachment that will oscillate back and forth so you don’t have to move your wrist. Yes pretty gimmicky, but never the less, it does work well on hard surfaces. Okay, on to the shedding and bagging.
The suction of the unit is great. Not that it will suck up bricks, but it does a great job even on wet leaves. It’s kind of hard to design a tool like this because you need a tool that sucks well, but not too well where you are picking up rocks and denting the metal impellers. Toro has a Shredz ring that works in conjunction with the metal impellers to help reduce the size of leaves as they enter the bag. Not sure how this all works, but I can say for dry leaves it does a great job. While the system will pick up wet leaves extremely well, it doesn’t shred them as well as it does with dry leaves, but that is what I would expect. Now don’t get me wrong, this is the best system we have seen for wet leaves, but just don’t expect them to be dust when you’re done. The unit includes a main tube for dry leaves and also has a power insert for wet leaves. I have a pine tree in the back, so I have tons of pine cones. Again it will pick them up, but doesn’t shred them really fine. Again I don’t care because pine cones don’t take up much room. The bag is extremely easy to empty. You put the bag over a can, unzip the bottom zipper and empty.
The unit does have a variable speed control which is great for blower mode and also useful for vac mode. Attaching any of the attachments is also very easy. Switching between blower mode and sucking mode attachments takes only a couple of minutes. The attachment style they use is pretty well designed. Once in place, the attachment will stay in place even if you bump or jar the attachment. The unit comes with a 2 year warranty.
I have to say this is one of the best 3 in 1 yard tools we have tried. The unit is powerful and easy to use. It does a great job for sucking and shredding leaves, even wet and heavy leaves.
Toro 51621 UltraPlus Blower/Vac, Red
Nice to see a good working blower vac, my dad had an old crafstman and that thing would vibrate itself apart. If you barely knock it the tubes would fall apart.
I like the video you guys did showering the power of the blower, looks like a solid machine.
I tried all the different affordable options to deal with leaves over the years – Hand rake, leaf blower as a blower and as a vac, shredder with the weedwacker line like the one you posted yesterday (mine was a craftsman but very similar), grass catcher pulled behind lawn mower. All of these where about the same speed – very slow. The best solution that I finally figured out is to mulch them with the riding lawn mower. You have to have a mulching mower and I bought GATOR BLADES that really help improve the mulching speed. The create an updraft that seems to recirculate the leaves within the mower deck. Overall I would say this is five times faster than any of the above methods, leaves the leaf debris in your grass for fertilizer, is very affordable if you have a mulching mower and its very easy. The other tools still have there places and I still use the blower for landscaped areas but this mulching has really saved me a ton of time, effort and money since I discovered it about 8 years ago.
Cool,I have the Toro Ultra which seems to be the same thing without all the attachments and its awesome. We have a very large leaf dropping tree out in our front yard,as do all our neighbors. It cuts job time by a good amount of time.
Like you mentioned you gotta be careful with wet leaves,they have a habit of clogging the tool if it sucks too many at one time.
Our tree is not very grown at this point, yes we have just one in the front yard. The house is two years old as is the tree so leaves are not that big of an issue now, thank God.