Stihl VS Echo Backpack blower battle

[Applause] [Music] So today's video was supposed to just be on the steel BR800C kind of doing a walk around and review, but then these guys wanted to take it to the next level. So let's find out how this turns out. That would have taken a lot longer with the echo. Why do you do that? This is just like from 6 to 10 ft. This feels like it has the power of the echo like quite blank. Really? Yeah. So, you can't really hear Frankie in the background, but he suggests that we stick our old Echo up against this brand new steel and see what happens. on the other side. The PB770. Just like so many of my videos, it starts with me walking out of my front door with a camera in hand and somebody not realizing that I'm going to be talking to them for the first time with a camera in my hand. But that's what makes it fun. And today we're going to be talking to Dan. How are you, Dan? You used to be the main guy at Steel Corporate headquarters for blowers, right? And now you happen to be local to me. Exactly. Perfect. So, can you walk us through, you started out walking me through the priming of the steel BR 800C model, and you're just going to kind of familiarize us with this unit? Yeah. So, this is a really unique backpack blower. It's probably the first one of its kind on the market. And I'm just going to cut straight to the chase with what makes this machine really unique. And it's this handle right here on the side. Um, this is actually a handle that you can pull when it's on your back. And when you pull it, you pump it up and when it reaches a certain point, it turns the engine over and starts it up. Unless you're Xander, then this is what happens. For the for the grab it. So, it's pull it a couple pull it and then just keep pulling and then you'll hear it kind of Okay. Well, here we go. Wait a minute. I don't think we choked it. Maybe it unchokees itself. Yeah. You un pull once and let go like that. Pull and release it and then let it kick over there. Oh, wait a minute. No. Oh, no. This is difficult. They've made it too easy. Come on. What is that? Weird. Hey, St. Grab this for a second. That doesn't work. Did not work. This is a magic trick you have to figure out. [Music] Ah, there we go. That is easy when you figure it out. All right. Well, now this is actually the way it's supposed to work. One of the best things about this unit is turn it off and then you've got your side start right here to get it started. Again, it's a really easy, really gentle This unit right here in your hands has never been fired up, right? Exactly. So, what is the first time operators startup procedure when they go to do it? or once you get it fueled up, you're going to prime it. And anytime you have a backpack blower, you need to know they have relatively long fuel lines in them. And that fuel line is going to pick the fuel up from the tank, put it up into the carburetor, and then with this primer system, it's going to pull it through, and then push it back down into the tank. So, a lot of people think with gas powered equipment, if you prime it too much, you're going to flood the unit. Um, that's not true. You could prime this thing a 100 times. You're basically just purging air bubbles out of your fuel lines. Now, is that just this unit or is that power equipment in general? That's power equipment in general. Okay. So, you can just prime till the cows come home and never hurt it. You're not going to flood it. You can prime it till the cows come home. You will not flood it with the primer. All right. So, this is where things start to get weird. Frankie's got the old Echo on the left and Xander's got the brand new steel on the right. And I basically thought that Xander was going to smoke Frankie, but if you watch this, you'll see that Frankie, I think, actually wins this first round. And I wanted to find out what happened. So, when I asked Xander what was going on, he said he was just blowing normally while Frankie, on the other hand, was hustling. And you can see how much of a difference that makes. It's not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. Meaning Frankie hustling with an old unit can accomplish more than Xander just going at a normal pace with a brand new unit. But let's see what happens when they both hustle. All right, so another thing that's really cool about steel blowers is the choke. I mean, if you zoom in close, you'll see some symbols here that basically mean choke. When the flap is closed, that means the choke is choke is on. But the cool thing about blowers is when you put it in choke, you don't even need to know what that is. You just turn the lever and you pull it. When it starts kicking over, when it starts turning over, all you do is just flip the trigger and that choke is going to automatically release. This is kind of traditional control handle for a backpack blower, but it has a one-touch stop switch. So, you turn it off and it automatically bounces into the run position. And it also has a throttle lock or some would call this like a cruise control function where you can actually lock the throttle in varying positions and keep that on. And that's going to be really useful for those situations like we're about to be in now with pretty heavy duty leaf cleanup. So we decided to stage a pretty heavyduty cleanup by tossing out a bunch of bags of wet deadlies and tall grass and seeing if this steel backpack blower could handle it. Let's find out. So, how many bags did you toss out, Frankie? There must be eight, 10 bags. What is this? Just kind of like wet dead dillies. Well, some of it's leaves and there's some suck, but mostly it's long. It's just long grass. That's going to be impossible to blow. Well, start up and work your way in. I think I would work it. We'll see what We'll see. Y I got I got confidence in it. Why is that? You've never seen it before. Steel. Somebody likes steel. Yeah. Fanboy alert. Fanboy alert. What do you think? That's nice. Well, you've been running Echo all summer. Mhm. And all day today. And all yesterday. Yeah. So, how is it compared? It's definitely more comfortable. Really? Yeah. By a long shot. Really? Yeah. Even with on full blast, it's not like pushing me back. Okay. I'm not like working. Do you have the same power as the Echos? Yeah. Really? So, we have two different Echo units. We've got the ones with the throttle on the other side. 770T and the 580T. Yeah, the 580. That one's nowhere near as powerful as this one. That's the mid-level one though. It is. But that's the one that's got this control, which is way easier for me to use cuz then I can do this and I can hop on a like a mower and go around and do other stuff, come back to blowing. Okay. So, when you're storing it, you have this really nice metal ring right here. And you're just going to open this thing up, telescope that in. Bring this over here and rotate your elbow. And then this ring right here is going to hook onto this clip on this machine right here. There it goes. So now when you're transporting it, your tubes out of the way. You know, it's not going to get run over or destroyed by other things. Filters are really easy to access. The machine's going to come with a tool like this. This is just a combination wrench. And you can use this for removing the spark plug for taking out these two screws to replace the air filter. Let's do it. All right. The heck. We're not here to talk about it. We We need to do it, Dan. I hear you. Do it, Dan. Just do it. Do it, Dan. All right. So, they It's just two screws, right? Just two screws. Oops. I didn't quite get that one all the way off yet. Oh, look at that. Okay, so there she is. So, the the cover is actually in or the air filter is integrated into the cover. Yep. It sucks in through this side, which tells me Can you put the air filter back in? Yep. Which tells me that this side of the air filter is going to get plugged up sooner than later. So, when that happens, is it possible to rotate it like that or is not recommended? Sure is. But but really, you shouldn't need to do that. I mean, these things are sucking so much air through there, it's really going to disperse itself in one thing that you might also want to look at once you open this cover, there's actually a winter shutter on there. What? So, if you're operating this machine in cold weather, I don't know if you can get a shot of this or not, but we've got a picture of the sun and a picture of a snowflake there. And if you want to run it in really cold, icy conditions, you just move this over to the side and it opens a little bit of hole, a little hole, and that's going to just let the warm air from that engine compartment circulate into the air filter, and it prevents it from getting iced out. So that's the summer and the winter shutters. So on round two, Xander's got the brand new steel on the left this time, and Frankie's got the old Echo on the right, but Xander was told to hustle and work like Frankie does all of the time. And you can see that the results are much more even. Actually, in fact, you can actually see where the steel with the extra power does pull ahead in the end. But the overall results kind of tell you that it's the operator that makes the biggest difference. If you've got a guy that hustles, he's going to beat a guy that works at a normal pace. Even if the guy working at a normal pace has the absolute best equipment, and the guy that hustles maybe doesn't, the operator makes a big difference. But you then combine a good operator with a good piece of equipment and that's where you're really hitting your sweet spot. [Music] Wanted to flip flip this thing around and show you that it's got a hip belt on it. Well, this machine here has so much power that this hip belt actually really helps you get the job done faster in a more comfortable way. Okay. Um, it's light. It's comfy. It It's light. It doesn't. It's not light when you pick it up, but as soon as you put it on your back, the weight's all even. And it's Well, strap in. That's why they have all them fancy buckles. That's the thing. Before you even put those on, it feels light. Okay. I definitely run around all day like this. I'm going to see if it'll work. All right. Well, let's see if we can't get this thing started here. So, Dan's priming the bulb. He's making sure he's got enough fuel in it. So, we're going to put the choke on. Yeah, I almost forgot. I think we need to grab our hearing protection and our eye protection before we do this. This isn't a steel approved video. This is a dirt monkey approved video. So, want to make sure that when you're starting it, you put your mouth right on the receiver tube and suck in. Suck, don't blow. The boys seem to think that the steel has more power and is more comfortable, but we're also not doing a very fair comparison. Ekko does have a brand new unit that they're coming out with. All right. So, this is Echko's newest backpack lure, the PB810T, and it's their biggest at over a,000 CFM, but it's actually really light. It's because this is all made out of carbon fiber. All of the main components and framework, it's carbon fiber, super light that I would rather put that headto head against than my fouryear-old old faithful that's been with me forever. So you guys tell me, would you be interested in seeing a headto-head with Ekko's brand new one? Maybe I can get RedMax to bite and put theirs and steels and kind of do it three ways where we talk about long-term use, like comfort, like how when you use it all day long, how does it perform? Plus power, balance, and I don't know, price as well. You guys tell me. Is that something that you guys would like to see? Comment down.