All things being equal the leafblower sucks as hard as it blows, so you'd get no net thrust pointing it forward at the sail. As Mythbusters found, in practice the forward thrust may be a little greater than the rearward thrust due to "reflection" off the sail, but essentially you are cancelling out almost all of the energy in the leafblower. You might get some more forward thrust if you stood amidships and pointed the leafblower at 90 degrees to the direction of travel into a Bermudan rigged sail since this is well suited to turning sideways air pressure into rearward thrust.
If however you removed the sails altogether and simply pointed the leafblower rearward, you'd get the most thrust of all (due to the least losses). It would act as a small jet engine. Trying to blow a sail boat along with a device that is on said boat is, at best, a very inefficient way to power your boat. The whole point of sail powered craft is to negate the need for such devices and harness the enourmous power churing through Earth's atmosphere.
There are no free lunches when it comes to energy.
If however you removed the sails altogether and simply pointed the leafblower rearward, you'd get the most thrust of all (due to the least losses). It would act as a small jet engine. Trying to blow a sail boat along with a device that is on said boat is, at best, a very inefficient way to power your boat. The whole point of sail powered craft is to negate the need for such devices and harness the enourmous power churing through Earth's atmosphere.
There are no free lunches when it comes to energy.
Last edited:
