Lawn Sweepers · Planning Tool
How long will clearing your acorns actually take? Set your yard size, how heavy the drop is, and the tool you'd use — and see the estimate, plus how much time each other tool would save or cost you.
This is a planning estimate, not a measured lab result. We don't stage timed field tests — we model it from realistic clearing rates and adjust for how heavy the drop is. Treat the number as a ballpark to plan your weekend around, not a stopwatch figure.
The starting clearing rates we assume, at a moderate drop:
Then we scale for the drop: a light drop is faster, a heavy drop or a mast year needs more passes and takes considerably longer. Your real time depends on terrain, obstacles, how dry the acorns are, and your own pace — so your mileage will vary.
The single biggest lever on acorn cleanup time isn't how hard you work — it's what you're pushing. On anything above a small lot, the gap between a rake and a sweeper isn't minutes, it's whole afternoons. The calculator makes that trade visible: pick your yard and drop, then click through the tools and watch the estimate swing.
That said, the fastest tool on paper isn't always the right one. A tow-behind sweeper only helps if you own a riding mower, and it's overkill for a small flat lot where a rake or rolling gatherer clears the job before you'd have hitched up. For which machine actually fits your yard, our guide to the best lawn sweeper for acorns walks through brush size, and whether a sweeper picks up acorns at all covers the technique that keeps your real time close to this estimate.