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Thread Number: 42526
/ Tag: Recent Vacuum Cleaners from past 20 years
The Dirty Fan question |
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| Post# 446839 10/6/2021 at 15:48 (931 days old) by Eureka1998 (New York ) | ||
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| Post# 446840 , Reply# 1 10/6/2021 at 17:11 (931 days old) by suckolux (Yuba City, CA) | ||
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| Post# 446842 , Reply# 2 10/6/2021 at 17:28 (931 days old) by Blackheart (North Dakota) | ||
I think | ||
| Post# 446844 , Reply# 3 10/6/2021 at 18:42 (931 days old) by fan-of-fans (USA) | ||
bagless + tools on board | ||
| Post# 446891 , Reply# 4 10/7/2021 at 10:06 (930 days old) by Tekjunkie28 (Western Va) | ||
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You cant get asthma and allergen certified without having a clean air machine, easily anyways. Not many people are willing to carry around a bag of attachments either bc they are just lazy. | ||
Post# 446936 , Reply# 5 10/9/2021 at 00:59 (929 days old) by tolivac  (Greenville,NC) |
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Kirby still uses the direct air system,Sanitiare is still direct air,and several modles from Tacony-Simplicity,and Riccar.The system is still around.Not as mucch,though. | ||
| Post# 446969 , Reply# 6 10/10/2021 at 00:35 (928 days old) by huskyvacs (Gnaw Bone, Indiana) | ||
Likely to reduce the influx of returns and bad PR from people vacuuming up everything under the sun like it's a shop vac and breaking the fan or the motor. Less risk for consumer = less risk for company's image. Kirby and Sanitaire use some pretty tough fans and their machines tend to cost a lot more than consumer level budget vacuums so I think it weeds out some of the careless owners.
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| Post# 446985 , Reply# 7 10/10/2021 at 19:07 (927 days old) by eurekaprince (Montreal, Canada) | ||
I think we can thank Panasonic for taking the Hoover Dial-a-Matic configuration and making it work very, very well. That happened in the mid 1970's. By the 1980's the Panasonic bag-first upright was top rated in Consumer Reports. I think people liked the sleeker motor head that looked like it could get under furniture more easily, and hose attachment for cleaning with tools was very easy- just open the hose port high up on the back of the unit and you were good to go. Panasonic also made these for Kenmore eventually, so the Sears stores provided lots of exposure to the new configuration.
My problem with this famous Panasonic "Dial-a-Matic" design was that the brush roll with beater bars kept spinning while you used the cleaner in hose mode. There was always a danger of damaging fingers and toes and bare floors and anything that came into contact with the brush roll while it was in hose mode. | ||
| Post# 446990 , Reply# 8 10/10/2021 at 20:50 (927 days old) by Eureka1998 (New York ) | ||
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Thanks guys!
All these actually seem like really plausible answers! I just always found it weird as a kid cause there was a transition time where you'd see a company like Hoover sell both their clean air units (Windtunnels) and dirty fan units (Widepath,Elite,Caddy Vac) at the same exact time, then they just kind of drop the dirty fan units like flies out of nowhere. This was a really insightful thread!
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| Post# 446997 , Reply# 9 10/11/2021 at 08:32 (926 days old) by suckolux (Yuba City, CA) | ||
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| Post# 447009 , Reply# 10 10/11/2021 at 18:53 (926 days old) by eurekaprince (Montreal, Canada) | ||
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Better than the uprights with a belt clutch mechanism are those with a separate motor for the brush roll, because you can shut off the brush roll with a flip of a switch on the handle. The top-rated Kenmore Elite and the discontinued Miele U1 Dynamic upright both offer that convenient feature. I think Aerus’ two motor upright also offers that feature.
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| Post# 447011 , Reply# 11 10/11/2021 at 21:42 (926 days old) by Oreck_XL (Brooklyn, New York 11211) | ||
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| Post# 447195 , Reply# 12 10/20/2021 at 18:02 (917 days old) by FanOfVacuums2 (Williamsburg, VA) | ||
Hmmmm, let me share my thoughts.
Dyson unveiled their clean-air bagless models and they surely changed the market. It was much easier to imitate their design with a clean-air base. I know Hoover made their direct-air twin-chamber models, but boy did they leak and they did not work all that well once the filter became dirty. Cheap direct-air machines likely fell our of favor because companies such as Bissell and Dirt Devil began offering extremely cheap clean-air models that had on-board attachments. To make the cheapest machine possible, most companies looked overseas and from that came way more clean-air machines than direct-air machines. Certain companies also began advertising how their clean-air machines could suck up anything, building off the fear that a good majority of customers had about sucking bigger debris into their machines. I think a lot of factors played into it. If you do it right, a clean-air machine can be a far easier to use machine just as a whole. Many direct-air machines clean carpet excellently, but flop in attachment mode. For example, the Hoover Elites cleaned great in upright mode, but are not all that useful for anything much more than dusting and getting in corners in attachment mode. I have seen numerous different tries, none of which have floored me (no pun intended). Some of the best ones to use in attachment mode are the G-Series Kirbys, but transitioning to attachment mode is a little annoying and they still do not work nearly as well as something such as a $130 Hoover Tempo upright or a $250 Kenmore Elite upright. Overall, while it is a great machine, their design is quite dated and is not appealing to the average consumer. I just rebuilt one of the 12-amp Hoover Elite soft-guard things and it works amazingly well in upright mode, but just decently well through the hose and still not as well as a clean-air machine. You have to manually switch it into attachment mode, there is not much suction as the house despite having more than an older Elite (that matters a lot to consumers), and the unit is remarkably noisy. Also, Hoover was heavily pushing their clean-air offerings at the time as the WindTunnel was their latest and greatest design. It made more sense to offer a basic stripped WindTunnel than two different models, though Hoover did not always do things that made sense in the 2000s. They certainly did not drop the direct-air models for no reason. I am sure that sales reflected that consumers preferred the WindTunnels. Panasonic definitely got the clean-air design correct. Their Jet-Flo models were some of the best things on the market in my opinion. As other users noted, they had brush roll shutoffs, they were easy to change into canister mode, they were powerful in upright and canister mode which even meant that they were able to utilize extremely long extension hoses, they were able to make them very small and light depending on the target market, they were able to add unique features easily, and so forth. I always enjoyed how Hoover gave up on the design, but Panasonic took it and made it better and Hoover hopped back on the train. I think the best place for a direct-air machine nowadays is for lightweight and/or cordless offerings. For example, Hoover/Oreck/TTI released their cordless version of the XL21 base and it is great. This makes sense because one thing that direct-air machines are is efficient. Even the corded Oreck models are nice in their own way. A lot of people like the lightweight build of them and I think that is why they work. Also, they are great for the elderly and disabled. Just have a little canister such as an Oreck Buster in the house and you are good to go. I know some folks do not like having two machines for the job, but there is a give and a take. | ||
| Post# 447224 , Reply# 13 10/21/2021 at 17:32 (916 days old) by panasonicvac (Northern Utah) | ||
For my own answer here, consumers tend to want something that does great for cleaning other surfaces of the home. Not just carpets. Many direct air machines lack to have attachments on-board or doesn't have the hose power compare to many bypass machines. Sadly though, this makes consumers think that having better suction for attachments would also do a better job at cleaning carpets than direct air machines. This is why most manufactures turn away from their direct air models because more and more people would buy their bypass models over the other. Even when vacuum shops tried to sell them a direct air machine. But there are still people out there that would prefer to use a direct air machine. And there are some people like me that wished they would have a vacuum that not only does great for carpets but also something great for using attachments on-board without having to buy another machine. Well thankfully a few companies solved the problem here, one of which is Tacony. Tacony developed what's called a "Tandem Air System" for not only their uprights but also for their canisters and even for their central vacs as well. This is an ingenious idea in my humble opinion because not only it's a design that works but I also find that it cleans alot better than almost any other vacuum that I've seen or even used before.
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| Post# 447244 , Reply# 15 10/22/2021 at 12:20 (915 days old) by eurekaprince (Montreal, Canada) | ||
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I love fan-first uprights! I never use them for cleaning anything else but carpets. They are less bulky and lighter and don't require screaming 12 amp motors. They also have larger bags that can accumulate lots of carpet fluff with less need for frequent bag changes.
For everything else, I use a suction only canister. | ||
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Post# 447248 , Reply# 16 10/22/2021 at 13:48 (915 days old) by kloveland (Tulsa) |
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If not already mentioned, think about how many fans were broken back in the day. I remember a parent telling me at a livestock show (my dad is a retired FFA instructor) that she would frequently take her Eureka F&G in for repair because she would break the fan. The family lived in the country and her son and husband would track in small rocks and pebbles. She told me the vac shop owner in our town demonstrated a new type of vacuum. She said the dirt went through the hose instead of the fan. Thinking back she was probably referring to the Regina Housekeeper. This would have been early 90s.
As others have said the convenience of working on-board attachments and the fact that the average consumer is bent on bagless now. In the long run I don't know if clean air is better or not. Bagless vacs seem to have their own set of problems. | ||
| Post# 447253 , Reply# 17 10/22/2021 at 20:59 (915 days old) by fan-of-fans (USA) | ||
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I guess we could say that tool on board direct air setups were one step toward the modern clean air setup.
Prior to machines like Hoover Elites, Eureka Bravos, or Bissell Poweramps, you had the old F&G, Singer Twin Fan or Hoover Convertibles, which required the converter pan to be added to the bottom of the machine. Having a hose port on top of the vacuum was a step in simplifying the use of the hose. You saw this with machines like Whirlpool and Kenmore had in the 80s. By the time the Elites and Bravos came out, it seems like the older pan converter style vacuums got away from offering tool sets for the most part. The Eureka F&G was marketed as a carpet only vacuum for about it's last 25 years of production. Possibly Eureka still offered a toolset after that, but it wasn't promoted at all. Hoover got rid of the Convertible for the home market by 1993 and sold the design as a commercial carpet-only vacuum. In the commercial market fussing with pan converter tools would've been too much. By the time the bypass/clean air uprights had gotten popular, I guess this meant the end for Elites and Bravos, etc. as they, like their Convertible, Twin Fan, and F&G ancestors were now outdated. Really I guess you could even say the Convertible, Twin Fan, and F&G pan converter setup itself was even a simpler system to set up than even earlier vacuums of the 1920s-40s. You had the very early uprights that had front hose ports, which would require belt lifting. I guess the most recent vacuums of that design would be the Kirby and Royals. When the pan converter machines came out in the 50s I guess this would have been seen as simpler already than those. | ||
| Post# 447261 , Reply# 18 10/23/2021 at 11:29 (914 days old) by human (Pines of Carolina) | ||
Twin motors...
Eurekaprince wrote:
Better than the uprights with a belt clutch mechanism are those with a separate motor for the brush roll, because you can shut off the brush roll with a flip of a switch on the handle....I think Aerus’ two motor upright also offers that feature. I reply: Absolutely. That design is a direct descendant of the Electrolux Discovery II, which came out in the mid-'80s and is a pretty brilliant design. They basically took the best elements of a classic Electrolux canister and an Omniflow power nozzle and combined them into an upright to create an excellent all-arounder. It's little wonder that the design has gone largely unchanged for some 35 years. I have several of them under the Electrolux brand with various model names--Discovery II, Discovery Plus, Genesis LXe, Epic 3500SR. The only one I'm not fond of is the Discovery Plus with its awkward onboard tool storage. You basically have to offload the tools to make it usable. The separate tool caddie is a much better idea. | ||
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