nizo's Journal: My new $60 vacuum really sucks!

Having gotten sick of running my old vacuum over the carpet and still seeing lint and hair everywhere with nary a bit picked up, I went and bought this new Eureka 431A Optima Lightweight Upright Vacuum. It came in the mail yesterday (free amazon shipping yipee!). It was fairly simple to put together (no tools are required). Assembly is more fun if you pretend you are putting together a bazooka or small nuclear reactor. Once that was done, I plugged it in and off I went. It was much less noisy than the old Useless Vac(tm) and it actually picked up all the visible lint and a cat-sized pile of cat hair. I considered sucking up some of my daughter's smaller toys as a test but decided I didn't want to break the vacuum on the first day; however I am willing to bet this puppy could suck up just about anything on the floor. For $60 this ugly green vacuum is a great deal, plus since it is lightweight (11 measly pounds) it will actually get put away instead of becoming a permanant fixture in our living room (the lime green color helps here too). It is bagless but has a changeable canister filter (two included with the vac) that will probably need to be cleaned fairly often, but that is a small price to pay to actually get stuff off my carpet. I can't wait to test the brush-free sucking mode on our wood floors.

Customization

[RailGunner]

If the vacuum really sucks you could always put a University of Michigan sticker on it.

You know, when I was in Ohio, I went to a store that sold Ohio State stuff on one side, and Michigan stuff on the other. I bought a couple OSU shirts, a gym bag, a mouse pad, etc, and almost bought a "stick to all surface" Michigan decal. My wife asked me what I was going to do with that. When I told her that I was going to drain the toilet and put it on the bottom so I could piss all over Michigan every day, she made me put is back.

(True story, by the way.)

Go buckeyes.

Huh.

[Some Woman]

I would never think that a vacuum that cheap could be that good.

Re:Huh.

[nizo]

I thought about taking the old one to a shop (yeah that would be cheap). Then I thought about trying to replace the belt; about $15 (at least) for the belt plus who knows how much effort (I would need to take the jigsaw puzzle of plastic parts apart to do it, and even assuming that fixed it, it never worked very well anyway). Then I saw this new one on amazon; it got pretty good ratings, but I admit the size (small) and the cost (low) made me wonder. So far I am a happy camper however :-)

Considering....

[Elpacoloco]

If I paid $60 for a vacuum, I'd expect it to suck! ....I'll shut up now.

Dust Collector

[Shadow Wrought]

We had to do emergency vacuum repair to our behemoth of a vacuum last weekend. It had sucked up a small stick which jammed the roller, causing the rubber belt to melt away and burn due to friction. We thought it was worse than it was because the burning rubber (oddly enough) had caused smoke to come out of the vacuum. We were very, very stoked that all we had to do was replace the belt;-)

A firend of mine has a woodshop behind his house and he recently invested into a large saw dust collector. He proud

audience: How hard DOES it suck...?

[BandwidthHog]

A few years ago I found an old, nasty Kirby G3 at a yard sale for $3.00. It looked like it had been used to clean out a wet morgue... twice. I spent that entire weekend tearing it down to the smallest pieces I thought I’d still be able to put back together, and cleaning them in the strongest stuff I thought they could withstand.

Not only was it worth every last minute of effort, but I’ve more then recouped my initial investment by charging the nice little old lady downstairs for sucking the cobwe

We have an Oreck.

[KshGoddess]

In fact, we have 2. The (8lb) upright and the canister (because it was free with the upright). Ben owned them before we got married. They're awesome, and make stairs easy to clean.

We've had 2 run-ins with Kirby people, though. They "showed us" how much better the kirby was, and admittedly, it was better, but we don't vacuum every week, so it doesn't warrant a $2k vacuum to do so. One salesman told us he wanted to buy a gamecube after he bought his kirby. I wanted to smack him. He probably lived in an apartm

Re:We have an Oreck.

[nizo]

I remember one pushy salesguy trying to sell me a $2000 vacuum; my response was I knew some people up the street who always had spotless carpets. They paid a lady to clean their house for $7/hour; if she came and vacuumed my house once a week $2000 would get me nearly five and a half years of her time. I asked him if his vacuum would clean by itself but apparently it still needed me to push it around. Personally for 2 grand I would rather just let the cleaning lady in :-)

Obligatory M$ Joke

[Le Marteau]

"The day Microsoft makes something that does not suck is the day they make vacuum cleaners".

Hoo wah.