Instruments of dust bunny doom
The author's collection of vacuum cleaners
The machines that create the Wind That Blows Backwards
Central vacuum cleaning system
A central vac is understandably abhorrable from a dust bunny’s point of view and I don’t care much for them either. There’s a honking great vacuum unit mounted to a wall somewhere utilitarian and the entrails of a central vac coil behind the walls and run all around the house.
Instead of hauling electrical cords and a cumbersome motor unit around the house, the idea of the central vac is to just plug vacuum hoses into handy holes around the house and away you vac.
Moving those central vac hoses from room to room was like wrestling a large python, winning then having to haul its stubbornly inert carcass from room to room.
Dyson V8 animal
What that name is supposed to invoke I have no idea. Something both mechanical and organic? But I’m sure people got paid handsomely to make up the name so that’s a good thing.
Our Dyson V8 Animal has a colour scheme inspired by a mandrill’s bottom so perhaps that’s the animal the name refers to.
Functionally this unit is the Great White Shark of dust bunny demise. This hyper-evolved specimen is the spawn of PhD’s run amok in their labs.
I smell computational fluid dynamics at work.
The plastics have the sturdy but brittle feel of a toy water pistol from Hong Kong circa 1968 so don’t drop it. Looks great, works fabulously well, sucks the money right out of your pocket.
Wonderful voiding system. We should all be so lucky.
ShopVac- Wet/Dry utility unit
A 5.5 Peak Horsepower* ShopVac for home, garage, workshop or vehicle (or a basement that gets soggy in the spring). Snorts up water and inhales almost anything.
Boasting huge tubes and a range of intrusive nozzles, it can be difficult to manoeuver at speed in tight spaces. It’s versatile though. Put it together backwards and suck turns to blow for those occasions when you have lots of bits you’d rather blow into your neighbour’s space than vacuum up yourself.
No prizes for loveliness and the handle makes my hand hurt when I lift it because the smooth bit’s on the wrong side.
However this unit comes with two sneaky asterisks worth of weasel words*
* "Peak Horsepower" (PHP) … does not denote the operational horsepower of a wet-dry vacuum but rather the horsepower output of a motor, including the motor’s inertial contribution, achieved in laboratory testing. In actual use, Shop-Vac® motors do not operate at the peak horsepower shown.”
* “Boasts a belly of 11.5 gallons. But Tank capacity refers to actual tank volume, and does not reflect capacity available during operation.”
Pure evil.
Hoover Electrolux
Prettier than the Shop Vac, this shiny little unit may have evolved ‘Bagless Wind Technology’ but it has not yet learned to keep its tubes away from the public gaze.
It has no stomach bag but delivers all the bits into an internal dust bucket instead. The dust bucket’s transparent so you can examine the horrors you’ve sucked up, much like inspecting the better items you pick out your nose.
The clever handle and tubery lets you pretend you are the Schwartzenegger of domestic chores as you slide the handle of the business end to and fro like a pump action shotgun.
Very manoeuverable but not always in the direction you want to manoeuvre to.
Obviously based on biomimetic design, a self-coiling system slurps up the power line like the very opposite of a chameleon’s tongue.
Hoover Air Cordless
A lightweight waspy little vac with a 20w battery that we whip out and waggle around the house like one of those annoyingly zippy radio control race cars.
It is as a child compared to Dyson so it can only consume little bits at a time. But, like the Dyson, it doesn’t leave its tubes flapping about in public like those other primitives.
Probably the vacuum cleaner with most writing on it. Every part, function and feature is labelled, it’s a vertical poem on wheels.
The middle section lifts out to be a nifty handheld snorter and you get to see what treasure you’ve accumulated.
Made in Korea. For a wordy little unit, it goes unexpectedly silent as to whether north or south.
