Referencing also Choice’s poll in vac testing we just purchased a new vacuum selected from the Choice tests (thus no specifics here) and primarily used the scores for cleaning.
We went to the shops ‘dumb and blind and stupid’ to see how it would go. The pitches (when there were sales people rather than buy it from the shelf or not) went like:
- the salesmen asked all the ‘right’ questions to qualify what we thought we wanted.
- put standard dirt in The Demo Carpet and vacuum it with a commercial shop vac. Display the dirt collected.
- put ‘a competitor model’ to the test and it obviously got more, that was displayed.
- put ‘their target machine’ to the test and it got still more, and more, and that was displayed as well as the sight of the powerhead beating the carpet and uniquely sucking the dirt from in front of it.
Observation:
- the demos were predictable, rehearsed demos, but the vacuums seemed to clean much as the Choice scores, suggesting the ‘standard sales demo’ and Choice tests may be superficially similar.
- we were able to negotiate an additional discount after the ‘best offer’.
On getting ‘it’ home (subtitled: reality sets in):
- we prefer bagless but a bag model came to the fore from Choice, and that model had better ‘bells and whistles’ than its sister bagless model so home we took it. Our carpet is medium pile wool. the vac has a powerhead (as did all our previous few vacs). Each vacuuming with a powerhead skims some fluff from the wool. The bag will fill with wool fluff regardless of dirt so bags, no matter how big, will fill sooner than they would with just ‘dirt’ so we also bought the diverter accessory (a small bagless attachment that collects most of the fluff and dirt before it goes to the bag). It is reminiscent of a stick vac cylinder.
- Running the powerhead, the diverter needed emptying (fluff) once per ‘normal’ room and twice for the ‘big one’ but is easy and tidy to empty.
- the powerhead has unusually stiff bristles. We did nothitnk about this whilst shopping. In retrospect maybe not the best for wool carpet life since the carpet will ‘erode’ more quickly than from a powerhead with softer bristles (or using a suction-only head). The powerhead has 4 height settings and on the highest it pulls slightly less fluff than the old vac that automatically set height based on brush drag, but on high setting it is not as engaged with the carpet as on the medium setting. The lower height settings are awesome but seem abusive to wool carpet IMO, and I suspect the cleaning performance might be noticeably reduced on high height.
Recommendation for Choice to consider: Add runs on each of nylon, polypropylene, and wool carpets with low and medium pile to the report. Who does 10-strokes (or religiously even 4) with their vacs? Differing carpet types should be added to the mix, and most carpets would thus be represented.
