"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Arfa Daily wrote:
... if we've now got to start shaving a few watts off the motor of an
appliance that these days is probably used no more than 15 minutes a
week, in order to save power. I refer of course to the new vacuum
cleaner motor power directive from our chums at the EU ...

Eco-bollox at its most ludicrous ... :-\

15 minutes a week?

It does seem odd, but like all these things forcing makers to increase
efficiency is no bad thing. They won't do it on their own.

It's likely a pretty inefficient design that requires two horsepower to
lift some dust.

I really don't believe that. We have been making electric motors for 150
years or more and I'm pretty sure - particularly in these days of
'efficiency' - that manufacturers will have striven to get the most power
out of their motors for the least power in. How do you make a motor more
efficient ? Better bearings ? Maybe, a little. Wind it somehow differently ?
But nobody has thought of a way already ? How do you you make the vacuum fan
more efficient and so require less input power ? Again, I'm pretty sure that
the multistage fan design that is universally used in 'conventional' vacuum
cleaners is probably about as efficient as it can get. So in order to
generate a certain amount of suck, a certain amount of input horsepower to
the fan will be needed, and a certain amount of watts into the motor will be
needed. If you put less watts into a motor of the same efficiency, then less
horsepowers will come out, and the fan will not generate the same amount of
vacuum. I don't dispute that with a lot of costly R & D, there probably are
some improvements to be made to motor and fan efficiencies, but I don't
think that it will be anything very significant, and manufacturers aren't
going to pour money into a bottomless pit to try to find those efficiencies.
All that will happen is that vacuum cleaners will pass their current 'golden
age' and decline into a shadow of their former selves.

As to 15 minutes a week, when I was a kid, we had stay-at-home mums - they
called them housewives. Mine used to vacuum the house from top to bottom
most every day. It was what she did. It was her 'job'. She was proud of how
clean she kept her house, and probably had that cleaner running two hours a
day. Now, the whole family dynamic has changed. Most families are out all
day, so not dirtying up the house anyway. People are also fundamentally
lazy, and won't take the vacuum cleaner to rooms that are not used most of
the time. So these days, only the lounge, kitchen and maybe the bedroom get
hoovered, and how long does it take to do that ? 15 minutes maybe ? OK let's
be really generous and say that the dining room gets done as well, and the
hallway. Half an hour. And that's worth buggering up yet another industry
and mature product that works just fine, to save that small amount of power
for that small amount of time ? As I said, Eco-bollox at its most ludicrous.
If the people who come up with this **** had dynamite for brains, they
wouldn't have enough to blow their ears off ...

Arfa



--
*No I haven't stolen it , I'm just a **** driver*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.