"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
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"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
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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 ...

Making a vaccum cleaner more efficient is easy - multi-stage fans.
Most have just the one, if they had say three, the same work could be done
for half the power.
Of course this costs more so unless they are all forced to do it none of
them will.
Everyone would go for the el-cheapo even though it used more power.