"harryagain" wrote in message
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"polygonum" wrote in message
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On 23/08/2014 01:02, Grimly Curmudgeon wrote:
And yet... 20 years ago I bought a Nilfisk that had 900W of motor
power and it suckethed mightily, so mightily I thought the carpet
would come up.

An enormous number of years ago, I did a spell cleaning a hospital. We
had a range of vacuum cleaners. Of those, the Nilfisks were astonishingly
good (I think they were 900W). I detested the BVC/Goblins because they
were so noisy whereas the Nilfisks outperformed them at an incredibly low
noise level. I also rather liked the aluminium pot on wheels design. The
worst that I can remember were various Hoovers.

Exactly so.

Interestingly, for many years, my mother had a Hoover Constellation. It was
an original one from when they first came on the market - all metal sphere
in grey and blue and heavy. That machine had enough power to lift itself,
hovercraft-style, off the floor - including on deep pile carpet - and float
around at the touch of your finger. It would suck the paint off walls. I
don't recall how powerful the motor was on it, but from the few times that I
did work on it putting in new brushes and I think once a new armature
because the commutator was worn so much (she used it a lot !) I don't seem
to remember it being very big. The fan unit, on the other hand, I seem to
think was. It was not a noisy machine either. I suppose that was 50 years
ago now that she first had it.

When she 'retired' it, I took it into work, where we built a little Dexion
trolley for it. It then gave a number of additional years' service, daily
sucking and blowing (it had another hose port at the bottom where the
exhaust air came out to make it float) dust and crap out of every TV set
that came through our busy national-chain TV rental workshop.

Perhaps we've already forgotten the art of building vacuum cleaners, or
maybe it *is* all just driven by price. But I still don't think that "energy
saving" is a valid reason in this particular case, to mess with the existing
technology. It's just another case of an EU department getting a bee in its
bonnet for all the wrong reasons, much like taking lead out of solder ...

Arfa