"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"harryagain" wrote in message
...

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
...


"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 ...

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.


All the vacuum cleaners that I and my parents have owned that I can
remember working on, have had multistage fans, It's an old and
well-established technology.

Arfa

The last ones I dismantled hadn't.