In article , Mary
Fisher wrote:

I think it's been discussed before but I can't remember the details.

What are opinions on Dyson vacuum cleaners, please?

To add my two pennyworth for what it's worth (or not), we bought a DC08
animal about 18 months ago.

It's too soon to say anything about reliability but it seems quite
sturdy, despite being made of plasticy bits, and it hasn't suffered
despite tumbling halfway down the stairs a few times before being
arrested by the hose.

We're well pleased by the performance. It tackles anything we throw at
it, including brick dust and plaster dust, but we don't expect miracles
and shovel up the thick of the plaster and brick dust first.

The suction is much better than our old Electrolux upright, as would be
expected considering the age and decrepit state it was in.

I was fitting some new doors at my son's house recently where they have
a fairly new Panasonic upright which was nothing like as effective as
our DC08 would have been. It would pick up the sawdust as it was pushed
forward then promptly disgorge some of it as it was pulled back. I
appreciate others have praised Panasonics in this thread, I'm not
disputing that, just passing on my limited short term experience with
one sample.

Apart from the initial novelty of being able to see all the gunge
whirling round in the canister there is the useful aspect of being
visually reminded when it needs emptying. The bag in the old one was
invariably overdue for emptying by the time we got round to it.

I've just washed the HEPA filter for the second time in 18 months
(should have been every 6 months but there was a delivery problem with
the tuits), although it was well covered with dust there'd only been a
very slight drop in suction. There's no doubt that the HEPA filter is
very effective, the air outlet on the old vac used to rapidly get coated
with fine tenacious black dust, after 18 months the outlet of the Dyson
is still spotless. I'm not sure how the non-HEPA Dysons fare in this
respect, I'd be a bit concerned if they didn't have some form of filter
between the dust canister and the fan.

I don't pretend to understand the theory of cyclone extractors, the air
appears to be sucked up the cones _after_ passing through the dust
canister and presumably dust also falls down out of the cones, but it's
certainly effective. When we were choosing the new vac I got the
impression that many of the bagless competitors just swirled the air
round a bit as it got sucked into the canister and relied on a (usually
small) filter to stop the dust going any further. I imagine these
filters would need much more frequent cleaning (or even replacement)
than the huge Dyson filter.

As others have commented, the abundance of spares in the shops does
suggest a reliability problem but some of these are attachments that I
don't think were supplied as standard with all models so really fall
into the accessories category rather than replacement parts. The
existence of replacement "lifetime" filters does suggest that the life
might not be as long as implied, OTOH some users might have become so
addicted to their vacuuming that they need to keep a spare filter so as
not to be deprived of a day's pleasure while they wait for the filter to
dry after washing it :-). Or perhaps today's throwaway society means
there are lots of people who would rather spend 12 quid on a new filter
instead of spending a few minutes swilling the dirty one out under the
tap.

A posting elsewhere in this thread mentions a tendency for the earlier
DC02s to topple over when pulled along. Fortunately the DC08 doesn't
suffer from this, the hose attaches very low down and the vac obediently
follows wherever you go, conveniently dispensing more mains lead as
required.

So despite it being ugly, noisy and expensive we're happy with our
Dyson.
--
Mike Clarke