alt Hacker NewsI bought a Dyson vacuum, or rather I was given one as a gift from my wife after she saw a joke twitter post about a man being happier about a new vacuum than the birth of his own kids. She gave it to me on Christmas Eve because I was about to vacuum the entire house with our old vacuum - which was also a fantastic vacuum, for the record.
My feedback:
1. It works great. I had to empty it several times because it was picking up so much more stuff than our existing vacuum did - mostly pet hair and the like.
2. It's the one with the little laser thing, which is a dumb little gimmick until you see it in action and then it's life-changing - if you're like me and find satisfaction in picking up every invisible crumb anywhere.
3. After a year and a bit, maybe less, it started misbehaving. It would suddenly turn off, then you'd have to let go of the trigger and pull it again; then it would work fine. Then it would happen a few times until it worked fine. Then it almost never worked fine. I kind of tolerated it for a while until I got fed up and googled the problem, and it was suggested to buy a new housing - the electronics plus the motor, basically the whole 'vacuum' part of the vacuum, which was only just over a hundred dollars direct from Dyson. Irritating to have to spend an extra hundred bucks to get my five hundred dollar vacuum working as expectred, but expected it to cost far more.
Would I recommend it? Not sure. It's very expensive, it works very well; it has a nice wall mount that charges it and which holds a small subset of the attachments it comes with. I'm glad I have it and I use it often.
Yes, it's plastic, but if it were, for example, steel or aluminium then it would be too heavy to use for any length of time. As it is, it feels very sturdy and has held up physically very well, but I'm obviously also not rough with it so there's no reason it would have any issues unless it were, in fact, cheaply or poorly made.
Replies
I've had this issue a few times. Took it apart and soaked/scrubbed anything without a pcb or wires coming out of it, and it worked fine after. Eventually the filter on the motor crumbled into dust (not suitable for picking up the dust from sanding paint off indoor walls). I tried to get the right one from Dyson but I ended up just grabbing something that looked like a distant cousin of the right filter off eBay and cut it into the right shape. It stopped working again after a few months, I was going to do the cleansing ceremony again, but then I dropped it and it started working fine again.
Going on 13 years now I think.
The trigger has a deliberate defect where it has the least possible amount of material right at the weakest most leveraged part.
It's a cheap part to replace. It also means a complete disassembly! A lot of it isn't hard but there are some wires that have to snake around, and popping out certain things requires some scary use of force. It took like 3 hours to do for mine.
Also these things don't seem to be great at battery maintenance. I forget how long that took me but it didn't leave any scars, I think it was easy. Just, more expensive. Less so now that batteries are cheaper. But I have my suspicion that their float charge mode is maybe not good & injured batteries. I specifically avoided that but still had issues.
The trigger really made me mad when I finally dug it out of mine. It was such a blatantly obviously designed-to-fail system. It really makes me super distrust this company.