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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> and served for almost 10 years before being passed on

Wait what, is ten years supposed to be a good lifetime for vacuum cleaners?

My mom still uses her Hoover from the early 70s. It's mostly metal and the bags for it are still readily available at the store.

A Dyson would probably clean better, but she's not going to upgrade until her old one breaks, which may be never.

That said, it hasn't been completely care free. My parents have had to replace the belts several times, but those parts that are easily available and very cheap. The light bulb is more of a special order part, but you can find them on the internet.

In comparison I bought a Dyson vacuum back in the early 2000s and it died due to the plastic at the joint between the handle and the body breaking after about 15 years. There was no repair that didn't cost more than a new vacuum cleaner. Also, the hose that connected to the corner brush never connected properly because of a factory error, so it always had tape holding the hose on.

But we replaced it with a Dyson ball vac because my wife was convinced they did a better job getting the dirt up. The ball vac is still going strong, although I think we may have shortened it's life at one point. It had gotten plugged up at one point and after my wife had tried to vacuum two rooms it suddenly shut off. I took it apart and removed the blockage but it still wouldn't turn on. So I used a shop vac on the blow side to force air through the motor to get it spinning again and discovered that it had probably thermally shut down because the air that came out the other side was so hot you couldn't put your hand over it. A few seconds of that and the vacuum turned back on and sent out a blazing hot stream of air for several minutes. I'm pretty sure if I took it apart I'd find cooked and now brittle plastic around the motor housing.

My wife has caused every vacuum we’ve ever owned to literally catch fire. Ranging from cheap Bissell to expensive Dyson. It’s quite impressive, actually. The cheap ones usually last <1 year while the Dysons last ~2 years. So now we just buy the cheapest one and run it into the ground. It probably doesn’t help that we have 5 animals + 1 husband in the house.

Ouch. Maybe you should be more aggressive about cleaning out the filters? Our Dyson says to clean them every 6 months or so I think, but if your house is especially dirty (say because the dogs track in a lot of dirt and shed) you should do it more often.

If you have not done it in awhile it can be surprising just how much better at picking up dirt it will become after a good cleaning. Because the filters are trying to get down to 2.5ppm they clog easily.

I wonder how much that Hoover cost brand new (adjusted for inflation, of course).

I've always had the narrative in my head that appliances have become flimsy and have shorter lives because people tend to buy whatever is the lowest price. A race to the bottom on prices means a drop in quality.

> before being passed on and still works

They said it's still working, so seems like its lifetime is greater than 10 years.

I'd say with couple of times a week usage for a thing made out of plastic I could expect a lot more troubles than it had.

It did require one dyson service which they kindly provide even for old devices and one this pipe thingy swap since it ripped.

But as other commenter pointed out - it still works we just wanted to move on to something smaller and cordless and we expect the first thing that will fail in V11 is going to be batteries because other than that they're really sturdly built.

Any cordless appliance with non-replaceable batteries is going to be designed to last only as long as the batteries. Typically 5 years or so.

At least cordless tools usually use replaceable (but absurdly expensive) battery packs. Home goods however seem far slower to adopt battery pack technology.

One thing I hate is that every single manufacturer has their own special battery tech that is expressly incompatible with every other manufacturer. This is an area that is absolutely crying out for standardization but probably won't get it because they're making too much money selling literally $7 of materials and labor for $80. I meant that too. 8 18650s for $0.50 each, plus a cheap off-the-shelf $1 charge controller and plastic case.

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