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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

It's hit or miss. For a plug-in vacuum, there are others I would choose first. But for a cordless stick vacuum, nobody else is comparable.

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> But for a cordless stick vacuum, nobody else is comparable.

I own one; if it is better than the rest then the whole genre of stick vacuum cleaners should be taken out back and shot.

Core function (sucking things up from my carpet and disposing of the content): charitably I would say it is poor for the half a room that the battery charge lasts for. Build quality: terrible cheap brittle cheap shattering cheap plastic. Price: extremely expensive, 2x anything else.

I have had some shitty appliances over the years, but those tend to at least be so cheap that the only guilt you feel throwing them in the bin is that you are destroying the planet and not your finances.

I wonder about this, I heard same claim before. I however owned 2 of them over the last 5 years(moved a country and did not bring first one). Fact that I bought the second one kinda tells the story.

Honest I never had any issue with them.. maybe if you have a huge house? Or really thick carpets. I find it incredibly convenient and it works well enough, convenient means you can use it every day and do not need to get through that barrier of getting something out of the closet. I have the charging station mounted next to the fridge and honestly I will never buy another kind of vacuum.

It certainly is convenient enough to use every day, but you have to. Any attempt to deeply clean a moderately sized room is going to involve considering a recharge, and certainly more work than basically any plug in.

I can think of a few small flats with all laminate flooring I have lived in that it would have been great in, but the $20 small plug in thing I had worked probably just as well, and not a lot less convenient.

Seems like a conventional, more powerful and cheaper vacuum that was the same factor to fit next to the fridge would suit you better.

I haven't seen a cordless vacuum that actually worked and have resorted to corded vacuums for my entire life.

Vacuums should suck, they should suck a lot but Dysons don't really suck all that much (haha)

Hmm that is kinda my point for my uses it does suck more than enough ;) but then we don't have any carpets except carpeting on stairs and it's charge is more than enough for that on max power.

If I had carpets in the house I think I would get corded as well. But why have carpets is a better question.

I don't really disagree. They seem flimsy, battery life ain't great. But they suck better than any other cordless stick vac. Which might say more about the competition than anything else. I'm actually pretty impressed with what it picks up, given that it runs on a battery.

> if it is better than the rest then the whole genre of stick vacuum cleaners should be taken out back and shot

Great (and amusing) comment; we have three vacuums in the house: a 1984 Central Beam, a 2002 Miele corded canister, and a Dyson cordless stick vac. I've replaced the bearings, motor brushes, power head belt and beater, and smooth floor head exactly once each on the Beam. Other than changing bags and HEPA filters, the Miele hasn't needed a thing, and the Dyson, well as I detest throwing things out, I've fixed it several times to-date, but it truly is shoddy quality for the price.

The battery pack died twice - the first time, I replaced it with another Dyson pack thinking I could repair the original - no such luck as the PCB is sealed with a thick layer of silicone, and the thermal cutout pretty much has to be destroyed to be removed as it's epoxied between two of the batteries. I managed to remove all six batteries and found one faulty cell, damaging the PCB in the process. I repurposed the rest of the cells to fixing a laptop battery pack.

We were careful with the second pack and ensured it was only charged for three hours at a time after the batteries were drained, but it also died, while its cheap ($60 vs. $250) Amazon replacement has been solid ever since.

Then the powerhead stopped working. After taking it apart, it was obvious that the wires traveling through the swivel joint lacked mechanical protection from repeated stress . Most of the wires on "good" vacuums that pass through a swivel joint are protected by a coiled spring with plenty of slack. In the Dyson, there are two 18GA wires with thin insulation passing through the joint. The positive wire was severed, and the negative wire was very close to failure. I managed to strip away enough insulation to attach two new wires with appropriate slack within a protective spring (from a ballpoint pen). So far, so good.

I'd have to say Dyson stick vacs are engineered to fail in several ways. Interestingly, my wife purchased a Dyson canister vacuum for the night cleaners at her office, and it's still going strong 10+ years later.

Thanks that was very informed and helpful.

I applaud your fine work. Funnily enough I had first gen canister way back in the day and it was a reasonably good product, didnt quite get the 10 years out of it, but respectable nevertheless.

I will keep in mind your experience, the nature of this beast and break out the tool kit at the first sign of trouble, as it appears many of the faults are really just quality or design issues.

Repurposing battery cells is probably just beyond how far I will go, I never got the battery building merit badge in my scout days, but never too late to try!

I had a Dyson cordless. I couldn't clean a while room on a charge. I live in a 2 storey house, it couldn't do the whole stairs. It got quickly worse. Lovely light format, but far too weak to be practical.

I find their stick vacuums are complete junk. I'll never buy a Dyson again. They get clogged almost every time you use them (you gotta either jam a butter knife down the main intake or take apart the filter, both susceptible to blockage). The max button gets stuck in the on position, the battery only lasts a few months. I don't understand the appeal at all.

The max button is like the old turbo button for your computer.

Does anyone really use 'slow' mode?

Slow mode would increase the battery life from 5 to 10 minutes though.

It also reduces suction, thus requiring 20 minutes to do the 5 minutes of vaccuming.

What type of floor do you and others complaining in the thread have? I own one, and almost never use the "max" setting. I have hardwood floors and a hardwood floor-specific head for the vacuum, so I'm wondering if all the negative experiences are coming from folks with carpet.

Carpet, and rugs; hardwood floors get hand polished in my house, we are not savages.

I use max for carpet, weak mode for hardwood. Doesn't take a lot to pick things up off a hard surface, but running the carpet beater off air suction needs a lot more oomph.

Turbo mode kills the battery faster and stresses the battery harder.

So basically when I push that 'max' button I am overclocking my dyson. Walking the glorious tightrope between a performance boost and molten mess of silicon.

Cleaning day just got a whole lot more fun.

I guess I've had better luck. It doesn't clog for me (but it does suck up so much fur from apparently clean carpet that it fills the basket fairly quick). My only real complaint is that the charging base is flimsy. I haven't broken it yet, but that's because I'm fairly careful with it because it looks so fragile.

>They get clogged almost every time you use them

Sounds like Dyson would be a perfect to start making consumer printers!

With air flow based paper loading mechanism.

They are generally the most powerful stick vacs, but in my research it seems like there are several more practical options (and for a lot less money). I like the vacuums with a single head containing both a soft roller with an exposed front face (for picking up larger debris while maintains decent section with hard floors) and a traditional brush roller behind it. The Dysons I have seen come with two heads that are interchangeable, and in my apartment changing the head between hard floors and carpet is a total non-starter.

If you want to suck sand out of a groove in a hard floor with sheer power, or get the most debris you can out of a thick carpet, Dyson might be a great choice. But if you just want to quickly do a routine vacuuming of your (smallish) home I think there are better cheaper options.

We mostly end up using ours for touch up work between deep cleaning with a corded commercial vac that I bought years ago. The battery just lasts barely long enough to make a halfway decent pass over the living room. Good for when I want to just quickly get the place tidied up without dragging out the rest of the cleaning gear. I find that we keep the house cleaner in general if it's trivial to run a vacuum over the floor pretty often.

Their hair straighteners are also awesome - the only brand able to put a curl into my wife's hair.

Hmmm, straighteners, put in a curl, sounds defective.

No, it's called a 'straightener' but it's a generic tool for controlling the shape of hair - can straighten or curl - both are intended use-cases.

Can hair curlers also straighten hair or is it a one way process?

I think hair curlers are cylindrical, while straighteners are flat. You can curl with a flat surface by heating up and then curling around the whole thing. But with a curler there's nothing flat to shape against!

I have googled it, a person on youtube claims to be able to straighten hair with a curler; some kind of magic I think - I am not willing to suffer the pain that watching the video would inflict on my youtube reccomendations to determine the exact form of magic or witchcraft involved.

Just searching for it probably did harm in and of itself. "Because you searched for..." type of stuff

Probably best I log out of youtube on the tv otherwise someone is going to expect dyson hair curlers/straighteners/curlers for christmas.

I have a Shark Vertex Cordless. It has a duo dry roller and a no-tangle roller. No other Cordless Vac had that.

It's last year model though, not sure what the improvements are now!

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