DesertTortoise
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2014
- Messages
- 1,189
Was doing some shopping in Palmdale today so I could not resist swooping through the vacuum department of Sears. The new Elite canister was there on display so I asked the sales person to plug it in and let me play.
The first thing you notice is how quiet it is. You can have a comfortable conversation with someone standing right over it while it's running. The floor brush is also nearly silent. It is noticeably quieter than my Windsor or my Electrolux.
The hose is interesting. The 90 degree elbow at the canister end swivel is gone. Now the hose exits straight up from the body but it still swivels. The hose itself, while eight feet long, has returned to the same shiny dark gray material other Kenmore and Panasonic vacuum hoses have used since the late 1980s. The connection from the hose to the lid is with a normal looking three prong connector of the type used since the late 1980s, but there is another electrical connection from the lid to the vacuum body with three flat spades like the hose connection used on the previous generation Elite Intuition canister. You could conceivably plug this hose on any new Kenmore vac that uses a powered hose and has a variable speed motor. I am also betting though I do not know for sure that you could re-hose worn out six footers from older Kenmores with the eight foot bare hose (no ends) from this vac. You know I'm going to try it. Oh yes, you can now open the bag compartment with the hose attached to the vacuum. This is a real improvement.
While the wands and nozzle are copies of the kludge on the current Progressive line (nozzle and wand ends are female and tools are male) the tools are a nice improvement. The dusting brush is a nice traditional horse hair brush and they give you this adjustable angled brush you can stick on the end of a wand and use to dust the tops of ceiling fan blades, book cases and the like. It's a highly useful tool.
No more bag caddy. The previous gen Elite Intuition placed the bag in a plastic basket that held the bag off the inside surfaces of the bag chamber. It had a little picnic basket handle and detached from the vacuum with the bag to make bag disposal easy. On the current Elite, the basket is there but it is fixed in the bag chamber. You remove the bag from the chamber the normal way now. Panasonic still uses a detachable bag caddy in their premium MC-CG937 canister.
The access door for the exhaust filter could not be easier to open and is a huge improvement over the current Progressive model in this regard. Fit and finish are very good and the whole vac is very understated in lightly contrasting shades of matte gray. Combined with it's quietness and the return of good horse hair brushes the vac gives the impression of being a refined machine. Only that Crossover floor tool is on the goofy/cheesy side, otherwise a very nice vacuum you don't have to be ashamed to admit you like.
The first thing you notice is how quiet it is. You can have a comfortable conversation with someone standing right over it while it's running. The floor brush is also nearly silent. It is noticeably quieter than my Windsor or my Electrolux.
The hose is interesting. The 90 degree elbow at the canister end swivel is gone. Now the hose exits straight up from the body but it still swivels. The hose itself, while eight feet long, has returned to the same shiny dark gray material other Kenmore and Panasonic vacuum hoses have used since the late 1980s. The connection from the hose to the lid is with a normal looking three prong connector of the type used since the late 1980s, but there is another electrical connection from the lid to the vacuum body with three flat spades like the hose connection used on the previous generation Elite Intuition canister. You could conceivably plug this hose on any new Kenmore vac that uses a powered hose and has a variable speed motor. I am also betting though I do not know for sure that you could re-hose worn out six footers from older Kenmores with the eight foot bare hose (no ends) from this vac. You know I'm going to try it. Oh yes, you can now open the bag compartment with the hose attached to the vacuum. This is a real improvement.
While the wands and nozzle are copies of the kludge on the current Progressive line (nozzle and wand ends are female and tools are male) the tools are a nice improvement. The dusting brush is a nice traditional horse hair brush and they give you this adjustable angled brush you can stick on the end of a wand and use to dust the tops of ceiling fan blades, book cases and the like. It's a highly useful tool.
No more bag caddy. The previous gen Elite Intuition placed the bag in a plastic basket that held the bag off the inside surfaces of the bag chamber. It had a little picnic basket handle and detached from the vacuum with the bag to make bag disposal easy. On the current Elite, the basket is there but it is fixed in the bag chamber. You remove the bag from the chamber the normal way now. Panasonic still uses a detachable bag caddy in their premium MC-CG937 canister.
The access door for the exhaust filter could not be easier to open and is a huge improvement over the current Progressive model in this regard. Fit and finish are very good and the whole vac is very understated in lightly contrasting shades of matte gray. Combined with it's quietness and the return of good horse hair brushes the vac gives the impression of being a refined machine. Only that Crossover floor tool is on the goofy/cheesy side, otherwise a very nice vacuum you don't have to be ashamed to admit you like.
