Help to me to understand smaller...

[wyaple]

So what would be the ideal power nozzle size then?

For very tight family rooms/bedrooms crammed full of stuff, are people searching for something around 10 inches or smaller then? I just measured all my power nozzles and they range from 12.5" (Rainbow PN2 - 1997) to 15.5" (Kirby H2 Legend - 1987). Only if I need to vacuum some area that is extremely narrow, would I change to some unpowered attachment tool.

Turbo500:
If I were to use my 1987 Kirby with no power assist, I agree it would be very difficult to vacuum a room outfitted like your picture (great pic by the way). That being said, my G4 would handle that easily. As long as the handle isn't straight up, the tech drive reduces the back and forth effort tremendously.

suckolux:
Please tell us which two vacuums you use. I'd love to know what your daily drivers are.

Please keep the comments rollin' in...

Bill

 

[suckolux]

Ok, here goes some news?Daily is Dyson dc44 animal or dc 18, quick, easy, light. Weekly can be Miele Titan, Kenmore power head cannister, cheap, but it has power!Lime green with hepa media bags, or Silverado powerteam.Not everyone's cup of tea I am sure. Btw, that powerhead on the Miele will fit about anywhere and it works pretty well on floors too, lots of edge cleaning, where the Kenmore seems to have none, but stronger on the carpet.

 

[rainbowd4c]

I guess I have a little bit of a different thught process.

I know for myself living in America we tend to have large houses and large rooms. My Livingroom is pretty big and even when all I'm doing is vacuuming my Livingroom carpet I can put my vacuum more in the middle of the room and the hose is long enough with my power nozzle and it will reach almost every part of the room with hardly much movement. I would think that if you found the perfect size power nozzle and hose that is long enough you would be able to do the same. I did a post about a subject similar to this a few years ago. I have attached the link to this post as well for everyone to read over.

I understand that Homes across the UK and other areas are much smaller and I would think that uprights would make cleaning more difficult because you move the while vacuum unlike a canister you just move the hose and tools.

Thoughts?

http://www.vacuumland.org/cgi-bin/TD/TD-VIEWTHREAD.cgi?15897

 

[vintagerepairer]

"I understand that Homes across the UK and other areas are much smaller and I would think that uprights would make cleaning more difficult because you move the while vacuum unlike a canister you just move the hose and tools."

That is pretty much so, although despite this Upright cleaners have always been so very popular.

 

[human]

Quite true, but sometimes ya just gotta pull out the big guns to get things "Kirby clean". I encountered this last night when I discovered that my cat had barfed on the carpet in my bedroom. It was on the far side of the bed where I never walk and was completely dry so it must have happened while I was gone for the weekend. My first thought was that I'd need a shampooer but on a whim, I decided to try my Kirby G5 with its uber aggressive Sentria style brush roll and you know what, it beat that dried cat barf right out of the carpet with dry, brute force! There's no trace of it left, none. And no shampooing was necessary. Now that's what I like about my heavy metal machines.

 

[vintagerepairer]

I think perhaps you may like to suggest to the UK Kirby distributors that they perform a dried cat vomit test in the homes where they have called to demonstrate the cleaner. Next to the mattress cleaning session, perhaps?

 

[sebo_fan]

Respectively though if you are vacuuming up dried up cat vomit from a carpet using a dirty fan vacuum, what on earth is being put through the fan and lining the dust air stream channel? The bag isn't going to get all of it.

The photo that Chris/Turbo500 has supplied nails the problem with UK homes in a nutshell - that "typical" view of a 1950's living room could probably be cleaned by a Hoover Junior at the most. Compact, easy to handle and can get through whatever gaps are left.

They were powerful enough for the model to stay in production far longer than when it stopped. Even today there are more Hoover Juniors on auction sites in the UK than anything else.

Yes whilst a cylinder vac would be even more nimble, UK market has always been pushed to buy uprights because of excess carpet in a home.

A few cylinder vacs have been sold with PN's but they were sporadic during the 1950s to 1980s.

 

[vintagerepairer]

So true, Sebofan. Cylinder vacs with power nozzles were never going to catch on in the UK, because rather than offering the best of both worlds - as may be the case in a large open-plan home abroad- over here they seemed to encapsulate the worst aspects of both types of cleaner.

The lightweight hose of the cylinder suddenly became so much heavier now that it contained a power lead for the motorised head. The tubes were harder to detach as so many cleaners like this required the lead to be disconected from the wand first. The manoeuvrability of the whole thing - cleaner and tubing- became much more difficult, and many power nozzles could only be tilted up & down, and not side to side. So in all, the convenience of a cylinder went right out the window.

Likewise the tried & tested aspects of an upright were compromised too, as performance was arguably better on an upright, and for a fact the ability to just lift the cleaner out of a cupboard was very much lost.

The cylinder cleaners with power nozzles were certainly too beefy for your typical UK home. In fact even suction driven turbo tools have only taken off in the last 15-20 years.

 

[suckolux]

My home is only around 625 sq ft, so maybe not typical us home!

 

[alexhoovers94]

I think you are all exaggerating on how "small" UK homes are they are not all serial box terrist houses like Chris showed further up many homes are dethatched or semi-dethatched many modern homes are built a lot bigger like Chris pointed out further up.

I think depending on the layout of your home a Kirby or some other 15" nozzle vacuum is a little too big and I don't particular like the bulkiness of it but many 12" cleaners are pretty standard and very practical in UK homes just as they are in US homes.

We must remember that the UK would fit inside a single US state in most cases so you would expect things to be smaller.

People (guys) however are the same size in the UK as the US, I can tell you that from experience make of that what you will haha.

I wonder if any body was wrongly lead to believe that people in smaller countries are physically smaller haha.

 

[suckolux]

Well I know I wasn't feeling they were smaller!

 

[alexhoovers94]

Haha, I actually find it very aqwqard with most older UK vacuums and certainly Hoovers, the handles were pretty short and I am 5ft 11 so nearly 6ft and I find I have to stoop with a lot of British vacs as the handle is not tall enough, most modern vacs nowadays are the right height but for some reason vacuums in the 70's,80's and 90s were very short indeed.

 

[suckolux]

ahh, same height here too.

 

[tolivac]

1950 English living room-That poor man or boy laying on the floor watching TV looks miserable!!!I wouldn't try to pick up dried cat barf with ANY vacuum-this is a job for an extractor machine!!!You will permanently stink up ANY vacuum in this case.Don't ask me to use it or you will have to clean up MY barf!I have to leave the area if someone or an animal "technicolor yawns" or Laughs at the Carpet"The odor triggers me to do it!!!

 

[vintagerepairer]

Who knew how many times I'd have to read the word "serial" before I understood it to mean cereal.

I don't think what Turbo500 said was in any way an exaggeration. Yes, Great Britain does have it's fair share of enourmous homes, of course it does, but houses built in cities en-mass have always been small, whether it's the type of home in the pictures we've already seen, or the pre & post war "traditional" semi with it's postage-stamp sized kitchen.

Many UK homes have now been extended in some way, but that's usually to make one or two rooms bigger, or to add an extra room. It doesn't usually make every room of the home bigger. New build homes have generally become smaller and smaller too, with living space often compromised to allow for a bigger kitchen area to cater for modern living. Bedrooms are shoe-horned in, but I must say that I disagree that most new homes have utility rooms as time & again I have seen pictures of new builds with all the appliances in the kitchen albiet intergrated behind cupboard doors.

 

[turbo500]

Alex, of course there are bigger homes in the UK. Certainly most new builds are bigger than what I posted*. I was more addressing the root of our love for smaller vacuums, which comes from our traditional houses being much smaller than in the US. So at the time that vacuums were becoming a popular, must have household item, lugging a huge vacuum around your typical British house at that time would've been VERY difficult. Hence the Juniors were so popular.

House sizes may have changed, but our love of inexpensive, lightweight and compact vacuums, as a country, hasn't.

*I think Benny has hit the nail on the head with this. New builds aren't getting any bigger, but are using more open plan spaces. So there's less rooms but bigger rooms. A 4 bedroom detached new build property will often be smaller square foot than an older 4 bed semi detached.

 

[sebo_fan]

New builds to me in Scotland means loads of bloody narrow stairs. Try lugging any vacuum up and down and you'll be rubbing the wall paper off.

From some of the new builds that some of my friends live in where London is concerned, they all seem to have wide and safe-ish shallow steps and carpet that has just been thrown over them, which often becomes a dangerous slide - more appropriate when rushing for work in the mornings.. A few have hand held vacuums rather than hose, tools and cylinders.

 

[vintagerepairer]

There have been programs on TV where owners of new homes could not get the furniture up the stairs.

 

[delaneymeegan]

I find this thread.......

 


 


<span style="font-family: helvetica;">...An interesting confluence with "somebody really hates there (their) henry".  .... and with some of the same participants, too.</span>


 


<span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 10pt;">On the one hand, there is all this discussion of the more limited square footage (square meters) that Brits (and supposedly other "Europeans") have in their homes, AND THUS, don't have room for elaborate  vacuums.....</span>


<span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 10pt;">Yet</span>


<span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 10pt;">Henry is 'SO LOVED', by 'SO MANY people', and for a time in the 90s, Brits were going to vac stores and buying commercial versions of Henry until Numatic decided to branch out into consumer goods and created this cartoon character-like line of vacuums named after British Kings.  </span>


 


<span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 10pt;">Let's review:  A Henry vac is essentially a Shop vac that is roughly five times the size of something like a Eureka Mighty Mite which is a little bit larger than a large clothes iron, and about as heavy.  The Mighty Mite even stores some of it's attachments on it's self, something Henry apparently does NOT do.</span>


 


<span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 10pt;">A Mighty Mite, or it's equivalent would seem the perfect match for a typical flat, 2up-2down, semi-detached, or even a nice estate home.</span>


 


<span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 10pt;">Why then this love affair with Henry? ..... AND WHERE does Henry sleep since Brit homes often do not have more than one </span><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 10pt;">closet/wardrobe?</span>


 


<span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 10pt;">Much like numerous other things that people (of any nationality, gender, or socio-economic level) </span><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: 10pt;">do, this defies common sense.  And I find it, like Henry and his compadre's, endearing.</span>



http://www.vacuumland.org/cgi-bin/TD/TD-VIEWTHREAD.cgi?30525

 

[vintagerepairer]

"Let's review: A Henry vac is essentially a Shop vac that is roughly five times the size of something like a Eureka Mighty Mite which is a little bit larger than a large clothes iron, and about as heavy. The Mighty Mite even stores some of it's attachments on it's self, something Henry apparently does NOT do."

No, Henry is not a shop-vac and never has been. And whilst bigger than the cleaner you describe, Henry is still very small and easy to store.

Another point about the Hnery is that the quality of it was equal to that of the mid-range Electolux cleaners of the late 1980's, however, whereas the quality of all cleaners sold in the UK has steadily but drastcially declined, the Numatic cleaners haven't. They have also managed to come down in price too, at least the price tag has not moved much, meaning that with inflation the cleaners are cheaper than ever.

Henry did also come with a clip at one time to hold one of the tools. They also had a bag to put the tools in but I think that has stoppped.