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The trend for crazy high wattages is something that drives me absolutely bananas. It's all about one-upmanship amongst the manufacturers, and it doesn't hurt of course that the public has been well and truly conditioned into thinking more power is always better. Give them a choice of two identical cleaners, one with a 1200 watt motor and the other with 2000 watts, and guess which one they'll pick.

High revving motors are the reason we now have so many cleaners that run hot and make a dreadful high pitched noise while running. It's also the reason why brushrolls now have either very soft bristles in sparse tufts, or a dual belt drive to help reduce its speed. Cleaning tools have vents moulded into them, allegedly to set up air currents that assist in dirt pickup. Really it's to bleed off excess suction, so you can move the upholstery tool over your sofa cushions with at least a moderate degree of ease.

My daily driver Sebo D2 - which I absolutely adore - has a 2100 watt motor. At maximum speed it has way too much suction, which just makes every single job so much harder. Normally I set it anywhere between minimum and halfway as appropriate, and find this to be more than adequate for any job. Nice to have that flexibility, but to me, a 2100 watt motor that never gets run at full tilt does seem like a bit of a waste. Had the same cleaner been available with (for example) a 1200 watt motor, I'd have been right on it. I do realise, however, that such a thing would not sell to the general public when displayed next to something with enough power to create a black hole.
 
I totally see why this is happening, I mean, most 1600+ watt motors usually belong to crappy, poorly designed vacuums (except the sebo) such as VAX's power models, like the power 4 is 2,200watts- it's really not nescessary!
 
Well lets not forget Miele - they offer 2200 watts!

Im going to reiterate what I've said all along as well as add another point:

When I had hair, and lots of it I much preferred having a 1600 watt hair dryer to dry my hair than a 900 watt one - same applies for vacuums - we can moan as much as we like - but it didn't help that back in the day, with fantastic upright vacs like the Hoover Junior that was probably the UK favourite, suction through the hose was weak compared to the 700 to 900 watts of the cylinder vacs. Why else did Hoover add the two step motor to the Senior when the hose was attached - more power, more watts used - the availability of more suction through the increase of watts.

We're all moaning about motors NOW going into the 2000 and 3000 watt ratings and so forth but unless brands start to lower the energy and motor rating of other household appliances used daily compared to vacuum cleaners, there really is no point to pass a law to restrict the power rating on vacuums.

Also we've been conditioned into thinking that higher is better across lifestyle products from the very beginning - the Americans, the British etc; countries that set forth the idea of "adding premium status," came from "deluxe" badged products such as a cars with higher engines or dressing up the body work with add on spoilers etc to improve air flow and running costs counteracting against the higher engine fitted in the first place.

As for my SEBO D2 - I use it on occasion if I haven't vacuumed for weeks and like Spiraclean, i choose to use it in the lower bands of power as opposed to full. Ive been pressing SEBO UK to get their Eco 1600 watt version in as they have in other countries - their professional model without the added convenience of auto cord rewind has a 1200 watt motor - signs that things are quite possible to lower power rating.
 
a double-edgew sword

Wattage -and the amount of it used- is dependent on the appliance type as to whether or not it is in anyway a drain. In the case of heated appliances with thermostats and those which turn off immediately after use, like toasters and kettles, a higher wattage is much more beneficial as the appliance goes from zero to end-result in a much faster time than one of a lower wattage. So in that instance the high-wattage appliance is using less energy than a lower-wattage appliance. Typical example would be a fast-boil kettle. That gets water to boiling point so much more quickly than traditional element kettles with a lower wattage (bearing in mind that at normal pressure water boils only at one temperature - I read recently an article where a kettle was described as being able to boil water to different temperatures) making a saving overall.

That is the key word of course, 'overall', as not everything is about being in real-time. A vacuum cleaner on the other hand is using electricity for the duration of however long it takes to clean a room; it's use is not finite by any means. Until wattages began to spiral out of control, manufactures designed cleaners and fans in such a way that clean-fan motors could run at around 700 - 1000 watts and still pack in a lot of cleaning power. It is proof it can be done.

The Hoover Senior is a fine example of boosting wattage to make up for lost performance elsewhere; had the machine fitment on the hose been such that there was no chance for air to escape, a boost in motor wattage would never have been needed. Hoover should have moved to the pan-convertor fitting years and years before they did (Hotpoint had used such an arrangement since the early 1960's) and saved themselves the cost and expense of making & installing the 2-speed motor into the bargain.
 
I just got a chance to listen to those broadcasts and I think you did a wonderful job! Your insights were very interesting, and you gave this site some free publicity:)
Scott
 
Regarding the topic at hand,

I must say that for me this discussion is rather interesting as no such debate exists over here. Although I do not know the exact date that the regulation was put in place, for a long time residential vacuums have been limited to a max power of twelve amps. Therefore the marketing potential for the power consumption of vacuum cleaners has been very limited. I will post a picture of the kind of thing that appears on a lot of cheaper vacs over here boasting they have "max power" and for the most part, if a vac has less than twelve amps it is simply not stated anywhere other than the ratings plate. And at the vacuum store I work for I get very few people talking about amps as though they relate to suction (although I have read some online reviews that seemed to think so). I think this is due to the simple fact that most vacuums use twelve amps now, so it's sort of a moot point. Many vacuums don't boast their amperage, and people don't seem to mind. For example, my sebo x4, miele upright, and most dyson uprights(excluding the 6.5 amp dc24)use 12 amps.

The whole point of this is that I can't help thinking that this may become the case for Europe on wattage if such a regulation is passed, and I can't see it as a bad thing.

Of course I am no electrician and the difference in voltage may mean that this proposed restriction may be more strict than the one in place in the U.S, I don't know.

Scott

singingrainbow++6-1-2013-17-27-57.jpg
 
Re: A double edged sword

VR - if you look at mostly any rapid boil kettle you'll see 2800 watts TO 3000 watts. Until tests provide evidence that kettles allow a lower amount of wattage to boil the water before boiling, the product is STILL using the lower output of 2800 watt just to power it up. These ratings are still too high. We then sacrifice quick "boiling time" or how impatient you are versus patience with the far lower "supermarket" slower-to-boil or cut-budget brands that offer a far lower element energy rating of 1800 watts to 2200 watts per kettle.

One could easily argue that even 2200 watts for an electric kettle is still too high - and given that most kettles in the 1990s had between 700 to 1000 watts for the "traditional" design, even the metal round bodied ones in year 2000 under Russell Hobbs were uprated to 2200 watts to 2800watts, presumably to meet the demand "for high power' for buyers.
 
Re: Air Watts

Sadly I don't believe in air watts either - air watts only came about with Dyson's 100% suction all of the time - with a bag in a place, or even the cyclonic paper pleated types, we all know that the suction starts to weaken - thus air watts cannot provide a continuous, reliable figure that buyers can depend on. Not just dependent on 100% suction all of the time, it also depends on the design of the vacuum's air flow and sealed suction, which in some brands' offering is lacking.

But unless a system offers continuous "power" and "suction" all of the time without it being weakened, air watts is a marketing spin concept.
 
singingrainbow

For many years, probably into the early 1990's, the wattage of vacuum cleaners was never really much of an issue for the UK consumer, and it's mention of it was little more than a technical specification. I think perhaps some people realised those cleaners with a higher wattage motor were sometimes more powerful, but back then we also considered that a physically smaller cleaner would never be as powerful as a larger one, regardless of the motor wattage.

We also had a good deal of 'fan first' upright cleaners on sale here until well into the 1990's, practically all of which had relatively low wattage motors. Had wattage been a consideration back then, sales of these cleaners would almost certainly have faltered, and unnecessarily so.

The only home appliance where numbers ever really mattered to a consumer was on the spin speed of automatic washing machines. It was always considered that the faster the drum turned, the better the spin. This mind-set went on right up until the mid 1990's, when many appliances in the shops -including washing machines- had to display their performance on a charts so that consumers could see exactly how well they appliance fared. It was in doing this that we could see that in fact some of the machines with higher spin speeds were, for a variety of reasons, not performing as well as others. To date there has never been any such requirement for vacuum cleaners to be tested for performance, which, coupled with a growing trend to ramp up the motor watts, has led to the situation in which we find ourselves today.

As I said earlier, older vacuum cleaners were built for maximum efficiency, but the desire and cost to do this seems to have given way to a trend of fitting higher wattage motors. As I also said, on an appliance which has a finite running time, such as a rapid-boil kettle where the aim is to get the water to boiling point as quickly as possible to avoid consuming more watts overall from a lower wattage element engaged in a slower process, or in a thermostatic appliance like an iron where getting the sole plate back to temperature quickly, there is a good case to put forward for high wattage consumption as the overall process will use less energy in total. With vacuum cleaner which have high wattage motors, the answer lies in vacuuming more quickly!
 
Perhaps there needs to be an energy labelling scheme for vacuum cleaners, to include performance ratings. Subject them all to the same standardised dust pick-up test, and show the result as a percentage. Grade the cleaner on a scale from A-to-whatever, according to how well it cleans versus the watts used on the maximum power setting.

Consumers would instantly be able to compare various models. Is it pulling lots of watts but doing a mediocre job? Or is it wringing as much efficiency out of a lower wattage motor as possible and still cleaning better than some of the competition?

I'm not so sure that vacuums are the first thing we should be looking at in the home in order to save energy, but if this is the path we're heading down, it may as well be done in a way that is easily understood by the public so they can compare apples to apples. Energy label testing costs money, but we're already doing it for white goods and many other products we buy today. And although lab conditions do not accurately reflect usage in the home, at least if they are standardised, every cleaner would be tested on a level playing field.

Somehow I doubt this is what we will end up with though. It's more likely there will simply be a motor wattage limit imposed, manufacturers will stamp ECO on all their cleaners and then say "Look how green we're being!", and the public will end up paying higher prices for something that has been greenwashed.
 
Now an example of a great, low wattage vacuum is a Kirby. It produces more than adequate suction, and it's carpet cleaning is excellent. On my heritage, the wattage is 515~660watts wich is perfectly enough.
 
Greenwashed

I couldn't agree more with what you said there, other than to suggest that people who are paying more for greener products are usually doing so gladly as they like to be thought of as being eco-aware. The problem with the 'green' debate is that it is multifaceted beyond most people's understanding, and of course in that statement I include myself. But at a simple level, a campaign to upgrade old energy-inefficient central heating boilers was seen by some as a great idea, whereas I read comments from others who asked what saving does one make by scrapping a boiler which still works, when paying a lot of money to fit a new one, and is it environmentally friendly to manufacture a new boiler and dispose of an old one?

Equally I read recently that a good deal of people were dispensing with the tumble-dryer as it was considered to be power-hungry, yet in their quest to be greener, they were hanging washing around the house and having to turn up the heating in order to stay warm and dry the laundry, making a damp environment to live in into the bargain. So it is of course about standing back and looking objectively at it all. It would be easy to say that, for example, a kettle or room heater running at 3KW was, on the surface, not energy-efficient, but when it completes as task much more quickly and then switches off afterwards, it is using less overall.

I agree entirely too that laboratory tests cannot replicate what one might call 'normal' usage, but are at least something to go on. I mean air-watts; that may well be the true measure of suction power, but how many air-watts are actually needed for each task the cleaner is expected to do?
 

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