Thanks for your replies. The reason I asked about this is someone brought one to me for repair. Parts seem to be scarce to support this machine. My impression of it is that it's a bad copy of an Oreck. It's very cheaply made. I was astonished that the lady told me she paid $349 for it. She claimed that she ordered an Oreck and this is what she got; whom she bought it from I've no idea. The belt broke and the brush roll was worn-out as about 75% of the bristles had fallen out. Initially, she took it to Oreck. They had it for five weeks, then told her they couldn't fix it due to lack of parts availability. They charged her $25 for "cleaning." When I got it, there was still dirt and mud in the brush roll housing so I don't think any actual cleaning was done. Online, I couldn't find any regular source of supply for parts but there were roll brushes on Ebay, etc.
Okay, so my repair of this thing was an improvisation. Belt, no problem as I've got a box full of different belts. Her original belt had a red paint daub on it and I found one like that in my stuff. Brush roll, I've got a box full of those too and noticed that an old Filter Queen is about the same diameter as the Puratron only a bit longer. Her brush roll had nice bearings, so I cut down the Filter Queen part and fit the axles and bearings from the original Puratron part to it. I pulled a couple of courses of bristles from one end of the "new" brush roll to provide a tractive surface for the belt. I had to make one bearing cap (from Filter Queen) as the Oreck shop lost one of hers. Oreck had it for five weeks and did nothing; I had it for 24 hours and it went back to a satisfied owner intact.
This machine had a head light that came on as soon as it was plugged in, which I don't find normal for vacuums that I'm familiar with. I didn't talk to the customer about that; any work to remediate that (if needed) would involve more labor than she'd want to pay I imagine. The UV lamp on the front edge of the machine had a separate switch for activation. When I turned it on, the light flickered like a defective flourescent tube (which it was).
I didn't get any of the "floating on air" bit with this machine. It has wheels, normal suction at the brush roll like so many other vacs. True, it is extremely light, but that's because there's nothing to it, not much used to make it in the way of materials. Yet, it's light weight is the virtue that caused the owner to want to save it. It didn't weigh much more than an old Bissel carpet sweeper.
I'm not sure how these were marketed, but I suspect they were sold by telemarketing rather than traditional retail. With all the advertising hype about germ killing, etc., they were sending up a smoke screen for buyers who didn't know much about quality vacuum cleaners.
