What Did Any Of You Think Of The DC01 When It Was Released?

[sebo_fan]

Well Benny, the same could be said for Gtech's venerable cordless sweeper - there was very little on the market before it - and it was hardly well built. Buyers bought it because it is far easier to push and pull than a conventional dust sweeper and then the Swivel Sweeper came to the market (I had one of those too) and then copied triangular ones thereafter.

 

[vintagerepairer]

Well I guess it could be, but what was the retail price of that sweeper? I don't know, but I guess it was around £50. I would also suggest that the expectation and indeed the use & abuse of that sweeper was considerably less than a Dyson vacuum cleaner.

 

[sebo_fan]

Yes, but double the price of a mechanical dust sweeper, people weren't exactly taken with the GTech - it seemed to only take off after it was seen on Channel 4's Big Brother. Suddenly everyone realised it was an Eco-derived model due to the product placement just from that TV show alone. 


 


I think a few peeps are being unfair with Dyson - he's an inventor first and foremost - and thus even if Dyson had perfected a bagless suction system, including a hard floor tool wouldn't be the first brand to do so with an upright vacuum and I think in the early days of vacuum cleaner production and releases, brands like Dyson are allowed to get some things wrong.


 


Im still getting over how mad Hoover were to bring out Hoover branded clear dust bags for use in their Cyclean, and Vortex upright vacuums! It kind of defeated the purpose of bag-less. The concept didn't last long, even though some used food bags to trap the dust thereafter.

 

[vintagerepairer]

I don't think the comments are unfair, I think they are true. I think that Dyson was lucky to be able to design and make the cleaner he did and win the consumers over. Getting people to buy his product would have been a challenge on it's own, but to do so with the quality of the product he was offering was nothing short of a miracle. A good deal of people were experiencing problems with the poor quality parts long before sales really took off, so he was lucky that work did not get around before then.

I do of course take your point that the G-tech sweeper was double the price of a manual sweeper, but even so, it was affordable; the sort of price which people were prepared to take a chance on. It was also did something vastly different from a manual sweeper as it employed an electric motor, unlike a Dyson where the main selling point was an improvement on an existing set up.

 

[Scaniabebe]

1993, was 3 years old at the time, they're not bad vacuums. My best friend, called Amy was given the DC01 her Step Dad owned when she moved into her first house, and, it's still around today, just with a few more scratches on it than when it first came off the production line!:')

They're not bad vacuums, can remember them very well, not the prettyist of the Dysons, but I do actually kinda like the style, and it's not until recently that we realized that the Dysons didn't "Deep Clean" as well as the Hoover Turbopower with Autosence!

Actually looking on eBay at buying one, possibly!

 

[Jakesvacs]

Why everyone dislike the Dyson Dc01 so much?
There are loads of Dc01's still being used today, my Da001 was still being used untill I got it and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it!
Its a plastic vacuum, just like the other vacuums.
The parts are robust enough for them to last a good few years, just a couple of days ago I met a lady who was still using her Dc01 with the old lettering and she said its the best vacuum she ever had. Of course when you compare it to a Dirty fan vacuum its not going to be as powerful.
I also love many features of the Dc01, its so iconic and special.
We also forget that we are debating about a vacuum that was from 93. Other vacuums of that era in discussions would be given some slack. I do not see many contours, Hoover turbopowers or other brands of that era still being widely used as Dyson Dc01s.

 

[jmurray01]

"Actually looking on eBay at buying one, possibly!" That's if your pocket money will stretch to it, or maybe you could sell one of the "cars" to buy it...

Sorry GENUINE VacuumLand members, just had to vent a wee bit there.

 

[sebo_fan]

Jake - A very good point.

I had a DC01 for many years and a DC04 - the DC04 didn't last as long as the DC01 and though the DC01 didn't have as much give when the machine was pivoted to the floor, I always felt the DC01 was better built. The DC04 by comparison had a better air inspection system but I had problems with the drive belts and eventually filter probs. I also liked the sound of the DC01 - not as noisy.

 

[vintagerepairer]

Ah well you see Jake, this is where it all comes full circle. The fewer sightings of the likes of the Electrolux Contour and Hoover Turbopower2 will be due in a large part to consumers replacing them somewhat prematurely, with the latest trend - a Dyson. I am never going to say the Contour was a great cleaner, although it was not bad. The Turbopower 2 and 3 were very good cleaners. But in both cases (and indeed the case of many a cleaner from that period of time) the build quality was considerably better than the Dyson DC01. It is not about knocking a Dyson, it is about how they were built.

The original question was about what we thought of them from their launch, and this is what I am reporting back. Dyson used a plastic which was too hard and brittle for a good deal of his cleaners to stand the test of time, and yet the plastics were too thin and soft in other areas. Although a good deal of DC01 cleaners are still around, this can only represent a small % of the millions they made. Many consumers had to obtain replacement parts in a very short space of time and I stand by my comments that James Dyson did very well to build an unknown cleaner with a poor build quality and yet still go on to develop a loyal customer base.

 

[jmurray01]

That's true Benny and the manufacturers James Dyson went to with his ideas probably knew that too (of course the money they made through bags was a larger incentive!) and thus weren't interested.

 

[alexhoovers94]

I am surprised the Turbopower 2's were as popular as they were because they came out in 1992 and the DC01 was proven popular in the mid 90s.
The turbopower 2 would of only been best sellers for 3 or 4 years before the Dyson took off.
It annoys me how the brand Hoover everyone loved and trusted for there exceptional performance was pushed aside for a Dyson DC01 cleaner that would not of cleaned carpet much better than a Ewbank sweeper with a dustbuster stuffed into the head of it.

I wish Hoover would of teamed with Dyson and not be so ignorant to there profit they were making from bags, when they were already making permabag models that eliminated bags anyway.

The only thing that sold the DC01 in my opinion was that you could see what the vacuum was picking up, which would of looked like it was picking up lots and lots of dirt when in actual fact the dirt spinning around was filled with pockets of air just like cream does when you whisk it up.
If Dson made the same DC01, but you could not see the dirt, I think it would not of sold as well as it did.

 

[jmurray01]

Thing is through Alex, the Permabag system didn't really take off and after a short while people threw the messy clogged thing away and started buying the superior paper bags.

The Permabag was just a selling point that people would see as a God send initially, but after cleaning it out a few times would just spend a Pound or two on a pack of disposable bags from the local vacuum shop to save the trouble!

 

[vintagerepairer]

My ex-wife used to use paper bags in her Turbopower 3, but I don't think that many permabag owners did such a thing. I can only speak of the models I had in for repair and didn't see a paper bag in the permabag models. I think they are more scarce as production of those models was shorter than the bagged versions of the TP2 which went on for a good deal of years.

 

[jmurray01]

Well I was just speaking from what I thought would be common sense (though, I've learned a lot of people don't have that virtue) and the fact I've seen a good deal of Turbopowers for sale with "Permabag" written on the bag door but paper bags, or indeed no bags on occasion, fitted.

 

[ryry_87]

'That's if your pocket money will stretch to it, or

hope that wasn't a poke at me Jamie? lol

 

[jmurray01]

Oh no-no Ryan, of course not, I wouldn't say that to somebody like you.

It was a "poke" at Scaniabebe who is a troll to my belief. Why would I make that assumption ? Well, you'd have had to speak to him privately and hear some of the crap that comes out of his mouth.

On one hand he was enjoying the sun with "the wife" and literally 15 minutes later he said to me she had Skin Cancer. Yes, those two really correlate don't they ?

Then he talks about buying cars on eBay for him and his "ten friends" to drive around in, but of course the only images he could produce were links to the completed listings and current listings of cars he was "going to buy". When I asked to see actual pictures of the cars in his possession, he said he didn't have any and clammed up.

Oh and of course there was the "plug stuck in the socket" incident where he apparently managed (God knows how) to get the plug of his Numatic James jammed in the socket and got an electrician out to remove it. Then what did he say ? He would have to buy a whole new flex for the James. Why do that when you could just cut the old plug off and put a new one on ? Absolutely ludicrous.

He truly is either a crackpot or a troll, maybe a bit of both.

So I'll say again, it was not a dig at you, I apologise if it sounded like such.

 

[ryry_87]

lol no worries

 

[sebo_fan]

Um.. the only thing about "quality aspirations," way back when Dyson was launched was that consumers weren't really interested in quality - we were still going on marketing promises like high power, high motors and dust capacity. The only aspect of quality that people who had seen Dyson machines were repairers or those working within the industry of selling vacuums. When Dyson came along, although undoubtedly pushed along in a few years with the suction power mantra, Dyson brought back glitter to the plastic surfaces and oh how they all copied Dyson after that! 

 

[vintagerepairer]

I would certainly agree that consumers did not go looking for quality in a vacuum cleaner, but I do think they still expected a certain standard. It was a good deal of years after the launch before anyone brought me a Dyson to be repaired, because they came with a two year guarentee as standard. All I know about the quality was based on what I had seen when looking in shops and hearing what my customers who owned one said about them when they came in to buy bits and peices from me.

As for the glitter, I always considered Hoover to be the one who started that off around 1991 with thier glittery new Turbopower Total System cleaners.

 

[sebo_fan]

1991 eh for Hoover? I always imagined it was the other way around. I never looked closely at my Turbopower Total but it certainly didn't have glitter to the plastics - that came later on the TP2 and 3 series. The Autosense model had glitter.

 

[vintagerepairer]

Yes, and so did the top Turbopower total system cleaners. The Freedom bagless models were the most notable, but there were shades of dark blue, dark green, and dark red in the bagged cleaners.

 

[vintagerepairer]

There is a green one pictured in a message here, so I found. They say it was a German cleaner in this case but I know the UK had similar.

http://www.vacuumland.org/cgi-bin/TD/TD-VIEWTHREAD.cgi?3750

 

[sebo_fan]

Whilst I liked the DC01, at the time I felt the far more conventional and far lighter Hoovers I had were much better just to use from a usage point of view - the big floor head on the DC01 was a case in point. Great for cleaning carpets but couldn't get flat to the floor as there was too much height on that main floor head.


 


Also the tool storers at the back were a bit cheap - having the option to slide a dusting brush on top of a crevice tool and then on the other side, with the flat upholstery tool locked on- might have been handy when used for car cleaning if you are bending down anyway and have the tools to hand - but I much preferred the flush fitting design of Hoover's TP2 & 3 series where the tools had their own recesses and was far more flush.


 


 

 

[jmurray01]

I agree the tool storage of the Turbopower 2/3 were exceptionally well designed for ease of use yet without the risk of them falling out during use and getting lost.

 

[sebo_fan]

Yep and the TPs also cleaned flat to the floor without much getting in the way.


 


It seems to be the case, sadly for a lot of bagless uprights on the market who persist in offering bagless, round bins 19 years on.. Morphy Richards' Clarity is about the only bagless upright I can think of that has a squarish bin, but even the pivot below the floor head restricts true flat to the floor cleaning.

 

[alexhoovers94]

I agree the tools on the turbopower 2/3 are much more accessible, than a DC01, however, I found them to be hard to click in and pull out, but I guss it helps them not to fall out.
The totalsystem turbopowers onboard tools were much easier to take off and put back on, yet didn't fall out.
I don't really like the purepowers but they have easy access tools.

 

[sebo_fan]

Well I think we can agree then that in both cases, Hoover's design was far more efficient and versatile, but at the same time, it wasn't exactly new having flush fitting recesses on the rears of uprights, especially if you owned any of the Sebo uprights, or Panasonic.

 

[alexhoovers94]

Well at least with the turbopower 2 all the tools you would ever need were located at the back, rather than having some at the back, some on the side or some on the front, like sebo and panasonic.
I like how Hoovers turbopower 2/3 had seperate tools for each job at the back of the machine along with the hose in one neat and convenient place.