I bought a Dyson vacuum, or rather I was given one as a gift from my wife after she saw a joke twitter post about a man being happier about a new vacuum than the birth of his own kids. She gave it to me on Christmas Eve because I was about to vacuum the entire house with our old vacuum - which was also a fantastic vacuum, for the record.
My feedback:
1. It works great. I had to empty it several times because it was picking up so much more stuff than our existing vacuum did - mostly pet hair and the like.
2. It's the one with the little laser thing, which is a dumb little gimmick until you see it in action and then it's life-changing - if you're like me and find satisfaction in picking up every invisible crumb anywhere.
3. After a year and a bit, maybe less, it started misbehaving. It would suddenly turn off, then you'd have to let go of the trigger and pull it again; then it would work fine. Then it would happen a few times until it worked fine. Then it almost never worked fine. I kind of tolerated it for a while until I got fed up and googled the problem, and it was suggested to buy a new housing - the electronics plus the motor, basically the whole 'vacuum' part of the vacuum, which was only just over a hundred dollars direct from Dyson. Irritating to have to spend an extra hundred bucks to get my five hundred dollar vacuum working as expectred, but expected it to cost far more.
Would I recommend it? Not sure. It's very expensive, it works very well; it has a nice wall mount that charges it and which holds a small subset of the attachments it comes with. I'm glad I have it and I use it often.
Yes, it's plastic, but if it were, for example, steel or aluminium then it would be too heavy to use for any length of time. As it is, it feels very sturdy and has held up physically very well, but I'm obviously also not rough with it so there's no reason it would have any issues unless it were, in fact, cheaply or poorly made.
I've had this issue a few times. Took it apart and soaked/scrubbed anything without a pcb or wires coming out of it, and it worked fine after. Eventually the filter on the motor crumbled into dust (not suitable for picking up the dust from sanding paint off indoor walls). I tried to get the right one from Dyson but I ended up just grabbing something that looked like a distant cousin of the right filter off eBay and cut it into the right shape. It stopped working again after a few months, I was going to do the cleansing ceremony again, but then I dropped it and it started working fine again.
Going on 13 years now I think.
The newer ones suck harder.
The trigger has a deliberate defect where it has the least possible amount of material right at the weakest most leveraged part.
It's a cheap part to replace. It also means a complete disassembly! A lot of it isn't hard but there are some wires that have to snake around, and popping out certain things requires some scary use of force. It took like 3 hours to do for mine.
Also these things don't seem to be great at battery maintenance. I forget how long that took me but it didn't leave any scars, I think it was easy. Just, more expensive. Less so now that batteries are cheaper. But I have my suspicion that their float charge mode is maybe not good & injured batteries. I specifically avoided that but still had issues.
The trigger really made me mad when I finally dug it out of mine. It was such a blatantly obviously designed-to-fail system. It really makes me super distrust this company.
I like mine ok. It's lightweight and gets the job done well enough. Are there vacuums out there nowadays that aren't cheap plastic construction?
Yes. Meile vacuums are made out of quality plastic, and seem to survive bring dropped down the stairs better than my coccyx did.
Due to the unfortunate quirk of language, its hard do describe how much better I like my Meile bagged vacuum than my Dyson. See my Dyson sucked, but the Meile really sucks.
I like the bag style more as well. It's so much cleaner when it comes time to empty it, no dust cloud.
My mum bought a Dyson, and my dad took her old Vax to use on building sites... and it's still going 20 years later...unlike the Dyson.
Numatic Henry.
My cleaners moaned about the Dyson but they love love love the Henry.
Our Dyson is cordless and so so so convenient for a quick 15-20s cleanup after kids dinner etc. Grab and go.
So we persoanlly use the Dyson for day to day cleanup, and the cleaners use the Henry when they come.
I have a Sebo E3 that has been fantastic. Plastic, but still seems very durable. Very well thought out design, too. Miele also makes a good vacuum, but I prefer Sebo.
> Are there vacuums out there nowadays that aren't cheap plastic construction?
As someone in the market for a new (portable) vacuum cleaner, who has a Dyson now and no longer wants to, is there really nothing out there that isn't so flimsy and plasticky and still portable?
Miele is plastic but excellent
I never really thought much of any vacuum I’ve ever own until I got a shark one. It picks everything, to the point where you have to be extra careful you don’t vacuum over things you don’t want to be sucked up into the vacuum. It makes total sense, who needs such powerful suction when you can instead just put a roller on the floor to pick things up. Never going back to a suction-only vacuum.
Mirrors my experience with their airfilter/fan combination: Sounded smart with glowing reviews; ended up being loud, with horrible whining noises, on top of horrible aesthetics and being very expensive.
I had a dc03 animal for over 10 years, kept replacing bits.. this year replaced it with the modern equivalent as I didn't want a battery powered one.
The new one just feels sort of flimsy in all sorts of ways, definite buyers remorse, the old one just felt indestructible + really powerful, this seems a bit crap.
My mum used to be a professional cleaner and she would often explain to people there's a reason professionals never use Dysons.
That's not to say it's a bad product, but I've had my Henry vacuum for decades, and in that time it's been kicked down the stairs and used vacuum up all kinds of stuff it probably wasn't design for, but it's still just as good as the day I got it.
You'd rather your vacuum be made of metal?
> You'd rather your vacuum be made of metal?
I would - rather it is. My grandfather had a kirby for decades. I've had a kirby for decades. Though mine has the transmission power drive that makes it a joy to use.
I can not imagine ever buying a plastic vacuum.
There are different plastics, some feel much better than others.
I bought a Dyson vacuum and it felt like cheap garbage, to the point that I returned it. I didn’t trust that it would hold up. It creaked and jangled around. The feel did not match the price tag.
Other plastic products, like the old polycarbonate Macs, felt very solid and well made.
When I first unboxed a new V15, I thought I got a cheap knockoff instead of the real thing. That’s how cheap Dyson plastics look and feel.
Metal portions would be nice but i get it’s a weight thing. Also emphasis on it being cheap plastic rather than just plastic. Several parts of mine cracked and broke within a year.
Carbon fiber and 3d printed titanium is probably where I'd start for materials to design a high end vacuum to be light/strong/durable. Injected molded magnesium alloy would also be a candidate if production qty was high enough to offset the tooling.
I was given a V6 and I bought an adapter that lets me use my dewalt batteries with the vacuum. Kind of a cool party trick but I think they were like $600 new which is bonkers.
We have the v15, best appliance we’ve purchased for our home.
I had the plastic trigger fail on mine. Took the whole thing apart and replaced it with a metal trigger from AliExpress. It’s been going strong since.
I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist, but if I was a product engineer looking for a way to make my well-engineered product fail just after the warranty period was up, that trigger failure looked like a pretty good candidate. There was a specific piece of the plastic that looked like it was ostensibly there as a structural reinforcement, but it was clearly too short, and the trigger had cracked just past it.
ifixit guide for the curious: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Dyson+V11+Trigger+Replacement/1...
My wife often says the Dyson v8 vacuum is the best purchase I have ever made, that was 8 years ago.
I wish I could be that happy. I have two V8s and both of them are prone to becoming stinky. Changing out the filters doesn't help, and dismantling and cleaning out the interior does make it better ... for a time. Then the smell comes back.
But for a cordless stick vacuum I do like the basic design. For real vacuuming I choose my Sebo E3 every time, but it's not nearly as quick to use as a cordless stick.
One of the best things you can do for a Dyson stick vacuum, in my humble opinion, is get an adapter so you can use something like a Milwaukee tool battery.
I bought mine because my coworkers were over the moon about it. Apparently i had a far different experience