Vintage Vacuum Cleaners: Motor Power Ratings

[Radio Wrangler]

Someone mentioned Nilfisk a while back and i've just taken a look at their website. 'Commercial' cleaners with 800 and 1000W electrical consumption AND specified airflow power (in watts) at the business end. Oh, and with cloth filters available. Almost like going back in time!

I have one of their other products, a pressure washer, and it's definitely more powerful than friend's machines in all ways except the ratings plate. I'm definitely impressed.

David

[Synchrodyne]

I’ve just checked our Miele vacuum cleaner, probably getting close to a decade old. It is a variable power machine, drawing between 300 and 2200 watts – ouch! But with its “beating” carpet head, it does a good job of getting the cat hairs out of the carpet, for which full power setting is usually needed. In that regard it is somewhat like the Hoover upright I had back in Texas days, which was also good at pulling out the cat hairs from the carpet. The Miele was chosen by SWMBO, although strangely it is used mostly by moi. Probably the best vacuum cleaner that I recall is one my folks had back in the late 1960s, I think. It was a Tellus (possibly with a model number like G70), a vertical shaft model that looked somewhat like a silver milk can. In fact it was basically a small industrial machine that was also popular for domestic use in NZ. I think it had a fairly hefty motor in power input terms; it certainly had no shortage of suction.

Cheers,

[G4XWDJim]

I've had a Hoover Dustette, 600 Watts, since about 1964 which I use in the garage and outside in the garden for removing dust from old radios. The hose can be plugged in to the back end to use the blow facility which is particularly good for early stages of radio cleaning.

Does anybody make that style of cleaner any more. I remember that it came with a glass spray gun that would spray emulsion or garden fence paint. Very useful.

The air that came out was quite warm and very helpful in drying out radios that I'd washed down

Jim

[emeritus]

I don't think any domestic vacs that blow have been available in the UK (other than second-hand) for at least 20 years. When the motor burnt out in our Electrolux 345 I had to get a replacement motor because no new blowing vacs were available. As well as dust removal by blowing, it is very useful for inflating air beds and rapidly defrosting the freezer, not to mention drying out the soaking wet carpet in my old Vectra by blowing air in from the underside via the drain plugs.

I still have the spray gun that came with my mother's long-gone 1950's Electrolux. I remember my father using it, and I last used it myself in the 1970's to respray a new panel for my car. Some of the younger people at work thought I was pulling their leg when I said that vac accessories used to include a spray gun as standard.

[G4XWDJim]

I'd forgotten about inflating air beds. Yes I did that too and also the buoyancy bags in my sailing dinghy. It's sad the passing of such a useful tool.


Jim

[dseymo1]

I also still have an Electrolug spraygun, which I used in the past for painting.
It shouldn't be too hard a task to convert a redundant vac to 'blow-only'. Once cleaned out, it would have the advantage of not augmenting the paint with residual dust!

[Okto1984]

I have an electrolux 312 from roughly the late 70s. It came with a 750 watt motor that worked great until earlier this year. The suction was pretty powerful, I used it easily to shrink those space bags for storing clothes. The motor started making bad noises however and loosing suction, so I replaced with a 1100 watt motor (electrolux don't make the 750w ones any more from what I found). This does suck better than ever before, and I can fill the bags more before replacing them now, but I'm not convinced the carpet is any cleaner. I sometimes lifted up and moved large objects like shoes and books by mistake with the old 750w motor, so why would I suspect the little hairs and dust I'm cleaning up need any more watts? I was actually concerned when I replaced the motor that cleaning performance could reduce as it might push more fine dust through the filter. That doesn't seem to be happening however, and the higher wattage motor does make the air turbine head spin a lot more, which is good for pet hairs and things.

It also has the handy blower feature. I've only used it to unblock the pipe (stick it out the window first, as I learned the first time...). However, I'm now wondering what other useful things I could do with it.

[Refugee]

When we had an old cleaner I used to use the blow mode to unblock the hose with the end pointing into the sucking end of the cleaner so that it did not make a mess.

[emeritus]

When my kids were small, I did sometimes let them use it as a sock gun after I had defrosted the freezer: put a long sock over the end of the tube and let it go. Great fun. I did contemplate making them a ping-pong ball gun, but didn't have any spare suitable tube.