1600 W maximum on vacuum cleaners from from Sept!

[scaryjim]

"Hod-duh-duh"

[wasabi]

Of course, if you want to be really green, get one of these




(from here http://www.gloves4less.co.uk/hoky-ro...Fc7HtAodygQAHg )

Then when you're tired, put the kettle on

[TheAnimus]

I find that odd, their reliability seems pretty good from the people I know who have them.

People buy a dyson, never, ever was the filter. Dyson dies after 2 years....

They need 'servicing' washing the filters regularly, cutting long hair from the rollers etc.

[Agent]

They need 'servicing' washing the filters regularly, cutting long hair from the rollers etc.

I've never had a vacuum that didn't need the hair cutting from the rollers to be fair.

My lodger has an afro. My god, it's worse than owning a cat.

[cheesemp]

My 1200W Henry Xtra hoover (The model with the air powered brush) works great. Picks up everything I throw at it (cat hair being a big culprit). Don't understand all the fuss - People must have some super thick carpets/inefficient hoovers if 1600W isn't enough...

[Zak33]

Dyson's are worth looking for second hand cheap cops few people actually wash the filter and once you do.. they are awesome again.

I have two.. both over 10 years old.. both still top reliable.

[Zak33]

now.. what actually has to occur in the vacuum cleaner market is that an all round adffordable model needs to be made.

Miele is all well and good but top bucks.

Many families wont be able to afford one.. so they will still be using old spec, inneficient vacuums for years to come.. millions of them

just like old cars...

[Agent]

Dyson's are worth looking for second hand cheap cops few people actually wash the filter and once you do.. they are awesome again.

I have two.. both over 10 years old.. both still top reliable.

That and split tubes - no one seems to check them and when they go, you lose a load of suction.

Under a tenner from Ebay / espares. Or direct from Dyson for a few quid more if you prefer.

[DanceswithUnix]

People buy a dyson, never, ever was the filter. Dyson dies after 2 years....

They need 'servicing' washing the filters regularly, cutting long hair from the rollers etc.

Guilty as charged, I think I washed the filter 3 or 4 times in all the years I had it. Perhaps the new ones aren't as resilient.

My 1200W Henry Xtra hoover (The model with the air powered brush) works great. Picks up everything I throw at it (cat hair being a big culprit). Don't understand all the fuss - People must have some super thick carpets/inefficient hoovers if 1600W isn't enough...

Not so bothered about 1600W tbh. The change to 900W in a few years seems stupid and harsh to me though.

Edit to add: We already had a limit. More than 3000W and you blow the 13A fuse. So by that measure the 2200W models are already green and could have been taking more

[watercooled]

Because if you give manufacturers an inch they'll take a mile?

The EU want to encourage more efficient vacuums, and I don't think anyone can really argue that making tools more efficient - as long as they still do their designated job - is a bad thing. But I don't see any way they can actually encourage manufacturers to reduce the power draw of their vacuum cleaners without imposing a power cap on them. I suppose they could subsidise low power vacuums, or impose some penalty (a higher tax, perhaps?) on vacuums above a certain power limit, but that's complicated and impractical. A blanket power cap? That's dead easy to implement, and it'll work. Sure, it's a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, but sometimes you want a walnut and the only tool handy is a sledgehammer...

I know I implied I'd avoid the thread, but thought I'd return to check for any replies rather than abandon what was otherwise an interesting discussion for the sake of one sub-thread (which is now duly ignored).

In response to your comment, I get where you're coming from, but as you say it's the walnut-sledgehammer thing; they haven't even given the method which has proven effective on many other appliances a chance. Manufacturers were encouraged to improve the efficiency of their products for sake of brand image with other appliances, and there were huge improvements to make in those areas e.g. washing machines using and heating far more water than was necessary, refrigerators having poor insulation and seals, electronics having high high standby power, etc. Why would that not work here, if there is a genuine improvement to be realised?

As I said, there really isn't a solid reason to impose the cap. And nor is it guaranteed to work if you think about it - what's to stop people going out and buying the cleaner with the highest number on the box, assuming power is directly correlated with performance? It doesn't. The limit does not directly force manufacturers to produce more efficient products, or encourage consumers to purchase them. Efficiency labelling perhaps, but that's a separate strategy and leads back into my first point.

I also understand that labelling could be harder, but that's assuming you want to rate cleaners based on efficacy rather than efficiency. Why not use what seems to be a fairly common MFR claim, air watts. After all, washing machines are rated on how much energy and water they use per load, not how effectively they will clean your garments vs another model.

[watercooled]

Perhaps I'm greenwash watercooled, but as far as I can tell your objections to renewable power generation in its many forms (wind energy in particular) can be supplemented by battery power in the form of cars being charged at home. Instead of having to produce power constantly you can simply resupply a ridiculous amount of batteries stored in electric cars which can serve as a store of energy for houses that require a little more than is available on the grid at any one time. Extending the idea further you could also install batteries to houses foundations as a store of energy for when little power is being generated thus giving a massive amount of potential energy to the grid that would otherwise not exist in our current system. Effectively the solution isn't only centralised power and it is not decentralised either, it would be a mixture of both to help make the system dynamic rather than static and slow to respond like it is today.

I felt obliged to make this post since your rant hit a nerve of mine by focusing on renewable energy generation which is helpful but not the complete solution. It is problematic but other technologies outside of power generation can ease your worries.

These are some sources of information I have taken on this subject giving me hope that the future is brighter than we may think:
http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovin...lan_for_energy
http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sado...newable_energy

Greenwashed, maybe. But to say the technology of intermittent renewable energy is something not beneficial, through rants or otherwise, is disingenuous and doesn't help solve our problem. Much like the discussion about this banning of high power vacuums; it doesn't properly understand the problem and therefore can't solve it. Perhaps kalniel is right, the politics behind the decision is more of a problem than the decision itself. Either way the problem remains unsolved and the consequences of this attempt to address it are probably going to mean more problems to solve. I'd rather see us use renewables and then solve their problems than continue to rely on generating energy as and when we need it.

Apologies, the tone of my rant may have painted a different picture of my stance on generation than I intended. Just to be clear, as I never explicitly said it earlier; I've nothing against renewable energy sources provided they're implemented in a way that isn't counter-productive, wasteful or technically infeasible, for instance. I.e. I consider myself simply realistic in that if something works, great, if it doesn't and/or carries too many assumptions which would lead us down a potentially dangerous path (all eggs in one flimsy basket), I'll probably not be supportive of it.

I was actually leading on from your comment on supporting new nuclear+thorium as I carry a similar opinion. Not that it isn't without its flaws, two of the major ones being cost and timescale.

I do however have an issue with the electric car/home storage concept, at least in the near-term with current technology, on multiple levels:
First being the environmental cost of producing the batteries themselves,
The enormity of the challenge of creating batteries on an unprecedented scale,
The fact that a country's worth of electric cars drawing power from the grid would add to energy demands massively,
The technical challenges and costs of exporting, synchronising and managing huge-scale 'micro-generation'.
And so on.

Of course, there's no point coming up with a system which is infeasible and/or doesn't produce energy at a price no-one can afford. Again, I'm talking near-term of course as the future is more of an unknown.

One last point - intermittent and unpredictable sources like wind arguably have less of a place on a mostly-nuclear grid considering the realities of nuclear generation. As always, you would need to have a reserve capable of filling in the generation gaps, but if this happened to be provided by nuclear, what's the point in even having the renewables? The cost of fuel for nuclear is near-negligible so it makes sense to run the reactors as close to full capacity as possible for cost reasons; while the renewables are producing, you're effectively paying for the energy twice.

Of course I can't see the UK grid being mostly-nuclear any time soon so that's less relevant - a more realistic but optimistic mid-term route is nuclear baseload and renewables with probably gas and/or some form of 'clean' coal as backup. So the renewables effectively reduce the fuel used by the fossil fuelled plants. Of course there's still the issue of cost with that route, with having to pay for backup plants.

Also for clarity, I don't (or don't intend to) use the term 'greenwashed' without reason. I use it pretty much as Wikipedia defines it:

Greenwashing (a compound word modelled on "whitewash"), or "green sheen,"[1][2] is a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that an organization's products, aims or policies are environmentally friendly.

Hope that clears things up a bit.

Edit: Just to add, wind turbines just happened to be something I chose as a comparison, specifically the way they are depicted by some. I've no special hatred for the technology itself, but as you say it's not the whole solution and I do have an issue with misleading claims. As I explained I do have an issue with cost and variability, however if practical solutions are found to overcome their issues, there's no reason I'd dislike that method of generation vs any other.

[Top_gun]

now.. what actually has to occur in the vacuum cleaner market is that an all round adffordable model needs to be made.

Miele is all well and good but top bucks.

Many families wont be able to afford one.. so they will still be using old spec, inneficient vacuums for years to come.. millions of them

just like old cars...

Bosch has this 1200 watt model BSGL3126GB Pro Energy Cylinder Vacuum Cleaner for a more affordable £99. It's also a Which best buy. So again, Watercooled is wrong again when he claimed lower energy vacuum cleaners will be more expensive.

Not sure why you think Miele is top bucks. They're good value products once you factor in their 20 year service life compared Dyson's just over two years, allegedly. Plus the price of Miele's vacuum cleaners are cheaper than Dyson's. Oh, and their cleaning performance does not deteriorate over time unlike Dyson's.

[DanceswithUnix]

They're good value products once you factor in their 20 year service life compared Dyson's just over two years, allegedly. Plus the price of Miele's vacuum cleaners are cheaper than Dyson's. Oh, and their cleaning performance does not deteriorate over time unlike Dyson's.

If they die after 2 years, then their 5 year parts and labour warranty must be costing them a fortune.

Now please forget current pricing, pretend their current range has Miele printed on it if it helps, and then look at the technology involved. Pricing and reliability are manufacturing details that always improve with time anyway. They used cyclones to improve dust extraction from the air stream, introduced exhaust filters to make sure fine particles aren't chucked back out the machine, and now they are replacing the decades old motor technology with a modern design.

And why on earth do you think performance drops off over time? Wash the filter if you aren't happy, I don't see what else can degrade the performance.

[peterb]

Any machine where a bag is part of the filtration process (and that includes Miele, as well as other makes) will lose efficiency as the bag blogs up, and the finer the pores in the bag, the quicker that happens, so part of the maintenance routine is to change the bag. The bags have a production and distribution cost in terms of energy impact, which adds to the through life energy impact.

Cleaners that do not use a bag as part of the filtration usually have washable filters - some models designed for households that require additional filtration (those with allergy suffered or asthmatics, for example) may have additional washable or disposable filters, but they are the exception.

Rating an appliance that only gets intermittent use by its power consumption is not particularly useful.

It is useful in considering appliances like fridges and freezers, which operate 24x7, but a domestic vacuum cleaner is not operated in that way.

[Noxvayl]

Cheers for the clarification watercooled. Your message seems to indicate you've not had time to watch the TED talks I linked to since some of the concerns you raised are directly addressed in them. The most obvious one being the environmental cost of the batteries needed for storage; the design is of a liquid metal battery that is created from very common materials on earth, none of the rare earth stuff currently being used; the capacity is going to be enormous, enough supply for a cul-de-sac full of houses when the larger designs are finally tested. The idea started as something that would benefit the renewable energy supply issue of intermittent supply of power. For me anyway, the nuclear option is there to address the need for a large amount of power to be produced over long periods that won't be feasible to be addressed with massive scale batteries, at least until we can drill far enough into Earth to be able to produce geothermal power anywhere in the world which is actively being worked on. The current power system we have is antiquated in theory and practice and isn't feasible for production of energy to supply the cities that are starting to develop in India and China which will soon become the norm. Those countries are building the newer generation power networks and we shouldn't be idly watching it happen, we need to upgrade.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ _


Getting back on topic, where is this unreliability of Dyson machines coming from by the way? From what I have read, the thread has many personal experiences extolling the reliability of Dyson vacuums and the DC24 that I have is working very well with intermittent maintenance by myself. I find them very easy to clean, having just done that this past weekend, and the suction power is as good as new at the moment. It isn't the biggest one in the range but it does the job better than all the other machines we have had in the UK and even comparable to 1600W Electrolux vacuum we brought over from South Africa that has been taken to the skip. I don't know any owner of a Dyson saying anything other than good things about them and I will certainly be buying another one when a bigger machine is required; the small one is perfect for the small home I am in at the moment but would make things unnecessarily tedious for a bigger house.

As for appliance ratings, they are more to do with the psychology of the consumer than the usefulness of the ratings as a measure of how good the product is. I've had the pleasure of talking to someone who works for the energy industry and tries to get consumers to reduce their energy bill, the conversation was far from what I had expected. Rational arguments and statistics to do with the quality and power draw of appliances has little to no effect on consumer usage, but simply telling them that they use more power than their neighbours suddenly achieves significant reduction in power usage. No valuable information was imparted to the consumer, simply a psychological nudge in the right direction gave them the will to reduce their own power consumption. That is what efficiency ratings achieve, a simple psychological nudge in the right direction by giving the consumers the ability to distinguish between similar products with a metric which we all intrinsically value, the amount of money we spend on using the item. Even if the item is used intermittently the effect will be the same if we simply give consumers the ability to see that one product will cost more to operate if used in the same manner as another product of the same type.

The way to think about it would not be to say the reduction in power is insignificant because it is used infrequently, that is the wrong perspective to take. From the consumer perspective you are replacing a machine that is no longer working as well as you would like, so you want something that will work better; naturally you will gravitate towards claims of high power usage to achieve better performance if you don't know any better. If you notice that it has a terrible efficiency rating you might then question the salesman as to why it has that rating or what the rating actually measures; in doing that the consumer now has their own reason for not buying the inefficient product rather than the EU telling them they are not allowed to through a ban. A simple efficiency rating encourages consumers to make better choices while a ban high power appliances leads to consumers, and manufacturers, finding interesting ways to get around the ban through some loop hole, well at least consumers not already using products unaffected by the ban.

Can read about how human psychology is used to help reduce energy usage elsewhere in the world: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...r-competition/ It is far more effective and less costly than bans on high power appliances.

[watercooled]

I was just on my way to bed what I read your post last night so missed watching the videos but I'll be sure to do so later today. I just wanted to quickly respond to your post after reading it. I'm hopeful about a viable form of energy storage as it would be part of a solution to many of the challenges we face in regards to energy distribution. Of course we already have pumped storage but constructing such sites is costly and they're used more to pick up slack for peak load, not having to supply the grid for potentially days at a time.

The LFTR is pitched as meeting some of the challenges of a less centralised grid like the ones in India/China, although there are of course challenges and uncertainties facing this reactor design. Nonetheless, thorium-based reactors seem to be given a back seat in terms of research scale and funding while there is a lot of potential in the technology. At least India in particular seem to be concentrating on it as they obviously have an increasing demand for electricity, and a huge natural reserve of thorium.