Brit inventor Dyson challenges EU ruling on his hoover's energy efficiency ratings

Re: It's no good

I'm sure it will just blow over.

Re: It's no good

As much as I dislike the man, he has a point...

Re: It's no good

I buy a vacuum cleaner (note I do not use the brand name Hoover) to vacuum and pick up crud from my carpets and floors. The last thing I want to do or think about is saving the planet when I do.

Re: A can of worms..

Ahh yes and you have spotted half of the story. At no point ever do dyson ever say anything about filters. They always talk about bags. That they can not make a cyclonic filter work on the mass of dust is not immensely surprising but that they use filters and dont ever mention them till you buy one and it stops as pretty much as inefficient as any other hoover.

On the plus side they look pretty, are massively overpriced, brittle yet heavy. All you want in a vacuum.

Oh and if you phone them refer to their vacuum as a hoover. They love it......

Re: A can of worms..

We had a Dyson a long time ago. I was so frustrated it's suction power was useless. We had a white cat and a blue carpet in one room. The Dyson never came close to picking up those cat hairs.

The mother in law gave us her Miele. Utterly amazing. It has variable suction power that could actually pick up the carpet on full power. It also has motorised brushes in the cleaning head which pick up the cat hairs instantly.

3rd party bags & filters available on t'internet cheap.

F*ck Dyson

Re: A can of worms..

Agreed. Dyson hoovers are terribly overpriced and poor performers. A conventional Miele cylinder type for half the price shits all over them, and the Miele's made in the EU, too.

Re: "...help customers to consider environmental concerns..."

The ratings aren't always the best metric.

For example, I have solar panels that heat my water (when I'm lucky) yet I can not find an energy rated washing machine that has a hot water inlet. They all have a single cold water inlet and the water is heated up in the washing machine. The reason for this is that in order to get an energy rating the washing machine has to use cold water and heat it up, it can not use hot water. Without an energy rating it can not be sold in the EU.

The EU has effectively banned me from using solar heated water to wash my clothes and is instead forcing me to heat water using electricity.

Even without solar, it is more efficient for your household water heating system to provide the washing machine with hot water than it is for your washing machine to heat it itself and therefore the EU efficiency rating forces washing machines to be more inefficient.

It's not the assault on the eyes that's the problem

It's the assault on the wallet.

Re: Dyson have a point.

I second the cat hair. It needs to have been trodden down for several days, too.

Re: Dyson have a point.

"Someone must define a 'standard carpet' with an exact laboratory-standard mixture of dust particles of various sizes and a measured quantity of cat hair."

FWIW, they have. The issue is that testing takes place once, with a new device and there isn't enough material tested to actually fill a container/bag - so all that's being measure is initial efficiency - which to be frank, is crap on all of them.

Some time back a british gentleman managed to patent a system where the exhaust air is redierected down onto the carpet/floor just in front of the suction head. The result was that the same cleaning efficiency can be achived with about 25% of the power(*). As far as I'm aware there is only ONE cleaner on the market which makes use of this innovation.

(*) It also means that the fine dust spray which all vacuum cleaners emit (even the HEPA filtered ones) is eliminated and efficiency sapping fine filtration is largely unncessary because with the air being recirculated continuously the filters have a much greater chance of catching everything.

Re: Hoovers???

"I thought we'd stopped doing that last century."

News to me. I use a hoover to do the hoovering. My hoover is made by Dyson.

Re: Hoovers???

A tenuous link, and I only thought of it because of the way Bubbles says "Hoover vacooom".

http://youtu.be/-q5bnwPLrxg?t=6m44s

Re: Hoovers???

Reminds me of some school kids I heard in town talking about their teacher "Ms Dyson":

"Ms Dyson. Ha! Ha! I wonder if she invented the hoover. Ha! Ha!"

My wife said giving them a smack on the head would be frowned upon.

Re: Hoovers???

Completely agreed. But then I only say vacuum cleaner anyway.

Re: Hoovers???

Where are Dyson's hoovers made, exactly?

Re: Hoovers???

Actually, in the UK Hoover lost their trademark because it became a generic term, so you can quite happily and legally hoover away with your Dyson, Miele or Henry. You can even hoover with your Hoover. I have no idea of the grammatical correctness of your actions, however.

Re: Am I the only one...

I'd say it was like measuring your car's power output with the wheels jacked up off the ground.

or a washing machine with nothing put into the drum

energy efficiency of a vacuum cleaner ought to be the energy it uses to pick up a known quantity of material. what price a low energy usage cleaner if you have to vacuum the same bit of carpet twice?

Re: Sort out the car industry mpg figures while you're at it...

Totally agree with you on this one. Apparently my VW Passat Sport 177PS returns 67.3mpg Extra-Urban 60.1mpg combined, and 50.4 urban.

Well I can tell you that I have never seen any more than 55mpg, and that was taken over a relatively short section of scottish highlands A road at about 50mph.

For real world figures consisting of mostly extra-urban driving on A roads, plus a little motorway driving, in the Cambridgeshire fens see:

http://www.fuelly.com/driver/w0067814/passat

I'm not a fast driver either BTW...

Re: Testing in a representative environment

My car pretty much achieves it's official, terrible, MPG numbers.

Re: Testing in a representative environment

Another hand up! Manual says 15.5 mpg but I usually get about 22 mpg.

Isn't that great? Thank you for the G, you Austrian engineers! </sarcasm>

His problem is that his rivals all suck. And cooperation just isn't their bag. Also untrustworthy, less than half of them being upright...

Re: Is it just me

Downvoted? Really? He has pretty much said that the fact that his cleaner is 'bagless' (a design element) should count as a plus in an energy efficiency rating (a measure of how much poweer it uses to do its job). If that isn't asking for the benchmark to be skewed in your favour, I don't know what is.

Re: Is it just me

I'm sure it's precisely the point. However, he may have some justification on his side. After all, the whole point of the swirly-wirly design was to do away with the bags. Because the bags only work at peak efficiency for the first bit of sucking, until you've actually used them. At which point they start to reduce in efficiency and suction.

So his point is that his should be using a relatively stable amount of energy, whereas theirs will become more energy inefficient as they're used. So testing when brand spanking new does give them an advantage - and isn't really a good test of energy efficiency. Or anything really.

He may even have a point on consumables. In something like a fridge, which is turned on 24/7, energy efficiency is obviously key. However, a hoover is only turned on once a week, for a few minutes. So consumables are a much larger proportion of the energy budget. Also if the unit drops in efficiency for a large portion of its lifecycle, it may end up consuming more power, as it has to be turned on for longer to do the same job.

Being no hoover expert, it may be that he's just getting his complaint in first. But his points seem pretty reasonable to me so far.

Re: Is it just me

So, you develop a device, add a few features into it which you feel improve its efficiency in real world usage, then the EU decide to test the devices in a silly way which bypasses your efficiency improvements (ooh I dunno, testing vacuums in a dust-free environment for example). Of course you'd complain!

Just the same was as if they tried to test the efficiency of cars by doing 30 laps flat out around Silverstone, all the hybrid manufacturers would (rightly) complain that it's not a true test of actual real-world usage (unless you're Michael Schumacher and happen to live next to the Nürburgring).

Unless of course you can see a single real-world aspect to firing up a vacuum cleaner in a dust free area?

Re: Dear Dyson

Simple solution: Buy a Henry. You'll change the bags every so often and keep the filter clean, then it'll last you at least 10 years judging by our one!

Re: Dear Dyson

With my old Dyson I just press a button in the top of the handle and carry the plastic container out to the bin, separate it's two halves over the bin and shake out the dust. The drop it back in place. That's not really a messy job.

I do need to wash the filters every year or so, as it loses suction because a safety valve blows on the side, as I guess it thinks the pipe is block by something, but it's actually the filter that's clogged.

Re: Dear Dyson

You should try a Dyson, I never have a mess when I empty, yes with other bagless I have...

Just hold in bin, push button, drop all dust goes into bin... tap a few times to ensure its all out, then close and your clean, no bag needed

Re: I've never quite worked out the benefit of Dyson

Why didnt you get them fixed under warantee - afaik remember even out of waranttee Dyson have the best customer service I have dealt with - often just fling you out a spare part.

I wonder how much of a "British-made" Henry is actually made here, and how much is shipped in from, say, Malaysia?

I had a DC01 and now have a DC24. The later models are a complete revelation, so don't base your opinion only on experience of earlier models.

Re: i don't care about efficiency

I dont do hoovering - partly because I'm lazy but mainly at 6'5" there is not a single one on the market tall enough for me to use comfortably and not set of my 'ooh my back I'm off down the pub' problem.

And Dyson can rot in hell for glueing the carpet thing on the end of the pipe so you cant use if and the pull out 'expandable' plastic hose that's as giving as a rally suspension coil.

Re: i don't care about efficiency

My girlfriend just bought a new Bosch hoover and on the lowest power setting it is remarkably quiet - perfectly possible to have a conversation while it is on - and yet it is still quite capable of picking up all the detritus it is required to.

Re: A to G

Some understanding to the 95% of the population who don't understand what kWh and joules are. (And it's likely to have absolute figures like that in small print next to the energy rating anyway, for those who want them.)