The Path to Household Goddesshood for the Inept... (almost). (Dyson DC02)

Member Name: sweary

Product:	Dyson DC02
Date:	17/07/04 (888 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Light weight, Well balanced and easy to carry, Hugs the stairs

Disadvantages: Can be vile to empty, Get's hung up in pull along mode , Would be good if you could stick the attachments on the pole to hoover ceilings

I take to cleaning like a duck to quantum mechanics.

What I'm trying to say is that not only do I hate doing it but the reason why is because I'm bad at it. I hoover my house once a week but it often looks worse when I've finished than before I began. Add the fact that when my husband comes home he invaribly a) doesn't detect any appreciable difference, even though he actually tries hard to notice these things and make appreciative noises b) inadvertantly manages to find some surface that is still dusty and c) sneezes until I fear he and the inner linings of his nose will messily and painfully part company.

My expecting the house to look clean after I've finished is rather like someone totally tone deaf, who can only sing with a high note and a low note, releasing an album and wondering why it won't sell.

I bought a Dyson about 6 years ago, the minute I got the kind of job that allowed me to afford one. I had been desparate to buy one since their initial release. If you work and resent spending your weeks sweating blood for your employers and your weekends sweating blood to make your house look less like a nuclear fallout zone you'll understand where I'm coming from. Cut down the hoovering time and that's a whole hour for ME.

That's the way I saw it anyway. The other added benefit was that if it sucks up four times as much dirt as the average vacuum cleaner, I will only need to hoover 1 in 4 times as often as I previously did. This is not actually how it works out but it does mean there's the odd week when I can get away with not hoovering without it being too noticeable.

THE FILTERS

I don't mind about the filters, mine doesn't take the HEPA thing but the other two work fine. I have two sets which can be washed and re-used three times. This cuts the costs a lot as you can do a year and a bit on two sets before you need to buy any more.

THE

BAG (NOT)

I agree with everyone else about emptying it. It's full of static so you can never actually get the dust off without inhaling vast quantities. The fact I always have to hoover around wherever it is I've emptied the bag afterwards demonstrates this (I hate doing it outside becase it all goes in my hair). I therefore tend to hoover in the morning, after I've been for a run, before I have a shower. That way accidental spillages don't matter as anything that gets dusty, be it me or my clothing, is going to be washed shortly afterwards.

THE DESIGN

The design, is fantastic. As the owner of what must be the hairiest cat in Britain I love to see great balls of hair appearing in there when I hadn't even noticed they were on the carpet.

I have a theory that most hoovers are designed by men. If a man is doing something like housework, he likes to feel he has achieved something. He likes his hoover to have lots of gadgets and he enjoys taking the time to do the work, watching the dust and fluff gradually disappear from the carpet. A woman's life is a headlong rush to get all the boring stuff like ironing, hoovering and cleaning done so that she can go and find something more interesting to do, reading a book, writing Caio reviews etc.

The Dyson is conceived and designed with the woman's attitude in mind, ie let's make this as quick and easy as possible so we can get onto something else. Even six (yes SIX) inch long cat fur is no trouble. On the downside, if you're hauling it along behind you it can handle like a supermarket trolly, it often gets caught up in its own flex and falls over. However, since it's easy to carry I often just pick it up and wander round with it. The handle is positioned in exactly the right place for this and it is, to my mind, quite light.

Like everyone else, I, too, relish the way it hugs the stairs, although I usually use the uphols
tery
attachment to hoover ours (cf six inch cat hair comment) rather than the long bit. I also like the way you can reach under things easily with the full length attachment, keeping the business end flat on the floor by turning the handle slightly.

GRIPES

I do really hate emptying it, and I do wish it would follow me around properly, I also wish I could work out, once I've pressed the bit on the business end of the suction hose to go into carpet hoovering mode, how I can get it to go back to floorboard mode without actually having to pick it up and press that metal thing back in by hand. I also wish you could put the attachments on the end of the metal bit, rather than just the end of the hose, as then I could hoover the cobwebs off the ceilings in my house rather than having to smear them in with a feather duster sellotaped to the end of a five foot pole.

THE COMPETITION

But before I complain, let's look at the competition.

Before I got my Dyson we had two hoovers, one from each set of parents. Both were state-of-the-pre-Dyson-art.

One was the opposite of an upright (I dunno, is that a liedown?) an Electrolux which worked ok but the bag filled up very quickly, new bags were difficult to get so I was always running out and it was a pain to empty. It was green and looked a bit like a mini-metro. The other was an upright, also made by Electrolux, which was supposed to perform both upright and liedown functions. It had what I can only describe in Red Dwarf terms as a Kryten-style groinal attachment - a hose which plugged in half way up - which you could use to do the stairs or the chairs. There were recesses in the plastic casing for all the tools and implements and the most vital would always drop out at the critical moment, falling down three sets of stairs so you had to trog all the way down to get it.

The entire hoover weighed about as much as a small car and the Kryten hose was a
lways gett
ing blocked so I'd have to take it outside, lay it out flat and poke a bamboo cane down it until the huge ball of cat hair inside could be pushed out at the end. The belt always came off the beater, too and without any resistance the electric motor would proceed to go faster and faster until the smoke would alert me to a problem and I'd turn it off, just before meltdown, and put the belt back. And I don't even want to think about emptying the bag.

My husband "never had any problems" with this hoover, which is what I mean about men liking to feel they've really DONE something when they help around the house. But it also shows that before Dyson designed a hoover properly people thought vacuuming HAD to be like that.

Once I got the Dyson, the time it took me to throroughly hoover the entire house dropped from 2 and a half hours to 40 minutes. That's how good it was. I would therefore recommend it to anyone looking to buy a hoover.

It's easy to forget that the reason there is any viable competition for Dyson these days is because the other hoover makers had raise their game to compete.

For that, alone, the man deserves our thanks.

PS. Please excuse the ee cummings capitals in the first half of this review, I have no idea why they're there or how to make them go away. Sorry.

Cheers

Sweary

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