I actually bought a Dyson Animal solely because of one of the “I love my Dyson so much I’d have sex with it if I could without hurting myself” threads here. I’d never heard of them until I kept seeing people wax poetic about how much they loved theirs.
For floors, it’s the best vacuum cleaner I’ve ever used by a mile. We have two cats and a dog, and it both delights and repulses me to take three cannisters of pet hair off the floor every week or two. Our old vacuum was a piece of crap, so this is a huge improvement.
For our couches, we were excited about the special hurricane brush attachment until we realized it didn’t work for shit on our couches. Turns out the couch fabric is too porous to create any sort of seal, so the beater brushes wouldn’t turn, completely defeating the point of the attachment. The basic attachment is OK, but not great.
I like it a lot. Mostly. However, it ain’t perfect:
The changing attachments seems needlessly fiddly, what with all the removing of handles, extending of piping, sacrifice of goat and so on.
The pet hair attachment is good, usually, but it doesn’t work very well on some surfaces because on the right (wrong) surface the brushes will just stop because there isn’t enough suction to keep 'em spinning. Also, after a couple of years of use, the fit between the pet brush and the vaccum cleaner becomes less good, and tends to leak air - needs to be periodically pushed back onto the tubing during use.
Hair does get caught on the brushbar, but this takes me <5mins to clean (laina_f, 20mins??! What are you doing, removing the hair blindfold with a herring?)
The Dyson is also tremendously shite on hard floors, where the vacuum exhaust seems to push dust bunnies around faster that they can be sucked up.
We love our Dyson. And I have berber carpet. But I have no stragglies, all my carpet is currently in perfect condition. Although we have a couple squares of it in the house like to put under the dog food dish (they won’t eat in the kitchen) and if the Dyson gets a hold of one of the loose strands on the remnant, the noise is deafening.
I bought one two months ago, mostly because of the people posting here about how much they love theirs. I have to say its good, but it does not suck the paint off the walls like some people seem to think. 9 out of 10 I think. The bagless emptying system is the best though, I love it. I still freak when I fill the thing up for each rug in the house…never knew there was that much dirt on the carpet.
Love our dyson too! 4 cats a dog and 2 kids make for a lot of dirt and hair and cereal. I love how squishy the carpets are to walk on after a fresh vaccuum!
Our Dyson is so good its scary. Yes it does clog, but it never loses suction, which is the actual claim made. We got it for Christmas and immediately set to vacuuming our house, which was kept reasonably clean, or so we thought. This was right up until we started pulling pet hair from our carpet. Our carpet that we had lived on for 6 months. We don’t have pet, and the place was cleaned before we moved in. Scary stuff. Couldn’t live without it.
The folks at the office bought a Dyson, despite my pleading to the contrary. The first time it was used was for a large spillage of little paper circles from a hole punch, but as the exhaust vent blows out forwards at ground level, the mess just got blown around before it could be picked up. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Should have bought a Henry - OK, it looks stupid, but it actually, you know, works.
Oooh. Will be checking ebay for a Dyson animal vaccuum. My current one is a $50 vac I bought at Fred Meyer. Motor seems to be burned out after… has it really been several years?!.. of extremely long hair on me, plus the addition of two heavy-shedding cats.
Wow. I guess it’s time to take the plunge and find a new vaccuum. One that doesn’t require disassembly with a screwdriver every time it’s used.
When I bought mine, there were two models retail… the yellow one and the purple one.
The yellow one was the basic model and the purple one was the “animal” one. The purple one has a power attachment that’s supposed to be good for sucking up pet hair on furniture and a flat tool that’s supposed to be good for under furniture on hard floors. There was about $100 difference in price.
I bought the third model (a teal/purple one) from Sam’s. It’s a hybrid between the yellow and purple ones in that it has the power attachment but doesn’t have the flat tool. They’ve also split the difference in cost (about $50 less than the purple one)
Since I bought mine, I think I’ve seen a red model as well as the “ball” one. dyson has an 800 number that was very helpful to me when trying to decide if I wanted to float for the extra $50 for that flat tool. (I didn’t).
