Does anyone have any experience with these? Apparently they are the only vacuums with a water filter, so no clogs or drop in efficiency.
I love mine. It is very efficient, not difficult to set up, and really does reduce the amount of dust in the house. My blue area rug was perceptibly brighter after the first time I used it. They are expensive, but IMO well worth it.
If I didn’t have (and love) my Dyson, I’d totally consider buying a Rainbow. But I would never buy it from one of those aggravating folks who come to your door to “demonstrate” it and then give you a hard-sell. If you want one, you can buy it a lot cheaper off of eBay, and without the hard-sales pitch!
I had neighbor with a Rainbow vacuum who could get an attachment if they got someone to listen to the pitch… we took one for the team and sat through the show. Ouch. You’d think these things could save the world.
The part that bothered me the most was the emphasis on the water filtration. Having worked with industrial ceramic powder manufacturing I spent a lot of time spec-ing dust collectors and filtration systems. I had to install a water based filtration system once (the air I was filtering was from an industrial dryer and therefore very moist). Dust collection efficiency numbers in the 50% - 60% range. The problem is contact. How to get ALL of the dust in the air in contact with the water. Picture a large volume of air moving through water…bubbles. Inside the bubbles…dust. The mechanics of generating turbulence is complicated. A re0usable Gore-Tex (or similar) filter membrane is, by far, the best filtration method.
and one more thing… water loses it’s filtering efficiency as it get dirty…membrane filter get more efficient as the fill up. Air flow drops, but filtration efficiency goes up.
I believe the Dyson testimonial…skip the Rainbow.
Consumer Digest is your friend. Do your homework before spending that kind of money.
You’re describing a bong pipe.
We had one a number of years ago. Great unit, one of the best vacumns that I used. But it did require a lot of maintenance.
TheBori- filter efficiency might go up, but you get less air flow, so less dirt gets picked up.
This is right. I spent about 15 years in the development of filters and in aerosol science (meaning particles in air, not the propellant cans). It is pretty easy to do a practically perfect job of catching particles with a filter, and a vacuum cleaner is a pretty easy place to do it. There are several very different ways of catching particles, one of which is the water. I did see a useful application of the water method in those motorcycle-like or snowmobile-like boats people race around on, in which water keeps getting sucked into the engine air, which is hard to handle in a filter, so they used the water to their advantage anyway. But except for some very special nich applications, these water based cleaners are not much use - especially in a vacuum cleaner.
If you have termites, and it’s spring and they’re all over the place…the water filtration thingy works really well.
not recommended as a substitute for actual professional extermination purposes