Is your Dyson Animal vacuum cleaner sucking, like mine was? There’s a good chance you can fix it cheaply.
In my case, the vacuum head — in Dyson speak, it’s the “soleplate” — was not seating down fully on the floor.
Because the soleplate wasn’t fully flush with the contact surface, the suction was greatly reduced. Here’s the sad thing: I knew this for some time. Like years. And I never got around to doing anything about it. I was just vacuuming in mediocrity. Well, I finally did something about it today.
Required Tools:
none
Required Parts:
rubber band, x1 1
It’s tricky to describe where to apply the rubber band, so the pictures below will help you visualize. But in words, the basic problem was that the intake hose (first two photos below) was making the soleplate assembly tilt up, away from the floor. I didn’t see any abnormal wear signs of the hose, or any other reasons to believe that this was something that happened with age. It makes me seriously wonder if this was a design flaw (gasp!) — a little hard to believe since Dyson’s legendary design esthetics resemble Apple’s. Regardless, a simple apparatus to force the assembly back down toward the floor was really all that was needed.
Photos:
The results? I kid you not, this thing has never — NEVER — cleaned this good. I was seriously astonished. My rugs are finally spotless; with three fur-bound pets in this house, I see a lot of deposited hair, and the rugs were totally clean. To quantify, a small family living room of about 15′ x 20’ used to equate to about a half full dirt chamber. Post-rubber-band-fix? The chamber was more full than I’d ever gotten before in that same room. Amazing!