How CHIP tests: vacuum cleaners

The best mod­els are not only effi­cient and eco­nom­i­cal, but also offer good equip­ment, work qui­et­ly and are not annoy­ing dur­ing oper­a­tion. Since Sep­tem­ber 1, 2014, vac­u­um clean­ers have been assigned a pan-Euro­pean ener­gy effi­cien­cy label from “A” to “G”. If the pow­er of the dust-swal­low­er is more than 1600 watts, it does not receive any label and can­not be sold in Europe.

The same applies to our rat­ing of vac­u­um clean­ers, which includes devices both with and with­out a dust bag: ener­gy eaters are not even allowed to be test­ed.

For almost every­thing in the world, there are DIN stan­dards (Deutsches Insti­tut für Nor­mung eV, Ger­man insti­tute for stan­dard­iza­tion). By the way, DIN stan­dards are not manda­to­ry for use in the ter­ri­to­ry RF.

For house­hold vac­u­um clean­ers, this is DIN EN 60312–1:2013. We pay atten­tion to it when car­ry­ing out var­i­ous mea­sure­ments, when we con­sid­er the cor­re­spond­ing indi­ca­tions ratio­nal. How­ev­er, in some cas­es we con­sid­er these direc­tives not very prac­ti­cal and have been forced to amend them.

For exam­ple, the results on a “pre­scribed” short pile car­pet are not much dif­fer­ent from the results on a hard sur­face. Instead, we use car­pets with a pile length of 0.6 cm — that is, we com­pli­cate the con­di­tions a lit­tle.

In addi­tion, the reg­u­la­tions gen­er­al­ly do not pro­vide for tests for the loss of suc­tion pow­er when the dust con­tain­er is full.

In gen­er­al, what you should pay atten­tion to when buy­ing a vac­u­um clean­er, you can find out from the sum­ma­ry test table for vac­u­um clean­ers.

Suction power (30%)

Suc­tion pow­er is test­ed on both hard and car­pet­ed floors. To do this, we dis­trib­ute respec­tive­ly 67.5 and 73.5 grams of quartz sand on one track 1 meter long. The width of the track is adjust­ed to the noz­zle. In this way, we simul­ta­ne­ous­ly test the suc­tion of dust along the edges of the brush.

We adjust the pow­er of each device in such a way that it does not stick to the sur­face and the noz­zle slides com­fort­ably. In the case of a hard sur­face, we can “suck” with max­i­mum pow­er, in the case of car­pets, we can reduce it by half or even more — with an appro­pri­ate adjust­ment for the over­all pow­er of the device.

Rat­ings for car­pet work are deter­mined by the amount of debris removed. It is more dif­fi­cult to sep­a­rate the results of work on a hard sur­face, since almost all vac­u­um clean­ers cope with such sur­faces per­fect­ly. For a more accu­rate assess­ment, we fill a spe­cial joint 0.6 cm wide and 1 cm deep with sand to the very edges.

The weight of the sand is mea­sured before and after pass­ing the seam with a vac­u­um clean­er. The device that sucks more sand gets the best score, and the results of all oth­er vac­u­um clean­ers test­ed are cal­cu­lat­ed in pro­por­tion to the best one.

Test­ing con­tin­ues with a test for loss of suc­tion pow­er with a full dust con­tain­er. To do this, we fill con­tain­ers with 300 grams of a mix­ture of flour, sug­ar, saw­dust and cot­ton wool, and then vac­u­um both hard floors and car­pets again.

Noise (25%)

The noise of the vac­u­um clean­er most like­ly will not inter­fere with those who are direct­ly involved in clean­ing, but it may very well be for those around them. Qui­et devices pro­tect your rela­tion­ship with your neigh­bors and can be used dur­ing qui­et hours.

Ven­dors almost always list noise lev­els in deci­bels, which are log­a­rith­mic units, so it’s not easy to com­pare the two. To deter­mine the lev­el of sub­jec­tive loud­ness, we use the unit “sleep”, just as in the case of oth­er types of devices.

The qui­etest vac­u­um clean­er we’ve test­ed gets the best score in this test cat­e­go­ry, with all oth­er devices fol­low­ing.

Power consumption (10%)

Ven­dors are will­ing to adver­tise vac­u­um clean­ers with good ener­gy effi­cien­cy labels. Buy­ers pay atten­tion to this.

Our lev­el of ener­gy con­sump­tion has lit­tle effect on the final assess­ment, because when cal­cu­lat­ing the aver­age annu­al amount of elec­tric­i­ty spent on a vac­u­um clean­er, the dif­fer­ences will be very small.

For exam­ple, if you vac­u­um your car­pet 50 times a year, then the most vora­cious devices will use up about 65 kWh per year. At the same time, the most ener­gy-effi­cient vac­u­um clean­ers will con­sume about 17.45 kWh. The dif­fer­ence is not sig­nif­i­cant, in both cas­es we are talk­ing about extreme val­ues.

Equipment (10%)

The most impor­tant point to check in this scor­ing cat­e­go­ry is the vol­ume of the dust con­tain­er: the small­er the con­tain­er, the less rat­ing points the vac­u­um clean­er will receive.

In addi­tion, the ease of use of the suc­tion device also mat­ters: does the tube move apart, is there a reg­u­la­tor for addi­tion­al air sup­ply? What sys­tems does the device have to store acces­sories?

The test in this cat­e­go­ry is com­plet­ed by check­ing the acces­sories them­selves and answer­ing ques­tions such as: how many car­ry­ing han­dles does the vac­u­um clean­er have, how con­ve­nient is it to store it, and how many attach­ments are offered in the pack­age.

Exploitation (25%)

Many fac­tors influ­ence the score in the Exploita­tion test cat­e­go­ry. Sev­er­al testers lit­er­al­ly drag vac­u­um clean­ers behind them and eval­u­ate their mobil­i­ty and maneu­ver­abil­i­ty. Among the advan­tages is a large radius of action.

We also take into account how much plas­tic fas­ten­ers wear out dur­ing test­ing. Next, it is checked: how easy and clean is the dust con­tain­er emp­tied? How freely and even­ly is the suc­tion pow­er reg­u­lat­ed, how heavy is the vac­u­um clean­er com­plete with hose, cable and all nec­es­sary acces­sories?

The device can get addi­tion­al points if its case is soft enough not to scratch fur­ni­ture in col­li­sions, and the cable rolls into the case auto­mat­i­cal­ly.

A pho­to: man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies