Study Reveals Best Vacuum Brands |
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| Monday, 04 October 2010 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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We are often asked several questions by readers. “What is the best upright vacuum”?, “What is the best canister vacuum”?, and “What is the best brand of vacuum”?. While these are not the only questions, they are fairly common. In an effort to answer some of these questions we have generated quite a few “best vacuum” lists: Best Upright Vacuum However, until now we have not tried to determine the best brand of vacuum. There is a good reason for this as it is highly subjective and it is also not practical to look at every model of vacuum for all brands. But over the years we have gathered quite a bit of information on a large number of vacuum cleaners. As such, we thought it should be possible to do a little number crunching and see if there are any obvious trends. The results of this exercise were both expected and surprising. Our methodology was quite simple. We considered cost of vacuum (approximate), length of warranty and consumer ratings score. These are all items we record in our ratings tables (upright ratings, canister ratings, stick vac ratings, steam vacuum ratings). The results were then sorted by brand name and those brands with limited data removed (less than 4 reviews). We also removed handheld vacuum reviews as the short warranties and low costs tended to skew results. After all the analysis we were left with a rather simple table as follows:
How is one to interpret this? The obvious aspect of these results is the more money one pays the longer the warranty and the better the consumer ratings. This is “generally” true, but one can see there are some outliers here. Probably the largest deviation from this trend occurs with Hoover. In the table we can see Hoover selling (on average) for about half the cost of a Dyson but average consumer ratings are very close to those of Dyson. And while it needs to be pointed out that the Dyson typically has a longer warranty, there are several Hoover models such as those in the Hoover Platinum series that actually carry a 6-year warranty. Some of these have even been rated as a Best Buy by Consumers Digest. It is also striking at how well Bissell fared when compared to brands that cost about the same, such as Eureka, or substantially more, such as Panasonic or Electrolux. On average Bissell vacuums are not too expensive and there are a few that get very good reviews – such as the Bissell Cleanview Helix bagless upright and several of their SpotBot carpet cleaners. We may also take away from this that you often get what you pay for with Miele and Dyson as they do have lengthy warranties and very solid consumer ratings – especially Miele. it is only fair to point out that the study is not truly definitive as costs are estimates, consumer ratings are subjective (and gleaned from different sources), and not all vacuum models are included for each brand. However these figures do provide some insights into certain characteristics of different vacuum brands. We will revisit these numbers at a later date when more vacuum reviews have been completed to see if the addition of new data changes the results in any meaningful way.
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