I was somewhat skewed with the power of vacuums because, for most of my childhood, I used a bloody SHOP VAC to clean the house with. I lived in a crazy cat lady home, with hardwood floors. So we had a few Shop Vacs, a string of Singer Fat Cats to suck up the dust and dirt in the house. Also - one of us had Asthma - so the place HAD to be super clean.

But as an adult, I've struggled, oh I've struggled, with these shitty things, as the quality of easily acquired domestic consumer goods has gone so far downhill I wouldn't trust it to last me more than 3-5 years. I HATE This trend with a passion. I like things I can own for years. C'mon, think about who you're talking to here - a man who owns several guitars, and his main ones he's had at least 10, if not 20 or even 30 years. And that's less surprising than the fact he daily's a 31 year old SUV, prefers lawn mowers with the old, venerable Briggs Classic engine on them, and hates most newer appliances, ESPECIALLY modern washers and driers.

And one of the devices of the most scorn to me, is the goddamn vacuum cleaner. Seriously, when I was a kid, these things could rip the damn rug off the floor! They could suck up pennies and guitar picks with ease. They never clogged. They never had batteries that left you with 5 minutes of charge. But starting in the 2000, we started to get these plastic pieces of shit that struggle to suck up simple crap like cat dander or fine dust without clogging, or messing up - ya' know, the things a Vacuum cleaner is DESIGNED to do! (or should be). So here's my guide to my experiences with vacuum cleaners (and how many have pissed me off, and what has impressed me).

Picture Make/Model	Description & My Thoughts
Shark Rocket	The O.G. Shark Rocket was expensive, at about $215, but was a great vacuum in hindsight, and one of the rare few modern ones I can truly say was a reliable workhorse beyond 5 years. We got it in 2012 or 2013, and had it until about 2019. I beat the ever loving hell out of this thing, and can't be too angry. Sadly I did smash this one getting frustrated over it's one Achilles Heel - the hose that attaches it to the "stick" part. That hose wore plumb out in the 7-8 years we had it. I did make a good repair by using a car radiator hose to fix it, but it made the vacuum too stiff to stand upright, as the tension of the thick rubber caused it to fall back a lot. Then it started clogging a lot as well. So that's the only problem with these, and the shop wanted $57 for a stupid piece of wirey hose. F*** that noise! So not much to say. I also had a nice lifehack where I took the head off and detail cleaned without the head off it using my foot. The most annoying part about it though was FILTER MAINTENANCE. When I was a kid, all you did was changed a bag and were done with it. These newfangled bagless vacs though, you have 2-5 different filters to clean, and those filters degrade with time. The Shark had this big filter that kind of reminds me of a Briggs & Stratton lawn mower air filter, and then a secondary filter that felt like a dollhouse bed mattress to clean. I would spend quite awhile squeezing all the fine particulates out of the filter using dish soap and hot water to clean it, and then having to wait 2 1/2 hours for all that crap to dry so I could put it back in the vacuum cleaner.
Orfeld Cordless	We bought this vacuum with a name I totally forgot off of Amazon in 2020 for like....$47 or something. It lasted about, oh, a year, and then was an utter and total piece of shit. It was okay, except that it had a weak battery, and it did a shitty job vacuuming unless I put it in "Turbo Mode". IT also was rickety, and kind of janky because of poor quality Chinese Plastics, which eventually led to me having to tape parts of it together to continue using it. Which led to the Shark Navigator. It had a pretty cool looking power indicator. But probably the most annoying part of this thing was how short this thing was. This thing was obviously designed for a populace of shorter stature, or a populace where a "subserviant wife" would do all the vacuuming. Me, being tall and aggressive, I'm just too much for this thing. Let me tell you, I like vacuuming, but it's not satisfactory with a device that fails to pick up fuzzballs.
Shark Navigator	The Shark Navigator is a cordless, bagless, cyclone-action vacuum with no attachments, a NiCad battery with a runtime of 30 minutes, and it's small, light, and I was right about it feeling "cheap". I believe the version we have was some kind of Amazon exclusive. We got about 3 years out of it before clogging became so frequent, my poor wife would try to vacuum, and the damn thing would clog, and we wonder why we started feeling sick and tired all of the time - I think it's this crappy vacuum. First off, this thing said it was made for pets. Then why does owning TWO cats clog this thing so easily? Oh, I know, the 1" wide orfice through which it has to jam stuff for a county mile...which then gets stuck in the passthrough to the "container" for dirt, and causes a huge clog. Seriously, this thing could'nt even survive living in a REGULAR household. It's so funny that's what people use these days to clean their house. It'd be a great vacuum if it did not clog like, every time I use it. Then there I am, with a running Shark Navigator, on the floor with a coathanger, or a drain unclogging tool, trying to clear out the huge chunk of crap blocking the orfice and causing it to just throw dirt everywhere. Every time I had that thing I'd be giving it a plastic tracheotamy to clear out some clump of crap that any **normal** vacuum (ie the quality machines I grew up with) would have no problem "inhaling". This thing though....it seems more content to sit on it's charger - blinking at all hours of the night while it charges, driving my wife nuts when she gets up to go to the bathroom!
Oreck XL BB870-AW	This is the *FREE* Vacuum that Oreck gives you when you buy one of their (incredibly hard to find in a thrift shop) uprights! I bought this at the St. Vinnies for $15 with almost all of the attachments, and it's become a staple in my new apartment with the garage. Here we have a tiny little Canister vacuum, and it actually lives up to the claims of the guy that came up with it - David Oreck. Seriously, I put this thing through pure hell in the span of a year! It's sucked up almost an entire Fender Factory's worth of sawdust from guitars. Before that, it was the vacuum I used to clean our old apartment carpets. It never loses suction, has only clogged once or twice, and it has literally sucked something into every square inch of it's bag to the point I had to really work to get the bag out! Solid blocks of pine/cedar/oak/mahogany/plywood/plexiglass/lexan/ABS plastic - all congealed in a single of a pack of 27 vacuum bags we got from Amazon for $25. Being a tiny little Shop Vac is it's strength! It's also great for the stairs, great for corners, great for sucking up insects, great for all that. What it DOES suck at - and not in the way it should at least - is doing carpet. This is for one reason though - the HEAD. I swear, in the 80's, every vacuum cleaner company bought all their attachments from the same 1-3 manufacturers. The extension hoses are identical to those we had on our Shop Vac, Singer System, and Kenmore Canister that we had when I was a kid. All the attachments look like the ones that came with our Shop Vac, especially the crappy carpet head on it. The carpet head's problem is it's just a wide mouthed attachment with pubic-hair-like-bristles all around. I get the idea, it's supposed to "flip" dust upward to hit the vacuums suction, but that's a really crappy, and primitive way of going about it. So i don't like doing carpet with it since I have to shove it like I'm digging a hole to get it to flip much. Or there's using the much better smaller head, which results in vacuuming feeling like I'm mowing a 3 acre lawn with a Sycamore 19' push mower. There's a part of me that's seriously tempted to find a way to make a safe auxilary wiring harness to drive a cleaning head from a canister vac with this.
Hoover Cyclone Pet Vacuum	So I picked this up at the same thrift shop for the same price as the Oreck XL above ($15) in/around mid 2024 because I got pissed off at the damn Shark Navigator, and right now, I'm at a point where when it starts acting up, I'm like Kurt Cobain with a malfunctioning guitar - I want to smash the fucking thing. Hopefully this will be my "Jaguar" of a vacuum cleaner. First impressions were not that solid though, since the cord was wrapped around, I assumed someone had broken the tabs to hold the cord off. Then it redeemed itself when I saw a feature I've not seen in a long, long, time - not since the days of the big, mean, Electrolux and Kenmore canisters everyone had when I was young - a RETRACTING cord! For you Zennials out there, Vacuums used to hav this spring loaded coily affair that would retract the cord into the vacuum, so no wrapping at all. Just push a button, and it goes back in. I figured this out at the store when I saw the "retract cord" button on it. It had all the attachments except one hose. The hoses look small for the attachments....but the hose itself for the vacuum is practically a Shop Vac hose! Perfect! So I won't be needing to pull out the drain cleaner on this one it looks like....and there's more than one place on the vacuum to clear a clog! Excellent. First impressions upon cleaning is it's very quiet. The first test run was in teh garage, it sucked up some pretty sizeable wood chunks and sawdust like it was nothing. Then I took it upstairs and vacuumed the floor and REALLY Saw where the Shark was slacking. HALF the friggin container was full by the time I was done. So we have been living in a dirty house for almost a year! Save for maybe the time I used the Shark Rocket. I Guess when the guy in "Vacuum Troubles" farted in a Vacuum cleaner and gave himself an anal prolapse - it was one of these monsters.