The Dyson Story

So, I've wanted a Dyson vacuum cleaner for a very long time now.  The things is that they're just rather expensive, and I haven't felt like we could spring for that sort of an investment.  It's funny how your priorities change when you know there's going to be a little child crawling around on the floor with all the cat hair and only God knows what else.  Add to this the fact that we had sorta killed our previous vacuum (more on this later) and well... we were due a new one.

With this in mind, we made the decision to finally purchase a Dyson.  After quite a bit of research we went for the DC25.  Model numbers are confusing at first, but the DC25 is essentially a lightweight vacuum with the same power as the larger Dysons.  It has greater manueverability (it sits on a ball instead of wheels) and a smaller capacity (by half).  We went with the "all floors" version which just means you don't get an extra attachement for the "wand" that helps with animal fur.

Now, it requires a little assembly, but not much, so after assembling it I of course had to vacuum the house.  I wish I'd taken a picture in its clean state, but I really didn't fully comprehend what was about to happen.  I flipped it on, and immediately got white powder in the collection area.  This of course deserves an explanation.

You'll remember I said we had killed our previous vacuum... well about two years ago now our cats got fleas, and introduced them into the house at large.  I didn't really like the idea of poison, so we researched other solutions and came up with diatomaceous earth.  Diatomaceous earth is a white powdery substance about the consistency of flour.  It's basically chalk in powder form.  They say it's ground up sea shells and such, and so the individual particles are supposedly sharp enough to kill bugs.  This sounded great in theory but when you put something the consistency of flour on your carpet, you're asking for trouble.

Now around this time we were leaving the country to go visit Ju's folks in Indonesia, but we didn't want to come back to a dirty house, so we tried to clean it.  I say "tried" because the existing vacuum didn't make it very far into that job before it was so clogged that it refused to suck.  We decided "Screw it, we're leaving." and that we'd steam it when we got back.  Certainly two week of the stuff being down would eliminate any lucky fleas (it did).

Upon our arrival back home we found that mom and dad had had the carpets steamed for us while we were gone.  This was a VERY pleasant surprise.  Now we had an inkling on the way to the house because all down our street was a big white mark that ended at our house.  The steaming company had actually steamed the whole house twice trying to get all the diatomaceous earth up.  Since that time I'm unsure how many times we've vacuumed but it's been plenty.  I say all this to lay the ground work for the rest of our story.  Any time you see Dyson commercials, or research it on the web people always talk about how much dirt it pulled up, etc, etc.  That's great but I don't think any of them have had the experience with this machine I had.

So back to the white powder.  I hadn't vacuumed 5 inches of carpet before it started pulling up white powder, which is of course the diatomaceous earth.  Once I started I couldn't stop, it was sort of like one of those fascinations where something is gross but you just can't stop looking at it.  So I vacuumed the living area first, and got an entire bin full of diatomaceous earth and cat hair... the job it did on the living room alone was worth the money we paid for it.  For every room I cleaned I had to empty out the bin, even the hallway warranted its own emptying.

So, in short the Dyson pulled up "dirt" that I know for sure is at least 2 years old, it did it better than professional steaming equipment + 2 years of combined effort from my personal vacuum.  So yeah... I'm impressed and can't suggest it enough.