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Hi! I'm Steve Chubin at Steve's Sewing and Vacuum Center in King of Prussia, PA and today
we are here to discuss how to buy a vacuum cleaner. On a hard case unit, where you have
the filter such as this vacuum here where all the air is exiting out of this filter,
these filters are replaceable filters that you would have to replace these filters about
every six months to a year and again that depends on how many pets and kids and how
much carpeting you do have and how much vacuuming you do in your home. On your soft bag units,
there is no replacement of anything but you do want to get the vacuum serviced or you
want to do it yourself and clean out the inside of this. Cleaning out the inside of this would
mean vacuuming this out with some sort of strong vacuum that you would find at a gas
station or car wash or bringing it to your local store where they would clean out the
inside of this bag while they are servicing the product. In servicing a vacuum, it is
also important that you do want to keep it running well. You pay a lot of money for your
carpeting in your home, you want to protect your investment so you do want to service
the vacuum. A lot of the companies say yearly. I say again, depending on how many kids and
pets you have you may be able to go 2, 3, 4 years but you do want to pay particular
attention on the belt on a vacuum. This particular model is easy to show. How the belt goes.
The belt is right in the bottom here. The belt is right here. This is the biggest problem
with vacuum cleaners. Most people do not change the belts often enough and do not realize
the belts need to be changed. They also think just because the brush is spinning that it
doesn't need a new belt. But the reality is just because it is spinning, it still needs
a new belt. The belts do wear like your car tires wear new tires. So the belts wear out
and stretch, they may not be broken but you still need to get a new belt. You need to
change the belts on an average about every six months. It is very difficult to tell by
visually looking at the belt if the vacuum belt is still good and is still turning fast.
On carpeted surfaces, the most important part of the vacuum is that the belt is kept in
very good condition and that the brush roll spins and agitates the carpet very aggressively.
Once that belt stretches out, the brush roll is going to start to slip and you are going
to lose a lot of performance out of that product. So that is one thing that we do tell people
that they want to check often. There is no real way of visually looking at it and there
is really a very difficult way of testing it. If you think your vacuum isn't picking
up well, then it is probably the belt. If it is hard to push, it is probably the belt.
The only way that I recommend my customers testing the belt would be to put on a glove
that you would use for gardening or snow shoveling, turn the vacuum on laying it flat on the ground
or on a hard surface and putting your palm against the brush. As it is spinning, if you
can stop the brush roll from spinning without any amount of pressure, the belt is shot and
the belt will spin when you look at it but when you take the vacuum and put it against
the carpet, the brush will simply stop turning or turns very slowly. So you would want to
make sure that the belt is kept very fresh in the vacuum and I would say that would be
the number one problem that people overlook on vacuum cleaners.