My father always used to say that if we’re lucky, we can learn from the mistakes of others, if we’re not so lucky, we have to learn from our own mistakes, and some people never learn at all.
We all know that hindsight is 20-20. This review is about a product that we bought about 10 years ago, but it could play an important role in your purchase decision today.
About ten years ago we had a little extra money, so we decided to buy what we thought would be the ultimate vacuum cleaner, the vacuum that would last a lifetime.
I have an ASET ( Associate in Science in Electronics Technology ) and worked as an electronics R&D; ( research and development ) technician for 27 years.
I knew not to fall for the “amps” scam that some manufacturers were foisting on the public at the time. They were advertising vacuums by the “amps” ratings of the motors, in other words, how much electrical current the motor draws.
This was nonsense to me at the time, and still is, if I see such claims.
A light bulb can draw amps ( current ) but it won’t vacuum worth a hoot.
I was more interested in whether the vacuum I was interested in had the suction power to suck up a pop can ( being facetious here ), not in how many amps the motor drew.
So after looking at what was around at the time and some of the reviews, I decided that Miele looked like they made quality vacuums that would really last.
This was important to me, because I was about 48 years old at the time and had been through all kinds of the more common vacuums over my lifetime so far. They all lasted awhile, but didn’t filter the air very well, and I got sick from vacuuming and had developed an aversion to cleaning because of it. And most of them didn’t have very powerful suction, so they didn’t clean very well.
I’m allergic to dust, so it had to be a HEPA filter vacuum this time too. For those not familiar, HEPA stands for “High Efficiency Particle Air” filtration. It was originally developed to filter the air in submarines years ago. They had to remain submerged for periods of time, and wanted some really good air filtering. It was later transferred, as so many military developments are, to the private sector for use it automobile engine air filters and air filters for homes and sometimes building air systems. They use them in clean rooms in production facilities and hospital wards.
There are different grades, from the less expensive ones used in industry, to the medial grade ones used in hospital clean rooms. Some of them are such fine filters that they can pretty much filter down to the size of viruses. They measure the filtered particle sizes in microns, but that gets beyond the scope of this article.
So instead of buying a typical vacuum in the $100 or less range, I decided to go for it this time, to buy something that would last me a lifetime and be the ultimate vacuum cleaner.
Something with powerful suction, a HEPA filter and made with real quality and sturdiness, so it would hold up over the years.
Miele was an old German company that started decades ago, before WWII. It sounded like they had a reputation for making fine German products, and of course we’d always heard that the Germans had a real reputation for making high quality machines.
So there was already this mystique going when I decided to check out Miele vacuums.
Sure enough, they didn’t try to pull the wool over my eyes with the “amps” scam, they just talked about it being a well-made powerful vacuum.
So we bought one. It cost around $750 street price at the time, but we had some money to spend, and expected something that would really last, so we went for it. Now we both come from lower middle income families, so this was not a trivial amount to spend, for us.
It was great for a number of years. It was a powerful vacuum that could almost “suck up pop cans”. It had a whole range of speed settings, so you could even turn it down, so you wouldn’t be sucking up the drapes if you didn’t want to.
It did everything we bought it for, for awhile. It had a nice orange indicator on top, to measure how full the bag was, so you’d know when to change it. For those of us with allergies, the bags were even designed so you could open the canister and pop the bag out while closing the opening, so it wouldn’t be making a cloud of dust in your face. I genuinely liked the thing.
We don’t vacuum all that much, maybe once every month, so we weren’t exactly wearing the thing out. In fact I was just getting ready to look for a new dusting brush for it, after all this time, because the old one was finally getting frazzled.
But about 2 months ago, it suddenly started smoking, heating up and filling the room with smoke. I shut it off as soon as I realized what was going on.
I opened the canister to find that the bag was really really full, in fact it was very heavy when I lifted it out to replace it.
The problem was that I had no idea it was full. The orange indicator on top had remained down near the bottom, maybe 1/4 of the way up, for all those months before this happened.
So I lifted the bag out, closed the tab on it and got rid of it. Then the following week, I bought a few more bags and put one in. I turned the machine on, but this time it made all kinds of noises and the motor barely ran, with very little suction. It must have burned out.
Now I wouldn’t mind this if it had truly been my own fault. If I’d let it go for months and months and the orange bag full indicator had been all the way up near the top and this had happened, I’d have no beef with Miele over this.
But that wasn’t what happened. The orange indicator had remained down near the bottom, and the motor had suddenly just burned out from the strain of a full bag, without letting me know so I could change it.
Do you remember the old quip about a $500 TV picture tube being protected by a 30 cent fuse? Well this reminded me of that.
It seemed obvious to me that this was a defective design that led to the meltdown of this expensive vacuum, years before it should have broken down, all because this apparently poorly designed indicator didn’t do what it was intended to do.
So I contacted the web site where I bought it, and they told me that it had been something like 10 years, so it was out of warranty.
Then I contacted a local vacuum store that also does repairs and asked them how much it would cost to replace the motor. I was told around $250!
At that point I was filled with disgust and revulsion. Had it been a big mistake buying such an expensive vacuum, and assuming it would last a lifetime? Not realizing that maybe this “fine German machine” might not have been designed to tell me that the bag was full, and might burn out a $250 motor on me?
But I thought; why should I have to suffer from this? It’s not my fault. These guys appear to have designed a $750 vacuum cleaner with what, if it had been a car, would be the equivalent of what we always called an “idiot light”. Hey idiot, all the oil is gone and your engine just exploded.
That’s what happened here too, in my opinion.
So I contacted Miele directly and explained my indignation. Of course they pointed to the fact that the machine was 10 years old, and I pointed right back to the fact that it had nothing to do with it, this appears to be a defective design. That motor might have lasted another 20 years if the darn dinky indicator had just told me that the bag was really full and about to burn it out.
They offered me no comfort or consolation. They told me that I’ll need to bring it in to a local service place and have it evaluated now.
Right.
So here I am with a $750 vacuum that probably needs a $250 motor because of an apparently useless bag-full indicator. Do I throw the whole thing out and just go back to a $150 HEPA vacuum that maybe can’t suck down a pop can, but just might have a bag-full indicator that works? Or do I spend even more money on something I shouldn’t have to, and get this thing fixed.
I suggested to Miele that I’m an electronics technician with ASET ( Associate in Science in Electronics Technology ) and if they could just send me a motor, I might be able to save the money and replace it myself, but they didn’t even answer me on that one, just said to bring it in for evaluation.
So despite my disgust right now, I’ll probably do that, but I know that whatever happens, I’ll probably never buy another Miele product now, and will probably recommend that others avoid them too. I feel really let down by this.
