Something Completely Different--Reviewing the Dirt Devil MO088160 Vacuum Cleaner

A couple of months ago, our old vacuum cleaner gave up the ghost. It went loudly with a hideous burning smell and the release of several pieces onto the living room floor one evening after dinner. Rites were said and the remnants were taken down to the closest dumpster. That meant we had to have a new vacuum as soon as possible. With a cat and two teenage boys, not to mention what Sandi and I track in, vacuuming our two bedroom apartment is a daily necessity.

So, Sandi broke out our last remaining credit card with any room at all on it and headed to Home Depot. Her main criteria were price followed ease of use. I am still trying to vacuum around here on occasion and she wanted something that I could use if I absolutely had to do it. It also needed to be light enough to heave it up and down the stairs.

 

She came home with the Dirt Devil MO088160 a fiery red bag-less upright that claimed to be “lightweight” and easy to use. It was $54.00 plus sales tax so it fit under the credit line cap on our Home Depot credit card. It boasted that it had a “long cord for cleaning multiple rooms” and came with two attachments. One being a crevice tool and the other being an upholstery tool.  It claimed that the “lightweight design makes it easy to use and carry” and obviously being made nearly entirely out of plastic was supposed to help that. Clearly, it was a basic vacuum cleaner and that was what we needed.

On the plus side, this vacuum cleaner seriously sucks---in a good way. It can really suck up stuff and the small light helps guide you to pick up the obvious stuff you knew was there as well as the junk you didn’t see when you first walked through the room. Because it sucks so hard doing its job, if you have some rugs with fringe on them like we do, you have to be careful as it will suck the fringe right off of them. Of course, in so doing it will yank the rug into the beater bar brush and choke on it. This is much like a teenage boy trying to cram a whole hamburger into his mouth on a dare from his baby brother but much less messy.  It does take a few minutes to work everything free and figure out how much damage the run has sustained. It also easily yanks in the cord off the blinds which is always helpful—especially if other family members are home to shriek at you about it while the blinds fly up in the window to slam into the top of the window frame before pulling free and crashing on the floor. It certainly has sucking power.

That sucking power does not stop one from going onto the linoleum when one leaves the shag carpeting. Our bathrooms as well as the kitchen have linoleum and it was always a pain to lower the vacuum cleaner to adjust for the different floor surface. This one does not require that manual adjustment which makes it little easier –especially on me if I have my cane in one hand so I can stand and am trying to work the vacuum cleaner in the other. If something happens, like a month ago when a plant pot committed suicide from the kitchen window sill and spayed dirt all across the kitchen floor, I could not wait seven hours for somebody else to get home and clean it up. I had to somehow do it myself and not having to adjust the vacuum cleaner helped.

But, there are some negatives. The first one is the noise this thing makes when it is on. The noise level is horrendous.  It roars very loudly. I don’t know how to describe it other than imagine a gasoline fired lawn mower. Now, it is not as loud as that, but it seems fairly close.

What bothers all of us more than the noise is the fact that it vents out the front. After the detritus is dropped into the bag-less cylinder (easy to remove by the way but very messy) the air shoots out the front of the machine for a radius of about a foot and a half to two feet. This means if you were watching the person vacuuming and they are coming towards you, something may fly into your eyes as has happened here. The force of air coming out of the thing just blasts you and you never know if something is going to hit you, land in your open drink, etc. the best advice is to clear the room of any other folks.

Clearing the room also helps to prevent somebody from sitting on their rear and pointing their finger wildly at different points on the floor while he or she assumes you never saw what needed to be vacumned up. Clearing the room of gawkers is helpful in nearly any home or yard situation, but I digress.

In between the pluses and the minuses are a couple of things that are negatives for us because of our own situation. They may or may not apply to your situation, but I mention them as they could be important. 

First, the cord is supposed to be long and I guess at 27 feet it technically is long. However, for us with the way the plugs are laid out in the rooms and everything, 27 feet does not begin to get the job done. We have to use an extension cord to get the length to vacuum this apartment that according to the office is 1050 square feet. Otherwise, it seems all one does is unplug the vacuum cleaner and move to the next plug every couple of minutes and the job takes a lot longer.

Second, the box says it weighs less than twelve pounds and that claim is marked by an asterisk.  While there is absolutely nothing in the 24 page instruction booklet (12 pages in English and 12 pages in Spanish) that explains the asterisk or anything on the box, my theory had been that the asterisk referred to the vacuum cleaner in an empty state. However, since the empty vacuum cleaner consistently weighed 18 pounds according to the home scale (which is within one pound of correct according to the scales at my wife’s cardiologist) on several occasions, I am not sure how they arrive at the twelve pound claim. I do know for me (who is supposed to lift nothing more than five pounds) this thing seems extremely heavy. My oldest, who last week carried four cases of water all together at one time up the stairs for a neighbor, says the vacuum cleaner is not heavy, just cumbersome. He also loves the New York Yankees so his judgment is suspect at best.

In the end, overall, we do like the Dirt Devil MO088160 Vacuum Cleaner. Despite its drawbacks of horrendous noise and venting out the front, it does the job well. A vacuum cleaner should suck stuff up on the first pass and it does. It does that job really well which allows one to tolerate the other issues.

(Much of this review first appeared on Epinions where I am a member under the incredibly complicated member name of  “kevintipple” My profile page  http://www1.epinions.com/user-kevintipple )

Kevin R. Tipple © 2011