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New EU Rules Will Limit Vacuum Cleaners To 1600W
AmiMoJo writes "New EU rules are limiting vacuum cleaner motors to 1600W from 2014/09/01. The EU summary of the new rules explains that consumers currently equate watts with cleaning power, which is not the case. Manufacturers will be required to put ratings on packaging, including energy efficiency, cleaning efficiency on hard and carpeted floors, and dust emissions from the exhaust. In the EU vacuum cleaners use more energy than the whole of Denmark, and produce more emissions than dishwashers and washing machines."
1600W is about two horse powers, and if you think you can keep a house clean with two horses running though it, I have a barn to sell you.
/me shows self to door
Yeah, and they are right. 10,000 watts sucks a hell of a lot more than 1600.
And why should they start rationing over there now when they got those solar panels all over the place? Next to go will be indoor plumbing because it's more efficient to just empty your pisspot out the window, if you don't live in the basement...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
In the US our consumer-grade vacuum cleaners are already effectively capped around the same wattage. The standard household electrical outlet is rated to provide 15 amps and does so somewhere between 100 and 125 volts. That's 1500-1875 watts as the maximum any single device clet an expect to pull without requiring a special outlet. Nothing in reality expects the higher end of the spectrum because it's by no means guaranteed.
Somehow we get along just fine, residential or commercial, with pretty much the same as what this limit allows. /me awaits some Brit who's come to explain how their 240v 13A outlets allow them to suck the carpet right off the floor with their cleaners.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
They can have my 2000watt vacuum cleaner when they pry my cold dead hands... Wait, the EU? Nevermind. Whar's mah beer?
Don't ban something. Put a hefty tax on it instead. This is like the lightbulb ban here in the U.S. But I do agree with requiring ratings.
Now, which would you prefer?
1. Lightbulb ban
2. High watt vacuum ban
3. No way to get out of Slashdot Beta
I think we all know it's not going to be 3.
Wowser, I feel better about my laziness already. My room might have a 3/4" layer of dust on the floor, but I'm saving the ice packs one lie-in at a time!
Our Vorwerk vacuum cleaners only use around 200 W...
Denmark uses about 34TWh/year. EU has about 500M citizen. A vacuum cleaner is using about 2kW.
That gives about 30 vacuum-hours per year per citizen, or about 1h per 10 days (rounding in different directions).
Seems remarkably reasonable.
I don't understand the meddling of capping the power though. Just make sure everything needs to be marked with how much !/W you get from the items. I'm sure most consumers are interested in the actual work performed by the vacuum, not how much you put in. But the sellers are of course interested in hiding it.
(. Soon they will cap your hifi at 40W and tapwater taps at 1dl/minute. .)
The EU found yet another way of telling me what to do. They should mind their own business, and stop wasting tax money.
no, I don't have a sig
My Roomba is using about 30 Watts for its vacuum and that is more than enough.
If 1600W is enough, then just buy two vacuum cleaners. Duh.
My vacuum cleaner has official Windows XP and Windows 7 stickers.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The Eurocrats clearly have no contact with real life to propose legislation like this. Construction sites need powerful, wet-dry vacs to clean up. That means a lot of wattage. Hospitals need similarly powerful vacs to clean carpets in rooms. But of course, the typical Eurocrat, with his (or her) limp little wrists, does not know that, hence this silly law.
Its yet another reason to avoid Europe except as a tourist looking at old buildings and art done when Europe was still worthy of respect.
I've heard rumors that they have a nice tea party in Boston.
©God
Vacuum cleaners
Last time I looked 1400W was common, now 2400W is common.
I'd be happy if they banned putting the Wattage in the product title as a temporary measure, no doubt some of these 2400W are still crap and edging towards being a fire hazard with that much power enclosed in a small space.
What do you do with your vac' when you've finished with it? Shove it in the cupboard with lots of highly flammable materials, perhaps underneath the stairs?
Quick search confirms it happens:
https://www.google.co.uk/searc...
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
So 300 million people spend more energy vacuuming, probably once every week or two for 30 minutes. than 8 million people in total.
I call bullshit
> consumers currently equate watts with cleaning power
I equate the word 'Dyson' with cleaning power.
The conventional lightbulb is easily replaced by a halogen version. That is if replacing with LED or Fluorescent lamp is not feasible.
I have hardwood floors. I use a broom. It's peaceful and meditative. I do not understand why people like carpet. It gets dirty FAST, it traps bad things, it offgasses weird chemicals, and vacumn cleaners are loud and annoying.
We had a Dyson that took 1500 watts and could not come close to matching the cleaning of a Kirby at 1200 watts, and the Dyson tripped breakers if anything else was in use. The Dyson was just lighter in weight. We replaced the Dyson with a Hoover, which did just as well and did not trip breakers.
My induction hob is 2500 watts, the microwave (900watt output + grill heat + fan) is 2500w. In Europe its not unusual, we're use to 15 amp ring-main wiring and 13 amp fuses at 230 volts.
I think you have the same kit, only put in special sockets for these things. So I buy an induction hob, slap it on any kitchen surface and plug it in, and its no big deal. When I don't need it, I unplug it and put it away. In the US that must need a special socket presumably.
My kettle likewise, 2.5kw boils fairly quickly, would kind of like it faster but that would need special wiring. I get by, but I don't think I'd like to go back to a slow boil kettle. Wouldn't it be less efficient? Due to heat loss during the longer heat up time?
The vacuum cleaner in my condo, a tiny Samsung unit is 1800 watts. I ramp it up to full power to get into the crevices of the window. If they create a unit of suction that's fine, but an arbitrary wattage limit seems daft.
Upon further consider, this doesn't suck as much as I thought it would.
Do they have commercial class vaxuums in the EU? For people that run a cleaning business, or for hospitals etc.
A friend of mine ran a cleaning business in NZ, and used backpack vacuum cleaners. Not sure of the power rating but they could really suck.
Are people addicted to noise? What's wrong with a broom and an occasional mop?
(OK, I can understand the use case of robotic vacuums for cats.)
The national electrical code and the UL place a limit on the maximum current a plug and cord connected appliance can draw to 80% of rated ampacity of the circuit. For a 15 amp branch circuit this is 12 amps, so the limit is 1440 watts. What if you have a 20 amp circuit? To pull the 80% of that, or 16 amps, an appliance would have to have a NEMA 5-20 plug and matching receptacle. Considering how few 20 amp circuits actually have a 5-20 receptacles installed and predominance of 15 amp circuits in US households, appliances that use a 5-20 plug to draw a continuous 16 amp load are as rare as rocking horse shit. About the only thing have seen that uses them are some floor buffers.
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/p... says
"[Assuming efficiency improvements of 16% to 33%...] Estimated per-unit annual savings for residential vacuums are on the order of 10-19 kWh/year... Considering there are approximately 28 million vacuums sold in the U.S. each year, the national energy savings opportunity would be on the order of 67,000-135,000 MWh per year if 25% of products sold were replaced with energy efficient models"
Contrast that the the document linked in TFA: ... of vacuum cleaners
will be reduced by 19 TWh"
http://ec.europa.eu/smart-regu... says
"[Vaccuum cleaners sold per year in 2005 and 2020: 54 million and 92 million]... [Energy consumed by vacuum cleaners under business-as-usual by 2020: 29.7 TWH/year]... by 2020, the annual electricity consumption
So, 67 TWh annual savings in US vs. 19 TWh annual savings in EU in spite of twice as many vacuum cleaners sold per year in the EU. Is there just more dirt in the US? Or was the Energy Star scoping report just overoptimistic?
This will not pass the investor state dispute mechanisms in EU free trade agreements if passed either CETA or the U.S. version.
If you have that much laundry to do regularly, you could always do it at the coin laundry instead of buying and maintaining a washer and dryer, buying water to run the washer, and buying gas or electric power to heat the water and dryer.
I live in the Canadian prairies. Our block heater is 400W. When it's -40, you need the heat.
I have a commercial-grade machine, a Sanitaire, that pulls only 760w, yet is more powerful than anything else I've used, including Dyson. These are built like tanks and really get the floor clean. There's no attachments, hoses or gizmos, it's just simply the vacuum and a cloth shakeout bag. You see these a lot in hotels and office buildings.
Your average 12-amp (1440w) Walmart special vacuum doesn't have the cleaning ability that a Sanitaire would have at about half the power. So, yes, it is possible for a better vacuum to exist with less the power, but jeez, does it have to be regulated? If someone wants to run a vacuum cleaner with a Hemi V8, then that's their prerogative.
People in government are the laziest in the bunch. They sit around and do NOTHING but dream up nonsense.
The new HE machines in the US are like that. 2 hours or more to run a load, and they don't clean or rinse worth a damn! Hell, they struggle and fail to get your clothing under the water! Usually you have to send laundry through 3 or 4 times, and wash far less clothing per load. It takes all day to wash one of these half loads.
I finally gave up about six months after I started scooping suds out of my HE washer by hand with a cup, junked a fully working (if you can call it that) HE washer, and bought a Speed Queen. Speed Queen's take 35 minutes for a wash. 50 minutes with the extra rinse option. And it's a real wash. Aggressive! Actual agitation! Even during both rinses, the tank fills up and agitates. It's a real washing machine! The clothes come out clean at the end. No visible suds when the extra rinse finishes agitating. Spinning while draining may have something to do with that. Water surface forms a cone shape. Or perhaps, unlike the HE, it's pulling the suds down off the water surface through actual agitation!
Anyway, there are decent options out there if you look, and they cost a lot less than some of these newer "steam" washers!
I hate doing the vacuuming, specially in summer, with the damn machine pumping out 2 kw of heat & the noise of a jet engine. Would be really nice to have quiet, efficient machines all round.
I learned that when you block the airflow, the motor does less work. The motor speeds up, making it sound like it does more work, but it speeds up because it has less of a load (no air to move). Less load, less work, equals lower current. No?
Consumers want number(s) to base their decisions upon. The wattage problem could have easily been solved by putting useful measurements of vacuum effectiveness on the packaging, such as guaranteed pressure drop and flow rate over the life of the product.
And the industry could do that all by itself without any regulation.
I am glad EU takes care of the vacuum cleaners problem. At least it will do little harm here.
When EU tackled economical problems, they managed to ruin entire countries and lower citizen life expectancy. I am sure dead people wil enjoy having better vacuum cleaners.
Humans are, in aggregate, just stupid sometimes. This rule setting maximum vacuum power limits is an example. European bureaucracies are particularly good at it, but they don't hold a monopoly on group idiocy by any means.
The sad manner of how petty rules like this are justified due to vacuum purchasers miscorrelation of vacuum power to watt consumption is as insulting as it is arrogant. How many people with unique cleaning situations would be screwed over by this? I once bought the best vacuum a big box store had to offer, and is sucked so bad because it had no sucking power I had to return it and spend real money at a department store to get a quality vacuum cleaner. I'm sure the EU would have loved it had I been prisoner of the first vacuum cleaner, but thank goodness I had the freedom - for now anyway - to purchase the tool I needed for my own *personal* quality expectations and needs. If these EU rule makers really care about society and its quality of life, they'd increase rules on how to convey vacuum power in manufactures' advertising in order to establish a more accurate and consistent competitive marketplace for vacuums. But that is not the bureaucrat's *true* interest now, is it? They want to 'help' society by protecting them from market choices *they* don't agree with. '*We* think you should only have a vacuum that consumes as much energy as *we* say it should. Do you have a unique need? Too bad, we don't care. Do you want to innovate a new vacuum that takes more power and drives itself around for the consumer or cleans more in less time? Too bad, we don't care. We like things just as they are and screw the free market forces that might be unleashed to experiment with better cleaning experiences for everyone." That is what they effectively are saying, but they don't even realize it and certainly don't care about individual's freedom to choose the best solution for them. What they really care about is protecting the status quo.
It is much more likely that everyone's quality of life would be improved if this EU rule board simply disbanded itself after terminating 90% of its previous monstrously huge set of rules. The remaining 10% should go to protecting a fair market place and if people want to buy a more expensive and power hungry vacuum let them; have you seen electricity rates in Europe? They are more than high enough to establish a natural market effect to reduce truly egregious power consumption by consumers. Put in a high-quality vacuum cleaner tax if quality items in the marketplace offend you but don't put these stupid rules of setting the maximum power out there; that's the same intellect behind the economics of the former Soviet Union. And that's 'former' for a damn good reason.
I observe, once again, everyone's quality of living being capped some remote bureaucracy brimming over with good intentions for society.
Who knows ? Maybe they are all concentrated in Bruxelles editing STUPID and USELESS bureaucratic rules which continue TO DAMAGE EUROPEAN COMPANIES with additional FAKE ECO rules.
Arbitraly limiting power does NOTHING if I have to DO TWICE the same activity becase I could not do it well the first time...!
Nanny sate is out of control in the EU just to be PC and GREEN
Is it reasonable to assume that a 1-year old child and a 95 year old grandpa use the vacuum cleaner 1h per 10 days?
I don't believe vacuum cleaners are a major factor in energy usage in any country. I don't care how fastidious the Dutch are, they are probably not vacuuming ten hours a day.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
http://www.g0cwt.co.uk/arc/new...
Patents issued in 2009 - manufacturer interest, nearly zero.
"Consumers want number(s) to base their decisions upon"
They do in the EU - "air watts"