Tales of the unexpected
I enjoy learning new facts as often as possible and here is one thing I learnt today which I thought I should share!
Since 1989, my mum favoured a turbo vacuum brush for her hover – to be honest it came with her new one of the time and it seemed to make a huge difference. On examination it appeared to provide better cleaning by rotating along with the sucking action of the vacuum. You need to bear in mind the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Or so I thought. Today our replacement turbo head for our Vax arrived (thanks Amazon), a turbo brush with a transparent plastic case. After a week on leave, I was looking forward to seeing it in action. I attached it and started the motor: as expected, the brushes allowed the turbine to rotate as the air was sucked into the vacuum’s dust cavity.
So, I tested it out on a piece of carpet. At which point I found the rotor stopped – the carpet fibres were catching on the brush and exerting enough pressure that the rotation ceased!
I pushed the brush forward and lo, the brushes were allowed to move freely. Maybe that was how the turbo heads made the sucking better; gentle aggravation of the carpet and a slight increase in efficiency of vacuum.
So I pulled the vaccum head back to redo an area of carpet and the brush was completely stationary again! Intriged, I switched the motor off and tried pushing the head without the motor going. This moved very freely, both forwards and backwards! So the air was moving the brushes: just needed some help to get going and going backwards the air pressure was enough to hold the brush stationary, while going forwards gave it enough inertia to overcome the friction of the carpet.
The turbo head is much better for vacuuming. Just works in a subtly different way to the expected.
Posted: December 31st, 2010 under 42.