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The floating vacuum cleaner

The floating vacuum cleaner
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Somewhere between a miniature hovercraft and a traditional vacuum cleaner, the AIRIDER has been nine years in development. While we’re not sure why it took so long, it is nonetheless a very good idea because one of the most difficult aspects of cleaning is dragging the vacuum around behind you and with a cushion of air making the machine frictionless, there’s no effort required to drag it around. Apart from floating an eighth of an inch off the floor, the bag-less design also reduces clogging and increases performance, with a claimed suction speed of 200 miles per hour.

Now we could go on and on about this but we won’t. It’s really a normal modern bag-less vacuum cleaner that is totally frictionless. Priced at the premium end of the vacuum market at UK230 pounds, it’s a very cool, stylish vacuum cleaner that should remove some of the effort from vacuuming. That's inventor Mike Rooney in the pics.

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2 comments
2 comments
professore
Presumably the writer is too young to remember the 1960's when the Hoover Constellation was a very popular (and spherical) hovering vacuum cleaner. It merely used the exhaust from the motor to provide lift. Being extraordinarily simple it was also cheap and probably took about 9 minutes to design, not 9 years!
agulesin
@professore my parents still have one of those and it\'s the preferred tool for cleaning the house! makes a bit of noise but who cares if it does a good job?
One thing I wondered about this article: What does a \"suction speed of 200MPH\" mean? Oh well, I suppose there\'s no other way of measuring suction that the layman will understand! (we have to remember that a vacuum cleaner will suck, but will it suck at the same speed with a 1-inch diameter hose as it would with [for example] a 5-inch hose?)