Eureka AirSpeed Vacuum is a Great Buy

Eureka AirSpeed Vacuum is a Great Buy Compared to the Dyson Animal Vacuum

Hey, when I am not underwater, I have to do housework once in a while just like any other guy with a wife or girlfriend!  So here goes:

I bought one of these Eureka AirSpeed Vacuums on Woot for $75. This vacuum cleaner is awesome. The suction is very powerful and this works great on bare floors or deep carpet. We have two Labrador retrievers, so sucking up their fur is important, and this vacuum sucks up just about all of their hair even in the deep carpet.

This vacuum also includes accessories that can attach to the hose so that you can clean things like the inside of your car. Again, this is important since we have dogs and need to clean out small spaces in our cars. The Eureka has an attachment used to clean stairs, which is handheld, about 4 inches wide, and has brushes that spin when attached. This spinning brush roll works great to get fur out of our car, in tight spaces. The Eureka also has (which I would think would be standard), a way to store the power cord just by touching a button and feeding the cord into a hidden spool inside the machine.

I also have a Dyson Animal vacuum cleaner (purchased for $300 on woot). The Dyson has about the same suction, but it does not have a way to store the power cord on a spool. Setting up the Dyson so I can clean my car involves taking a bunch of parts together. It's always a hassle because of the weird design, where I have to figure out the design all over again every time. After vacuuming, putting the Dyson back together for storage is also a hassle, as I have to laboriously put the parts back together. Having to manually put the cord back on the vacuum is especially irritating. Finally, the brush roll on the Dyson Animal is useless!  I can clean my car with the Dyson using another attachment, which works pretty well. 

I'd buy the Eureka over the Dyson again in a heartbeat. The Eureka seems to be as well made, and it performs better than the Dyson. Finally, the Eureka is only 25% of the price of the Dyson! Why buy a Dyson?  I give credit to Dyson for re-inventing the vacuum cleaner, but I don't understand why they are so much more expensive than other machines.  Maybe patent law has not protected Dyson's innovations enough, but I will leave that to the marketplace.

Solving a Problem: Portable Tire Inflators Blowing Car Fuses

OK, this post is a bit off-topic, but here goes.  Hopefully this might help out folks who have had the same problem.

I have bought about four different tire inflators over the years--$50 Slime and Vi-Air inflators, and a $20 Campbell-Hausfield inflator. 

I bought the more expensive Slime and Vi-air inflators, hoping to buy more durable ones that would last a long time and were of better quality than the cheap ones I've had in the past.  Both of these inflators works well but they both blow the fuses of all my cars -- a 2006 Ford E-150 van, Dodge Caravan, and Honda Odyssey.  The thing that I don't understand is that there is a fuse in the power cord of the inflator.  Theoretically this fuse should blow before the ones in my car (which are rated at 20 amps!), but the Vi-Air and Slime inflators both blow the fuses in my cars, and it is a hassle to replace the fuses. 

 I solved this problem by buying an adapter that I can clamp  directly to my car battery.  This adapter has a cigarette lighter female socket on the other end, so it supplies power directly from my car battery to the tire inflator.  I have had no problems with blown fuses, whether in the car or in the inflator, since using the car battery directly.  

 I have a cheaper Campbell-Hausfield inflator that is much louder and slower to inflate, but it has never blown a fuse in my car.