Are Bagless vacuum cleaners better or worse than bag type vacuum cleaners? There is a huge assortment of vacuum cleaner choices on the market today. If you only shop at the “Big Box ” stores, you could come to the conclusion that they are all bagless. Well, the truth is, bagless cleaners are what the large discount / high volume stores prefer because it satisfies the platform requirements of the store. Large chain stores have to have volume. They must sell large quantities of merchandise to justify taking up the shelf space in the store. Therefore, when it comes to vacuum cleaners, they need you to come back to purchase your next vacuum in 1 year or as close to that as possible. The standard warranty on the brands that they typically carry is 1 year, so they want it to at least last until the warranty has expired. Then they need you back so that their volume stays high. To achieve this goal, the vacuum cleaner selections they choose to sell, are cheaply engineered, bagless usually, and primarily manufactured in China to keep the production cost as low as possible. Because of this, the choices are poor quality, bagless, dust blowers that don’t work well or last very long. There are a few exceptions to this, such as Dyson and a few others. They claim to be better quality, and they also cost a good bit more. Are they really better? In some ways, yes, but the whole idea of bagless verses bags is still based on the assumption that bags “lose suction” and bagless doesn’t. The other myth is that bags are dusty and messy. In reality, the opposite is true. Another reason vacuum shoppers think bagless will be better is they won’t have to buy bags anymore, and they will save some money. So let’s address these issues:
First, bagless vacuum cleaners for sale today, are not more dust-free than a high-quality bag type vacuum. A bagless cleaner with a HEPA filter is putting the filter there to capture dirt and particles that it was never intended to handle. If the machine has a quality bag prior to the filter, then the filter only has to do the job of capturing microscopic particles, and that is what a HEPA filter is designed to do. When a filter in a bagless cleaner gets clogged, which happens regularly, dirt and dust starts blowing out cracks and spaces around the filter, because the air has to escape. You end up with a terrible mess.
The bottom line is this. A good quality vacuum cleaner with a quality bag will capture more dirt and dust. It will also package that for you, so you don’t have to breathe all that airborne pollution while emptying a dustbin. And even the highest quality bags, such as Miele AirClean bags, will cost less money annually than filters for the cheapest bagless cleaners.
So save your money, save your lungs, keep your home cleaner and more dust-free. Your next purchase should be from a local vacuum store, and it should have a high-quality bag.
