We started our search for the ultimate vacuum cleaner long after our old vacuum had died. We still used it after it had died. It didn’t pick up dirt any longer, but we felt like we had done our duty by running it.
We immediately thought of buying an Oreck vacuum. After all, that’s the vacuum ad we see the most, and besides we could get a free iron. Never mind that we don’t need a free iron. But we’d learned while we were in dusty Tucson that Orecks put dust back into the air.
And, we pondered long and hard over whether to get a vacuum for carpets or for hardwood floors. We currently have carpets, but someday we’ll have hardwood and tile floors that will be better for the chemical sensitivities. So, do we buy for now, or do we plan for the future. I think our old vacuum decided that for us, by groaning louder and louder, each time we used it. We may someday get rid of our carpets, but in the meantime, we needed to get them clean.
Then we considered Rainbow or another brand of water vacuum. The theory behind these vacuums is that the dirt is pulled into the water, so that it can’t escape back into the air. Unfortunately another theory is that the dirt gets trapped in water molecules which get released back into the air, making it harder to get rid of. I’ve personally never seen these water molecules myself. My wife tells me they’re invisible, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve never seen them.
My logic, as you can guess, didn’t hold out, so we started looking into vacuums with other types of filters than water. HEPA (High Efficiency Particle Arresting) was the first type of filter we came across. HEPA does a very good job of filtering out large particles of dirt. Then there’s ULPA (Ultra Low Penetrating Air). ULPA does a very good job of filtering out dirt ranging from very small particles to almost large particles. There’s CPZ (Carbon Potassium Permanganate Zeolite or Carbon Potassium Permanganate Zealot as my spell checker would have it). But CPZ filters only come on air filters and not on vacuums. At least they didn’t come on any of the vacuums we researched.
At this point, I’m thinking, we should just get a vacuum with a HEPA filter. It will obviously be cheaper than one with an ULPA filter, and it will still clean better than our old dead vacuum does. Once again, my logic did not prevail. And I was even more disappointed that my logic didn’t prevail when I found out that you can’t just have an ULPA filter. First the dirt gets filtered by a HEPA filter. Then the dirt that gets through the HEPA gets filtered by an ULPA filtered. Otherwise, the ULPA filter would get too many large dirt particles for it to handle. Or as some would say, “The dirt would get too big for its britches (or filter in this case)”.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your view point, the filter standards don’t end with ULPA. There are two more standards – Clean Room and Nuclear. Clean Room standards are for laboratory research. You know, the kind where they’re playing with deadly biological viruses. Nuclear is for Nuclear Power Plants. You know, the kind where they’re playing with deadly nucleic particles. Vacuums for Clean Rooms and Nuclear Power Plants start with HEPA and ULPA filters and then go further. I’d say how, but my brain is already stretched to the limit.
The Clean Room standards are used by NASA, and we ended up getting a vacuum who was a distant cousin of the vacuum used on the space shuttle. Needless to say, our vacuum had a HEPA filter and an ULPA filter and a Gulpa price tag.
Book 4 My World of Cleaning
Written by Dale Stubbart Blessed by Terry Stubbart
