The Problem with Bagless Vacuums

 

When the team of Vacuum Experts and Engineers at Prolux decided to invent the world’s first bagless backpack vacuum, we had no idea we would also have to reinvent bagless technology itself.

 Our Story

Back in 2015, the team of Prolux Vacuum Experts and Engineers in our R&D department decided to invent the world’s first bagless backpack vacuum. Why a bagless backpack vacuum, you may ask?

We are glad you asked. Here are just a few of the many benefits of the bagless backpack vac:

•         Backpack vacuums can clean the same surface twice as fast as an upright vacuum.

•         A bagless backpack vacuum can clean hardwood, tile, carpet, floor edges, stairs, and under furniture without having to change any tools. Just turn it on and go.

•         Most large businesses use a backpack vacuum, and every backpack vacuum on the market to date uses bags, which are very expensive. By creating the world’s FIRST bagless backpack vacuum, we would be saving these companies thousands of dollars.

Our next goal with this project was to make the bagless backpack vacuum 30% more powerful than the bagless uprights, at half the weight. We knew professional cleaners already understood how great backpack vacuums were, but we wanted to build a product so powerful and so light that when homeowners tried one and saw how easy it was to use, they would want one too.

We started out with the idea of providing great cleaning systems not only for businesses but for everyday house cleaners, and one year later we had invented the world’s FIRST bagless backpack vacuum. See the picture below. Not a bad little unit, and we had created a lightweight backpack vacuum that never uses bags and saves people a lot of money.

THEN WE RAN INTO A PROBLEM…

You see, we have this weird culture here at Prolux. We believe that when we release a new product it has to be absolutely perfect, and we are kind of crazy about it. Our company philosophy at Prolux is that we don’t dump money into advertising. Instead we put almost all of our money into R&D and into making a great product. Our thinking is that the rules of retail have changed. We call it “The Amazon Effect,” and basically it means customers will buy an unknown brand’s product OVER a known brand if the reviews are better.

For example, let’s say we (Prolux) and the brand Shark came out with a similar product. If our Amazon reviews were 4.9 and Shark’s (or whatever brand’s) were 3.9, customers would buy the Prolux brand with the better reviews OVER the known brand. So here at Prolux you won’t catch us advertising how cool our brand is, but you will catch us putting a lot of money into R&D and making our product great.

So before we release a product to the market, it has to pass a series of tests. :)

One of those tests is vacuuming up material that normally destroys other vacuums. We know some warehouses locally that have bought our commercial vacuums (normal vacuums don’t last 10 minutes in these places). These places have screws, wires, pieces of metal, dust, thread, sand, and gravel. It’s extreme vacuuming.

So we took the bagless backpack prototype and ran it through the worst vacuuming you could imagine. Before we started, the bagless backpack was pulling 98 to 105 CFM of airflow (really good considering the average bagless vacuum on the market does 70 to 80 CFM). After that rigorous test we tested it again, and it was only pulling 25 CFM. 25! That was horrible!

We then tested all the other major bagless brands on the market, and they had even worse results.

We could not release a product like this on the market. Now, to be fair, I know we probably vacuumed up a year’s worth of cleaning in less than two hours, but we were still very disappointed. Why would it do this? We wanted a bagless backpack vacuum we could JAM to the top with dirt and debris and it would still have enough power to keep on cleaning.

In our R&D department we believe in doing LIVE testing of USED VACUUMS (hint hint, Consumer Reports), because most vacuums behave very differently once they have been used for an hour. We don’t think vacuum testing should be done in a computer 3D model or on a BRAND NEW vacuum. As a result, our R&D department has literally bought and tested nearly every model of vacuum made in the world, and we did the same thing with bagless vacuums. We bought and tested nearly every model of bagless vacuum and ran them through the same test we ran on the bagless backpack, and guess what: THEY PERFORMED EVEN WORSE. After running those other bagless vacuums through our rigorous test, we measured their CFM power and it was worse still. After testing, tearing apart, and studying the design of nearly 100 different bagless vacuums, we came to the following conclusion.

ALL CURRENT BAGLESS VACUUM TECHNOLOGY IS FLAWED

They all have the same problem. In a nutshell, here is what is wrong. They work great on larger dirt and debris, but it’s the small, lightweight material that does them in (you know, the stuff that causes allergies). That fine material passes right through all the “centrifugal force” and “100 times the force of gravity” and “vibrating cones,” and lodges right into the filters.

These filters are deep inside the vacuum where most users cannot see or reach them. The power of the vacuum begins to decrease and it cleans worse and worse. The brushroll then grinds the dirt and sand deep into your carpet where you can’t see it.

TEST – Try this test for example. Go to your local big box store and buy two brand new bagless vacuums of your choice. Leave one in the box and put it away. Take the other one out and use it as your daily vacuum. Then wait one year (or six months, it’s up to you) and vacuum as much as you want through your entire house with the vacuum you have been using all year. Then break out the brand new model you have never used and vacuum your house again (remember, it’s supposed to be clean since you just vacuumed it). You WILL be shocked at how much dirt your one-year-old vacuum left behind. The reason is that your one-year-old vacuum has dirt in all of its filters. No problem, you say, I will just replace all the filters. OK, but is that what you really want? Do you know how expensive it is to replace all of your filters every six months?

SPOILER ALERT STORY – I hate spoiler alerts, and if my dear wife is reading this, just so you know, I am still bitter about how you spoiled The Sixth Sense for me. :) LOL. At the bottom of this article is the story of when the CEO of Shark came by our booth and saw our bagless vacuum. It’s a great story, so don’t forget to read it. :)

Below is an actual filter removed from a Dyson vacuum. If you look closely you can see the filter is completely full of dust, dirt, hair, and small debris that made it through the Dyson filtration system and lodged in the final filter. We’re not picking on Dyson here, as all bagless vacuums have the same problem, and it choked down the power of the vacuum.

So we were depressed. :( How could we solve a problem that ALL bagless vacuums have, when huge companies with billions in sales could not solve it?

We did not have their budgets. HOWEVER, we would pit our vacuum knowledge against any company in the world. We felt that the Vacuum Experts and Engineers in our R&D department know more about vacuum cleaners and vacuum design than any company in the world, and that if anyone could solve the problem, we could. So we decided to tackle it.

If we had known it would take two more years to finally figure it out, we might not have tried. :) Needless to say, we were humbled quite a bit as month after month our prototypes failed over and over to improve on current bagless technology. Below is a list of SOME of the tests and prototypes we came up with that failed. Keep in mind, the problem all bagless vacuums have is that the suction power of the vacuum is greater than gravity, so it pulls all the small dirt into the filters (as shown in the Dyson filter below).

Below is a list of our failed ideas and prototypes:

Prototype 7 – Our idea here was to make the filter vibrate. If the filter vibrated, then the dust and debris would drop off. By attaching a rod from the motor (which vibrates) to the filter, it could… (It did not work.)

Prototype 13 – Create a chamber above the final filter with floating balls that get picked up by the vacuum suction. When the vacuum turns off, the balls fall down and strike the filter, knocking off any accumulated debris. And no, it did not work.

Prototype 17 – We came up with this idea of negative pressure, where when the user turned off the vacuum, the vacuum would reverse its suction and blow air back against the dirty filter, forcing the filter clean every time. We abandoned this prototype when we saw the vacuum turn off and a giant puff of dust went into the air. :) Bad idea. :)

Prototype 20 – Certain filtration companies advertise a special spray you can apply to filters that will actually “repel” dust and debris and won’t let it stick to the filter. Then when the suction turns off, the dirt and debris falls off… Cool idea, but it didn’t work as advertised.

Prototype 28 – Static electricity. By charging the filter with static electricity, it could repel dust away from the filter. We were concerned about shocking the user (and about people playing practical jokes on their friends), and it also did not work, as the suction power of the vacuum was too great.

Prototype 32 – A cone-type filter in an inverted tube. The dust would go up a chamber and down a tube, and when it hit the tube it would hit a cone-type filter. We passed on this idea because for it to work, the user would constantly have to clean the cone filter every couple of weeks. We wanted a design where users did not have to clean a filter for at least a year. Ironically, after we passed on this idea, a big brand came out with a new model using this design.

Prototype 37 – A slowly turning filter cleaner. We would have had to install a separate motor that spun an arm to wipe the filter clean while the vacuum was in use. It did not work because it still did not clean off the small dust particles, and it added to the cost.

Prototype 43 – Create a corkscrew design inside a separate chamber that forces the dust to travel up the “screw.” As centrifugal force pushed the dust to the outside, the dust would strike the chamber and slow down. The problem was that the vacuum’s suction was so strong it did not work (but we were getting close). This was one of my favorite ideas, but still not good enough.

Fun Vacuum Story – Do you remember the Fantom bagless uprights from the late ’90s and early 2000s? That was actually one of James Dyson’s failed prototypes. He had run out of money and sold that design to a competitor who released it in the US. James then went on and built a better version (he had several more prototypes before he was satisfied with his invention). Then he released his final version in the US and put them out of business. Prototype 43 was that for us (but we never sold the technology).

Nearly two years went by and we were stumped. No wonder no one else could figure it out.

My kids actually helped me figure it out. :) We went on vacation to Lego land (my kids love that place). While we were there, they also wanted to take in a day of museums in San Diego. My kids and wife were excited to go to the Aviation Museum and the Museum of Electricity. At the Museum of Electricity they had a demonstration on static electricity (it’s really entertaining if you ever get a chance to see it). They asked for a volunteer to come get electrocuted, and of course my nine-year-old son was the first to jump up waving his hands like crazy. He got picked, and the presenter was doing all these funny tests with him being shocked by static electricity, which he loved. While that was going on, I happened to glance over and read a sign. As I recall, the sign was about the importance of static electricity. It said something to the effect of:

“As particles in nature get smaller and smaller, gravity has less of an effect on them and static electricity has more of an effect on them.”

I thought about how that could apply to our problem, but I couldn’t see how it would help, since we had already passed on static electricity. I thought it was ironic how exactly that described the problem.

Current technology is based on gravity separating dirt from air. However, “as particles in nature get smaller, gravity has less of an effect on them,” which is why current bagless vacuums did not work very well. The force of the suction from the motor had more of an effect than gravity did.

As I drove home from vacation, I thought about this and about how gravity had less of an effect. Then it hit me: we needed a force OTHER than gravity to separate out the fine dust. I went back to the lab (it was after hours and I was the only one there) and tested some of our failed prototypes while watching how dirt and air moved. Something struck me. I noticed that in the bagless chamber, the inner tube was very clean and the outside of the chamber was dirty. As I watched the dirt circulate in the dirt chamber, the dirt and dust were forced to the outside. Forced by what? CENTRIFUGAL FORCE. Here was the other force besides gravity that I was looking for.

What IF we created a filter on the inside, just like that inner chamber, and what IF we created a powerful tornado-like force that pushed all the small dust and debris to the outside of the chamber, allowing clean air to pass through? The point was not to filter out the fine dirt but to MAKE IT AIRBORNE while the air passed through the filter.

The following morning I had a meeting with our engineers and brought my hand-drawn design. They thought my drawing was pretty funny, but they got the idea.

The next day our engineers came back with the design we affectionately call “The Vortex Chamber.”

The purpose of the Vortex Chamber is: 1) to force air to pass through the filter horizontally, not vertically like nearly all other bagless vacuums; 2) to spin the air extremely fast right before it passes through the final filter, so dust and debris are spun away from the filter, strike the outside of the chamber, and drop down; 3) to create a force stronger than the suction of the vacuum; and 4) to design it so that even when small particles do stick to the filter, the tornado effect creates a SELF-CLEANING filter. As the air spins around the filter, it actually cleans the dirt off the filter.

This final Vortex Chamber could be jam-packed full of dirt and small particles and still NOT lose suction power. But would it actually work? Time for Prototype 44. :) Below is what it looked like. Hey, don’t laugh at me. :) It might look funny, but I was EXCITED to try it out. We used a cardboard tube for direct suction and a K&N air filter (three times more surface area than a horizontal filter). And yes, that’s my wife’s glass bowl, and no, I never told her (it was the perfect size).

Yes, it’s true: a multi-million dollar company used cardboard, duct tape, a cut-down K&N air filter, and my wife’s glass bowl to build our final prototype. LOL. :)

If you look carefully at the images above, you will see that in the final chamber we vacuumed so much fine dirt and dust that it was literally jam-packed around the filter. So here was the moment of truth. Time to test the CFM… drumroll please… only a 5% drop in power. And even packed with dirt and fine dust, it had more power than all the other bagless vacuums we had tested when they were brand new.

So we took off the bowl to inspect the filter. Now, I know no end user would ever get a filter this dirty and packed with dirt and fine dust, but we wanted to test it in a worst-case scenario just so we knew the product would be perfect.

If you look at the image above (the glass bowl), it was so packed full of dirt and dust that you could not even see the filter. However, when we inspected the filter, over 80% of it was spotless. Our invention and the Vortex Chamber literally pushed the dirt and dust AWAY from the filter and kept it clean.

This allowed air to pass through the filter even though the final chamber was packed with fine dirt and dust. No user would ever get it this dirty, but even if they did, they would only see a 5% drop in cleaning power, not the 50% drop that current bagless tech has.

Problem Solved – We had invented the technology that became Prolux XForce, and the entire old generation of bagless tech was now obsolete. Users can run XForce technology for 10 months or 10 years and still have the same cleaning power.

So here is our design for the new Prolux patent-pending XForce technology:

You will notice that we made the top clear so the user can see the final filter. In person it looks very cool to watch the tornado-like action around the final filter. You can actually see the fine dust being forced away from the final filter by centrifugal force. We then designed it so that in 60 seconds the user can quickly unsnap the top, clean the filter, and put it back on. And if the user forgets to clean it, no problem: as shown in our test above, it is designed to be jam-packed with dirt and still have plenty of power to vacuum. As the picture below shows, it is very easy to see the status of your filter.

 

 

The BETA Release and Why We Went Back to the Lab

Here is the part of the story most companies would never tell you, but I think it’s the most important part.

After the Vortex Chamber breakthrough, we filed our patents, opened tooling, and released our first production version of the technology as a BETA. We were excited. Our lab numbers were outstanding and our early field feedback on suction and weight was everything we had hoped for.

Then the BETA units came back with a problem we had not seen in the lab: under certain real-world conditions, the filter would clog. Not in the way old bagless vacuums clog, but enough that it was not the product we had promised. And as I said at the top of this article, we have this weird culture here where a product has to be absolutely perfect before we put our name on it at full scale.

So we made a decision that a lot of people told us was crazy: instead of shipping it anyway, we pulled back and kept testing.

We put an additional $500,000 into R&D on this one problem. We built multiple new rounds of prototypes, reworked the airflow path, revised the filter design, the filter material, the geometry of all the chambers, and put every version back through the same brutal testing that killed our very first bagless backpack prototype years earlier. We tested used units, not just new ones, because that’s where the truth is.

It took longer than we wanted and it cost a lot more than we planned. But the result is a machine that only loses about 4% of its suction after multiple filled tanks when the bin is 100% full, compared to roughly 20% to 40% for a typical bagged commercial backpack vacuum. That number is the whole reason we went back to the lab.

Below shows our testing results after filling up the tanks to their full capacity 5 times and this is how the filtration systems looked at the end of that testing.  The vacuum tank on the left, is the NEW redesigned filtration system, and the tank on the right was the OLD BETA version that clogged the filtration system. (Both unit tests were done sucking up the same debris.) As you can see, the NEW redesigned filtration system has a substantially cleaner filtration system with zero clogs compared to the OLD BETA version.

 

 

Below are some of the XForce prototypes from that phase of development:

Spoiler Alert Story

OK, remember above when I said I had a great story about the CEO of Shark? Now I can tell it. :) After we invented the technology, we filed all our patents, opened tooling, and created our first version. Then we headed off to the famous Home Show in Chicago to release this brand new technology.

At our booth we had a suction test (see the image below) where we hooked up our new bagless tech alongside a Dyson and a Shark (their best models). As people walked by, we would turn on all three vacuums at the same time to see which one picked up the most tennis balls. Needless to say, it was impressive, and people would stop and come talk to us. The Dyson would pick up about 1.5 balls (meaning the second tennis ball would go about halfway up the tube), the Shark would pick up about 2 balls, and our new tech would pick up 4.

These tests were done with the same amount of dirt in each machine (in fact we had double the dirt in ours). People were amazed, because while the vacuum was running, ours had this tornado of dirt swirling around the filter (you could not even see the filter), but as soon as we turned the vacuums off, our filter was bone white clean while the filters on the other two were not.

 

So I’m at our booth hanging out with the CEO and inventor of Blendtec Blenders, Tom Dickson (super cool guy). Come to find out, he LOVES vacuum cleaners. He was telling me about the custom central vacuum with two motors that he built himself, and about how his Blendtec invention was basically putting a large vacuum motor on a blender (by the way, if you have not seen them, check out Blendtec Blenders on YouTube, they are awesome). His factory is just down the road from ours, and he was telling me about the new motor factory he was launching (and how we should buy our vacuum motors from him) when a lady from Dyson came storming up to our booth. She was upset and said, “You have sabotaged our Dyson somehow!” She wouldn’t let me get a word in (literally not one word) as I tried to explain the new technology and offered to let her check out her vacuum if she wanted (we had done nothing to it besides vacuuming up some dirt). Then she turned to Tom, gave him a big smile, told him how much she loves her Blendtec, and stormed off. Tom and I just smiled, because Tom knows a lot about vacuums too.

 

Then the CEO and founder of Shark Vacuums walked by and said, “What are you doing to my vacuum!” We explained the new technology to him and showed him the problem with current tech, and he nodded his head (this was not news to him). Then he shook our hand and, before leaving, said, “Well, don’t treat my vacuum too bad,” and walked off. :) LOL. Actually a really cool guy.

So that is the story of the problem with bagless technology and how one company solved it.

The Final Result: The Prolux XForce Pro:

Everything above, the failed prototypes, the museum sign, the glass bowl, the BETA setback, and the extra half million dollars in R&D, led to the machines we sell today. Here they are:

Prolux XForce Pro Commercial Backpack Vacuum with 1.5 inch Attachment Kit – https://proluxcleaners.com/products/prolux-xforce-commercial-standard

11 lbs, up to 105 CFM, 2.3L bin, 50+ ft cleaning radius, HEPA filtration, commercial 1.5 inch (38mm) hose, two-piece aluminum wand set, and a full commercial attachment kit. Only about 4% suction loss when the bin is 100% full.

 

 

Prolux XForce Pro Commercial Bagless Backpack Vacuum with Electric Power Nozzle – https://proluxcleaners.com/products/prolux-xforce-commercial-with-360-power-nozzle

Everything in the standard XForce Pro plus a commercial-grade electric power nozzle with a spinning brushroll, electric hose with an on/off switch at your hand, and an adjustable electric wand. Upright deep-cleaning power with backpack speed and mobility.

 

You can see the full backpack lineup here:

https://proluxcleaners.com/collections/backpack-vacuums

Questions? Leave a comment below or send us an email at sales@proluxcleaners.com.

Thanks,

Dustin

President, Prolux