No worries: Dyson kills the filter with new vacuum

James Dyson and his band of merry engineers have been creating fantastic improvements to the vacuum cleaner for years, and we can thank them for the removal of the bag altogether. But they’re not done yet, and with the newest fix, you won’t have to worry about your vacuum losing suction ever again.

Removing the bag did a lot for vacuum owners: it made it easy for the dust to collect around a central core, collecting itself into a big heap ready to be thrown out, while dropping the cost of consumables to close to zero since you no longer needed to buy replacement bags.

But it hasn’t stopped people from complaining about the lack of suction.

In fact, this complaint seems to stem usually from the filter not being cleaned out, and even though Dyson ditched the bag in 1993, the filter has stuck around, a part that nobody seems to realise needs cleaning.

With 20 years of research and testing later, Dyson appears to have found the solution with Cinetic cyclone technology, a development that uses a flexible material to work against the Dyson cyclones, stopping the dust from sticking to the filters.

Senior Dyson Designer Engineer Martin Peek with the Dyson DC54. We're just chatting by our water cooler. As we do.

“Getting rid of bags solved the frustration of my vacuum losing suction. But washing filters – or worse – buying them, is still a nuisance,” said James Dyson.

“Dyson Cinetic cyclones are so efficient at separating microscopic particles that everything gets thrust into the bin, and you can forget about fussy filters.”

Multiple materials were tested for the Cinetic vacuum, which also uses a ball head and makes it easier to pull around corners, and the engineers found that if the flexible material used inside the system was too hard, the parts wouldn’t move fast enough, but if it was too soft, the cyclones would shut down.

All up, the Cinetic – also called the DC54 – was created by 29 Dyson engineers for $11.5 million over six years, producing a machine that was tested with over $200,000 of test dust.

Yes, there’s such a thing as test dust.

“It’s a test dust,” said Martin Peek, Senior Design Engineer at Dyson, referring to the material in the image above. “It’s made of short fibres, fine fibres, almost like carpet fibres, coarse dust, fine dust, and almost like talc powder size.”

With all of this test dust, Dyson put the vacuum cleaner through what would be the equivalent of ten years of testing, and thanks to the technology used in this system, found that it would be just as good after owned for that long.

“Basically you can use this for ten years, and even after ten years, it has exactly the same performance as when you first bought it,” said Peek.

“This for us is a bit of a milestone: we’ve now achieved what we see is the perfect cyclonic system. It’s difficult to see at this point what could be better.”

Dyson’s DC54 will be available in four variants from September 1, with the DC54 Multi-floor arriving for $799, DC54 allergy for $899, DC54 Animal for $999, and the DC Animal Pro for $1099, all values RRP.

Dyson’s spiffy new filter-less vacuum isn’t the only product the company is unveiling today, though; it also has a new cordless stick vacuum that is just as powerful as a full-size model.

Developed with Dyson’s famed digital motor, the Dyson Digital Slim DC59 is a model that skips the bags, doesn’t ditch the filter, but does manage to skip out on the plug, making it rechargeable from a docking station.

Once you take it off the charge, the stick vacuum takes advantage of similar cyclonic technology (though not filterless) and a newly designed motor to make it as powerful as a larger vacuum without the bulk.

Two models will be made for this one, with the Multi-floor DC59 arriving for $599 and the Animal model coming in for $649, both hitting stores in September.