Tired of going to your local mega mart, trying to find your specific vacuum bag? Thinking about a bagless vacuum so that you never have to buy bags again? It’s not quite that simple. The vacuum specialists at Kneedle.com and Sewing Machine Warehouse prefer bagged vacuums due to their superior performance and increased hygiene and longer service life. To learn more about why we feel this way, we must first gain a better understanding of how these unsung heroes of home hygiene actually do their thing. Geek material follows: you’ve been warned. Vacuums operate by sending a mixture of dust, debris and nasty carpet critters suspended in air through a semi-porous material. The nature of this material has a lot to do with the overall performance of the vacuum. Bagged vacuums use a paper or, as is becoming more common, a synthetic fabric sack to trap dust, while allowing air to flow freely through. Bagless vacuums accomplish this same feat by trapping dust in a filter. These filters are usually made of either paper or foam. Many bagless vacuums also employ “cyclonic technology” that rotates this nasty dusty air frappe at high speeds, forcing heavier particles outward and clean(ish) air upward into the vacuums’ motor (dust+motor+electricity+high speeds=short motor/bearing service life). This tends to trap the heavier particles (cheerios, legos, your favorite pair of earings) but still allows lighter dust particles (dust mites and their eggs, dead skin, animal dander, allergens) to pass through. This is why a cyclonic vacuum still requires filters. Now why would a bagged vacuum perform better. Take my own personal vacuum as an example. The Miele Solaris Electro-Plus canister. It boasts an impressive 162 square inches of bag material (and newer Mieles have bags that are almost twice as large) to trap dust. As soon as this bag material is blocked with dust, it is no longer able to allow air to pass through, creating a loss of suction. Compare this with the leading bagless vacuum, the Dyson DC-whatever. It has an open-cell foam filter with a surface area of about 15 square inches. Loss of suction is experienced VERY quickly, usually within a single days’ usage. Fortunately, Dyson and some other brands allow for these foam filters to be washed and dried; but most of us either don’t do this enough, or forget entirely. If your filter is made of pleated paper, then replacement is your best option.

Now, let’s talk about household hygiene. The end-goal of that motorized appliance you bond with once or twice a week is to get dust, pet hair, and allergens out of your house. Unfortunately, many vacuums tend to emit a decent portion of the dust they collect from the floor back into your environment. This is why your vacuum cleaner is often coated in a layer of dust not found other things in your home, your vacuum is allowing dust to escape from all those nooks and crannies like hose connections, dust bin seals, and filter housings. Bagless vacuums tend to have more of these nooks and crannies so that you can easily remove the dust bin and dispose of its’ contents.

Some vacuums prominently display the acronym HEPA. This means that a portion of the vacuum, the filter, is capable of filtering out particles down to a certain minimum size (99.97% at .03 microns). These are highly beneficial to anyone regardless of their allergy sensitivity and respiratory health. HEPA filters can be found on many vacuums, but because of the high density of the HEPA filter, the dust-laden air will find other, easier ways out of a vacuum unless special design elements are used to seal the entire system. To date, the only vacuum in the US with this completely sealed approach to HEPA filtration is the Miele brand. This design also requires a much more powerful motor to effectively drive air through this very dense filtration system, which is why Miele features a ludicrously powerful 1200 watt vortex motor.

Now to dust disposal. We don’t want to be exposed to the toxic waste that comes off of our floors. It is the concentration of all the allergens, molds, dust mite eggs and feces (yuck), pet dander, and other nastiness that can cause all sorts of evil things to happen to your respiratory and immune systems. With higher end bagged systems, as those found on Miele, Sebo, and others; the bag will seal shut and prevent anything from escaping. With bagless vacuums, you are required to get up close and personal with this mess as you empty it into your garbage (hopefully outside.) A lot of the more dangerous particles float freely in air, directly into your face. Wear a mask.

No mom-and-pop vac shop has ever gotten rich selling paper bags that cost $2-3 a piece. We, the nationwide pseudo-alliance of privately-owned vacuum retailers recommend these bag-sporting vacuums because they truly offer greater performance advantages. It gives us a certain satisfaction when we hear from a customer that they love the product that we have recommended to them. And when you buy a great vacuum from a local quality dealer, bags are just a short drive away.

Just to tie this all together, here are some pros-and-cons to bagged and bagless systems. These are generalizations comparing products within a specific price range, i.e. A $200 bagged vac versus a $200 bagless vac.

Bagged:

Pros: Better filtration, increased service life, easier and safer disposal of dust, no washing and waiting for filters to dry, maintains peak performance for much longer.

Cons: Need to replace bags

Bagless:

Pros: No bags to change. If equipped with foam filters, you can wash them frequently to restore performance to a limited extent, sometimes pretty space-age looking.

Cons: Filters must be washed or bought frequently - and can be very expensive. Messy and hazardous dust disposal, poor filtration inherent to design, short service life, often heavily over-engineered- awkward to use and more fragile.