After looking at least a dozen vacuum cleaners and reading and rereading everything I could, I decided on getting a bagged vacuum cleaner.

I chose bagged because bagless machines require frequent emptying. Every time you empty the vacuum, you risk kicking up a cloud of dust into your face.  This is not a good thing when you have allergies like I do.

So I went back to the stores again and reexamined the field of potential purchases. I spoke with more sales people with varying degrees of expertise. And I spoke with friends about their machines.

One thing that was very obvious to me was that bagless vacuums are way more prevalent in the stores. Bagged machines don’t seem to have much of a future in the home.  But there will always be people with allergies ready to buy a good bagged vacuum.

After much more deliberation, (I really do overanalyze things) and more Googling, I ended up buying a Shark Navigator.  I ended up with a bagless unit.  The infomercials were very impressive and the online comments I found were overwhelmingly positive.

Among the factors that prompted the purchase were that it had a decent length cord. Some vacuum cleaner cords are ridiculously short.  Cord length is not a good place to cut costs.  One of the big disadvantages of bagless vacuums is the expense of the filters that need to be replaced every so often. Navigator filters are cleanable and reusable. And they give you two so you can clean one and while it’s drying, keep vacuuming.

I bought it at Bed Bath and Beyond. Using their 20% off coupon which comes in the mail like clockwork, I was able to knock $40 off the price.

After reading the manual, I ran it over carpeting that had been vacuumed the day before. The amount of dust and dirt I picked up was astounding. The carpets looked lighter. I realized I should have gotten rid of that old Hoover years ago.

The dust cloud I envisioned when I emptied it never happened. When I emptied the Navigator’s dust receptacle, I had it far into the garbage can so the dust fell very far from my nose.  Emptying the Navigator actually proved to be a lot less dusty than changing the bag on any vacuum I’ve had before. Changing the bags was always a chore that kicked up dust. Emptying the Navigator takes a second. It’s easy and it’s clean.

So far I’m happy with the Shark Navigator.  I’ve been told that vacuum cleaners don’t last as long as they used to. This machine seems to be fairly well built. I hope it lasts. I don’t want to have to go through all this again for a long time.

By the way, I am not paid to write this blog. I really did do a lot of research and I did buy a Shark Navigator. It wasn’t given to me for review purposes.

I had my suspicions about this whole affair from the get go. The job interview took place after a 60 minute presentation given by the office manager. During that whole time, he never once told us what we would be selling.

The job interview was on a Tuesday. The next day started our three day job training for which we did not get paid. Finally on that first day, we were told what we would be selling but it wasn’t until Friday when they told us how much these things cost.

Even though they called it a cleaning system, everything we compared it to was a vacuum cleaner. We were taught how much better our cleaning system was over various vacuum cleaners. But we weren’t allowed to call it a vacuum cleaner even though it was one.

After three days of training, they finally revealed the price to us, $1999. Two thousand for a vacuum cleaner? We all thought that was nuts. But it wasn’t a vacuum cleaner. It was a cleaning system. Most of us had googled this “cleaning system” after the first day and we knew how much it cost. We weren’t surprised. We were still shocked the trainer could say it with a straight face.

The Tri-Star is a combination of vacuum technology. The air flows up the hose to a chamber in the canister. The airflow inside this canister is cyclonic like the popular Dyson machines. But it had a disposable paper basket to store the dust and dirt so it was sort of like a bagged machine. The cyclonic action kept the dust from clogging up the paper though so it had that over a traditional bagged machine. The paper dust receptacle was like a large cup so it wasn’t even closed like a bag. It was easy to dump out and re-use as many people do.

All in all, the Tri-star is a great unit if you like canister vacuums but is it worth $2000? Eh, no.

The Hoover vacuum cleaner I had been using for more than twenty years just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Over the years, it had become inordinately loud and it made the carpeting look worse.

Thus began my search for a new vacuum. I tend to overanalyze everything and this was no exception.  I consulted with Consumer Reports. I asked my friends for advice. I googled like crazy.  I watched countless infomercials. (It’s amazing how many infomercials are about floor cleaning.) And I went to every store in town, sometimes more than once, talking to salesmen of varying degrees of product knowledge, trying to find the best vacuums and the best deals.

A lot has changed since the last vacuum was purchased. We now have bagged or bagless vacuums.  It seemed as though making a choice between the two was probably going to be the most crucial part of deciding what vacuum cleaner to buy.

The advantage of traditional bagged vacuum cleaners is that they are somewhat easier to work with. Emptying the bag is the only real regular maintenance you need to do with them. When the bag fills up, you change it.

The advantage of bagless vacuums is that there is no bag.  Bags can be expensive and bags are sometimes difficult to find in the stores. Finding bags for the twenty some year old Hoover I was discarding was becoming a problem.

The disadvantage of bagged vacuums is that the more filled the bag gets, the more suction it loses. It’s not a linear progression either. The fuller the bag doesn’t mean the worse the suction. The suction gets pretty sucky very early in the bag filling process. When the bag is maybe an eighth full, you’ve lost way more than one eighth of your suction.

The disadvantage of bagless is that there are filters that need to be changed every so often. This will cut down on your suction and increase your operating cost.  In comparing the cost of the bags with the cost of the replacement filters, I found the yearly costs are comparable.  You only have to change the filters once but they are expensive enough to equal the cost of a year’s worth of bags.

A bagless vacuum needs to be emptied often, sometimes after each use. Changing a bag is done every few months, for most users, which makes them easier to use. Allergy sufferers are often told to use bagged vacuums because emptying bagless vacuums tends to release a lot of dust into the air.

The plusses and minuses of each style were pretty equal. Good vacuums can be found with each style. Making the decision can almost be a coin toss. As long as you don’t go too cheap, and even sometime when you do, you aren’t likely to find a truly bad vacuum cleaner.