My wife took out the vacuum cleaner to clean our living room rug this morning. We have a Shark brand cleaner. It says it never loses suction or power. But that wasn’t her experience today. She could see the machine was not picking up anything from the rug. The built in container for dirt is transparent. She could see it was empty.
My wife separated the motor section from the brush head and long tube. A look into the tube quickly confirmed that you cannot see light through it. I was totally clogged…with dog hair. She took a long stick that we often use to support plants and pushed it into the tube. A large number of globs of dog hair came out the other end into the trash container she placed underneath it. Everything was reassembled for another try. It still did not work properly.
That’s when I got called. The brush head was also clogged, and it has an angular elbow joint that precludes just shoving the blockage out the other end. I tried a few methods for pulling the hair out. None were successful. The entry was too long and narrow for my needle nose pliers. After a few minutes of frustration I had an idea. We have an old plumbers snake for clearing blocked drains. I hadn’t used it for years. It took a few minutes to locate it. The end of the snake has a sort of screw that bit into the hair balls and allowed me to pull them out. It took about three tries, but the end result was a clean passage. This is just what I pulled out of the brush head.
Yes, the vacuum cleaner works just fine now.
Wetherhorn 