Add-on turbo brushes

[pebe]

Can anyone tell me of their experiences with an add-on turbo brush fitted to a cylinder vacuum cleaner? Are they worth buying?

[polygonum]

Miele?

Helps a lot on carpet. Also have the narrow one which is pretty good for the stairs.

Trouble is, the big one (especially) tends to get clagged up with hair,threads, etc.and is a bit of a pain to clean out properly. Needs some, scissors, etc. And very much best done outside.

[Bob Eager]

Following a discussion on here recently, I bought a turbo brush for the Henry.

It is excellent; wish I'd bought it sooner. It's made a dramatic difference, although, yes, it needs cleaning out at times.

My son (also called Henry), who does a lot of the vacuuming, thinks it's wonderful.

[alan]

I have turbo brush supplied with with my Henry cleaner. It uses the airflow to drive the brushes. It works extremely well and beats that carpet as it cleans. It does have one downside in that the turbine that drives the brushes is large and restricts the size of objects that the pipe can suck up. Suck up a screwed up sweet paper, the off cut from a cable tie, the stalk from a bunch of grapes and these will all jam in the turbine. Usually I can free it by tuning the brushes by hand in the opposite direction to normal but sometime it requires the brush assembly to be dismantled. The trick is to go quickly around sucking up these types of objects with the brush assembly removed and then vacuum the carpet/floor.

I did once buy a similar rotating brush assembly cheaply on Ebay - what a load of steaming horse poo! The brushes did spin a a fantastic rate under no load but didn't extend to the floor to beat it - they sat 5 mm up from the bottom of the attachment. Apply any load to the brush assembly and it immediately stopped turning.

[gremlin_95]

Yes.

Next! :)

[John Rumm]

I bought a small one for getting dog hair out of the stair carpet some years back. Worked very well. Not used it recently (dog pegged it a few years back!)

[harry]

They were popular a few years back. Allegedly give the suction cleaner the benefits of an upright cleaner. Ie picks up hairs, fluff and thread better. It used to be called a "power head". The problem is the motor is heavy on the end of the work tool. Some work on the suction & have no separate motor for lightness but don't work as well. Back then they were quite unreliable. Maybe things have improved. You may as well buy an upright cleaners, they will always outperform a cylinder cleaner but you have to buy belts and brushes. And they cause more wear on the carpet. Ideal to have both.

[Andy Dingley]

Henry's Air-o-brush is excellent on pet hair and well worth getting. Probably even worth it if you have bald pets.

[Man at B&Q]

Definitely. We had a small one, from a cheap hand held "pet patrol" vac, that we used on a full sized cyclinder. It screamed a bit at being over-revved but it got the cat hairs up no problem!

MBQ