If you watched dragons den tonight

[geoff]

That was my brother with the disaster zone bricks

Luckily, the government of Haiti seem more interested than the old fogies

[John Stumbles]

Didn't see it but it's always struck me that DD is an entertainment show.

[geoff]

Also - a source of good publicity if you come out well

[Andrew Gabriel]

Yes, did see it. How long ago was it filmed?

The one that caught my attention was the extractor fan which extracts through the WC pan, so smells never enter the room in the first place. The reason I noticed it is that I've seen it before, in 1986/7 (when I bought a previous house). I have been keeping half an eye out for it since, but never saw it again. It was in one of the DIY sheds as a retrofit kit for a standard WC. I think it was a Texas at the time, but it changed names several times.

[pete]

Yes, anything on TV is primarily entertainment - even "news" programmes. Their primary function is to draw in eyeballs and any usable content is merely a side effect of that imperative.

[dennis]

They are called rim extractors IIRC and yes they have been around for decades but aren't very popular. They used to make you feel cold but these days with CH they probably don't.

Dyson will be along to patent them shortly and claim them as a new invention like he did with cyclonic separators.

[sm_jamieson]

He never said he invented them. In fact I saw an interview where he explained he had seen them used on a farm to separate chaff from the air from a threshing machine and thats what gave him the idea. He patented various forms of miniaturising them to a size where they could be used in a domestic vacuum cleaner.

I don't own a dyson so no idea how good they actually are. I know they get mixed reviews.

As an aside, the ball vacuum was based on the ball from the ball wheelbarrow. I wonder what happend to that ?

Simon.

[A.Clews]

Thus spake sm_jamieson (sm [e-mail]) unto the assembled multitudes:

I've had a Dyson DC01 since 1995 and it's still going strong, though it's now on its second brush roller and belt. The hose tools are almost useless, but it's good at the upright cleaning bit.

[Man at B&Q]

When was that then?

MBQ

[Owain]

I thought I'd seen it before too, but maybe this was different in using the soil pipe for the extract duct.

Not sure how it would work in a stack without a vent pipe using an Air Admittance Valve - the extract air would have to go down to teh sewer and up the nearest stack with a vent.

Owain

[Andrew Gabriel]

Yes, that combined with separating out down to cigarette smoke particle size.

[dennis]

Rubbish, they don't use cyclones for that, there are two big filters that work the same way as any other filter.

[Jerry]

: : No such thing as bad publicity. :

Tell that to a certain Mr Ratner!...

[geoff]

In message , Andrew Gabriel writes

A couple of months ago IIRC

I remember some big fat moustached bloke who looked like James Robertson Justice demonstrating one on TV - must have been in the early 70s

[andrew]

The chap that was a producer for tommorrow's world had some sort of patent on this idea, I remember him selling it to a german firm in the mid 70s. I cannot remember the german name he gave it but is was a long word.

AJH

[andrew]

AJH

[Tim Watts]

aka

Robert Alexander Baron Schutzmann von Schutzmansdorff

[John Rumm]

If you read the description of how he developed the cyclone for small particle size collection, he used HEPA filters as a way of assessing the cyclone performance. Once it could capture smoke particle size debris, without the inline HEPA filter gaining any weight in the process he figured the cyclone was effective enough. So when working at peak performance it should capture smoke sized particles with just the effect of the cyclone.

[John Rumm]

Bob Symes did it on Tomorrow's World around that time IIRC.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Man at B&Q" saying something like:

Every bloody time he pops up.