Choosing a Vacuum Cleaner for Your Domestic Help

By | August 15, 2022

Choosing a Vacuum Cleaner for Your Domestic Help

In our post-Covid world, you probably don’t want a cleaner to bring their own vacuum cleaner full of other people’s dirt, so they will use yours.

If you have a cleaner or domestic help at home that uses your vacuum, you will be all too familiar that many of them tend to abuse appliances such as vacuum cleaners. Of course, if it is not their money buying the hoover, they are not too concerned about how they treat them.

Your concern is to buy a vacuum cleaner that your cleaner will not only like and understand how to use, but are less likely to be able to break so easily. Downtime costs money.

In our shop, we often get phone calls and emails from people asking for a recommendation for a vacuum cleaner they might buy that their cleaner is less likely to be able to break. Choosing a vacuum cleaner for your domestic help is something best researched with a commercial vacuum specialist (like us) rather than a department store or Amazon.

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Don’t Let Your Cleaner Recommend a Vacuum Cleaner

Cleaners clean all the time, so they know what are the best vacuum cleaners, right?

Nope! Or at least, not necessarily. Occasionally, yes. Probably not.

Are your cleaners spending their own money or someone else’s on their recommendation? If their own, they’ll likely buy a Henry, Numatic or one of the dreadful Shark monstrosities as they are only a hundred or so quid. If they suggest anything like a Vax, Shark, Hoover or Dyson machine, you are free to laugh heartily at the suggestion.

It’s a fact that many of the cleaning staff that are available to us in the UK are born elsewhere in Europe or even further afield. Nothing wrong with that of course, but many of these people have a different understanding as to what vacuum cleaners are needed for what jobs. They do not have the breadth of experience needed to recommend to you a vacuum cleaner.

The European taste for cylinder or tank vacuum cleaners is perfectly valid for the hard floors they typically have in central and Eastern European countries, but less valid for the nice Axminster carpets more likely to be found in the British shires, the Cheshire Triangle or the affluent corners of Scotland or Devon.

Therefore, your cleaner’s insistence that something like a Henry, Numatic or cylinder Dyson vacuum is their preference is likely to be ill-informed, certainly if your floor coverings are mostly carpets. Feel free to ignore them and buy them what they need and not what they want.

And certainly, don’t consider anything cordless like a Gtech or a Dyson V8, V10, V11, V15, etc. They are simply not heavy-duty enough.

Choosing a Vacuum Cleaner for Your Domestic Help

You would not ask the man taking your money in your local petrol station to recommend your choice of next car because he sees lots of cars. Similarly, you may not want to ask your cleaner which vacuum cleaner to buy.

They will happily saw away on your expensive carpets with an ancient Henry, making slow progress, whilst seeming to be working hard. This all looks jolly productive but isn’t really getting your house any cleaner. Give them the tools they need to do the job properly.

Good quality carpets need a good quality vacuum cleaner. A good brush roll is able to agitate the carpet pile sufficiently to extract from it the dirt and grit that is carried in on people’s feet. If the dirt and grit are not adequately extracted, it sinks down into the pile then from where it becomes abrasive and eventually your carpet is holed.

Vacuum cleaners such as Henry and Numatic that don’t have belt-driven brush rolls or turbo heads are simply less effective at removing the grit from the carpet.

There is a saying popular in Russia that “greedy pays twice”. If you pay a hundred or so quid for a cheap vacuum cleaner to clean your £10,000 worth of carpets, you will only have yourself to blame when they are tired and grubby twelve months down the line.

There is a reason that Sebo vacuum cleaners are so well-respected in the hotel industry and are the default choice of hospitals, schools, casinos, clubs, and any other commercial application you care to mention.

Professional Cleaners Who Know Their Stuff Use Sebo

Ask anyone you know in the hotel, airline, cruise ship, or other similar industry what they use. The answer is probably Sebo. Sebo is the default choice for proper cleaners.

Choosing a Vacuum Cleaner for Your Cleaner

The answer to which vacuum cleaner should you buy is usually Sebo. They are handmade in Germany.

Sebo is not only the best choice for those who have cleaning staff, Sebo tends to be the default choice for the discerning British middle-class household too (input “Sebo” into Mumsnet and you’ll get the idea).

In the same way that if you have a choice, you may well choose an Apple telephone, a Range Rover (or perhaps a Mercedes) to drive, and groceries from Waitrose or Ocado. The same rationale brings you to the decision to buy a Sebo vacuum cleaner. (If you happen to be a Kia-driving, Android-using, Aldi shopper, please don’t send us angry grams – we are referring to general demographics here.)

Which Sebo Vacuum to Buy for Your Cleaner?

Now we look at the question of which Sebo vacuum cleaner to buy. If you go somewhere like John Lewis you will be presented with the usual very limited domestic range and given lots of flimflam by salespeople who will sell you a half-decent vacuum cleaner with the best of intentions.

That’s all very nice but it’s only half the story. And you can do better.

Would you not prefer to have the opinion of somebody who has been in the vacuum cleaner business since the 1980s and understands not only the domestic Sebo range but the commercial Sebo range – which you will not find in John Lewis?

Before Sebo manufactured domestic vacuum cleaners for the UK market in the early 1990s they specialised – and still specialise today – in the commercial vacuum cleaner market. In fact, Sebo is the world’s largest producer of upright commercial vacuum cleaners. You will find them everywhere from Buckingham Palace to the Ritz and Trump Tower.

If you are buying a Sebo vacuum cleaner for your cleaning staff to use, you do not need a domestic machine with lots of bells and whistles and a high gloss finish that’s will be scratched in no time when they bash it against your radiators.

If you live in a regular-sized house, consider one of the Sebo commercial vacuum cleaners that are the same standard 30cm width as domestic vacuum cleaners (many commercial vacuum cleaners are wider than standard and some are 46cm across).

Here are two standard width options to look at:

The outer casing of these machines are extremely durable as they are designed for commercial staff to use in commercial environments. Therefore we would hope that your cleaner abusing it in Essex, Hertfordshire or Surrey isn’t going to damage it too much.

Such machines do not come with lots of extra useless features and many extra tools such as some domestic machines do.

Most commercial machines only come with a stair tool and a crevice tool mounted on the back (if that).

You buy any extras you need according to your needs. If you need an extra long hose to reach upstairs, for example, we have those >here<. We also have lots of other tools to do almost any job in >this article<.

There is another advantage to commercial machines if you have a particularly large house. Lots of our customers have large houses, Manor houses, castles and occasionally even houses that are open to the public.

What Is the Best Vacuum for a Stately Home or Castle?

If you have larger than average floorspace why not have a larger-than-average vacuum cleaner? A wider vacuum cleaner means that your cleaners cover more floorspace in less time. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that that increases productivity and reduces costs. The extra few quid that a wider vacuum cleaner costs is easily negated and/or self-financing probably within a few weeks.

So if you have very large floors please take a look at these machines:

And if you have very very very large floors take a look at the BS460 which is approaching half a metre wide (what the Countess of Carnarvon is using above). We sell those typically to large churches, grammar schools, mosques, casinos, and nightclubs. But the odd one also goes to Scottish castles and other places with exceptionally large floors.

Our Sebo vacuum cleaners sit in numerous Scottish castles and National Trust properties, the British Secret Service, Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and almost any hotel chain you’ll care to mention, and everywhere in between.

Our physical store is located on the edge of Cheshire in Stockport, so we tend to get many of our in-store customers from the Cheshire area from places such as Alderley Edge, Sale, Timperley, Prestbury, Bramhall, Wilmslow, Macclesfield, Handforth, etc.

We sell the same Sebo vacuum cleaners as John Lewis (but a far greater range), we are always cheaper and you can try ours out on the shop floor and get expert advice before you buy. Plus our friendly chaps will assemble them for you and even carry them to your car sans packaging.

If you don’t want to visit us, we even offer a Premium Home Delivery service within reach of our shop at no extra cost.

For everyone else, you can buy from us online (by clicking the banner below) so the information you are reading in this article is equally valid if you are at the top of Scotland or the tip of Cornwall.

Please take the time to look around our blog here, it’s stuffed full of articles and information (the search bar is your friend). Also, look on our Sebo Shop site. Read the specifications of machines, and if necessary ask for advice on our spiffing advice forums. Choosing a vacuum cleaner for your domestic help isn’t something best researched in Currys or John Lewis.

If you have exhausted those options and still feel that you need some advice as to which machine to buy for your particular circumstances please send us an email and one of our principals will get back to you.

The Sebo Shop – part of Manchester Vacs – are approved Sebo dealers offering the full range of domestic and commercial Sebo vacuums together with consumables and spare parts.  

The Sebo Shop