I Made it Suck

I know, a shocker.  I told you I wouldn't post for a while, but I'm doing it anyway.  I mean, I don't want the lot of you going through withdrawals or anything. 

So our vacuum has been dying a slow death for a while.  I've always been told that vacuums eventually lose suction and you have to get a new one.  (At least, that's what the Dyson commercials tell me.)  So I expected that we'd need to get a new one soon.  I mean, I have to run over the carpetted areas three or four times before the bits of food on the floor would eventually disappear.  Whether or not I'd actually sucked it up or simply smashed it enough times for me not to see it are two different things, but I'm figuring that they eventually got sucked up.

This means that I haven't been vacuuming the stairway and it was just getting too filthy even for me.  So I decided to take a look at the vacuum a little more closely to see why it wasn't working right.  And with a little bit of fiddling and a lot of dust up my nose, I eventually discovered that the hose was plugged up.

Oh yes, it was plugged up. 

So I removed the hose and started shaking the dust and various detritus out.  Oh yes, I said shake, because there was not a tool long enough to get to the further parts of the hose to pull the junk out.  Luckily, the hose was an accordion style hose and all I had to do was stretch and shake.  I swear it was six inches worth of junk in that hose.

After clearing the damned thing, it now sucks good.  It suck so good, I don't need a new vacuum. 

It suck so good the stairs are now clean.