Miele Vacuum Cleaner Bags

When I was a kid vacuum cleaners were all equipped with the same simple square paper bags to collect the dust, and they came very cheaply. 

I had them up until the early Nineties, one from my grandmother and one from her sister in law, till they both gave up. Model above from 1976. Mine were even older.

Newer models with better dust filtering and other improvements came up, all fine with me but what just bugs me is why do they all have to have their own special bags, with kind of a cardboard or now even plastic keys to fit the thing in, and otherwise your machine just won't work! Every brand even has varieties. And on top they are expensive. I wonder why nobody has ever thought about negotiating a standard for this to prevent waste of unused bags from broken machines. Like they do currently about cables for phones and other e-gadgets. And has kind of existed forever for AV equipment already.

Bagless models are being developed and maybe improved of course, but as far as I know affordable ones are not ideal yet. Like the one I sold for trash.

For myself I'm currently good with my AEG that I got around 2006 from a neighbour who went to a home. It still has the cardboard 'keys', and I can cut them of and stick over to non-fitting bags. Plus I have a set from the thrift shop, recently found to last me long enough.

But going through old photo's I found these from 2011! Curb found for sure and most likely in front of my door. That is pure luck. I had forgotten because never shared, but now I'm quite sure I reused the card board pieces for as long as they lasted.

So long story short, when I found this set of in total 18 bags in March I had no need to keep them and listed, asked €7,50, got €8,50. Buyer paid €12 including shipping, would have cost him over €20,00 (best deal I found) buying new on line.

Just for fun I packed them in a crazy luxury bag...

For real, this simply had the size, shape and firmness I needed. After stapling it all up it didn't look so stylish anymore. And for me antoher one gone from the lot I also use for books.

Vacuum Cleaners

Having the recycle center in the neighbourhood brings trash picking to a new dimension for me. Where before I looked for saleables, or stuff I need for me, now I can pick up a lot more and get rid of it straight away for cash, allbeit not much. And get rid of unsold stuff without much effort.

So today I went with two bags of textiles, cleared out of banana boxes in my bedroom. Most were cloths and I'm not even sure any more where from. Only two I remember buying at a discount over 30 years ago and if I hadn't used them by now I am not going to anymore. Pity, but.

The rest were mainly curtain coupons. Most likely my friend gave them to me and if she did, she found them on the curbs in her part of town. A few forgotten pieces of clothing I didn't care to keep.

The fun is that on the way to the shop, at a 100 yards or so, I found a (cordless) stick vacuum cleaner, of which the interesting electric part just fitted in my back bicycle bag, together wit a media box (digital tv-receiver). But there was also a printer that I couldn't take, so I decided to come back for it. Then I was in the shop and after cashing the textiles, before doing the e-waste I said, wait, I'm going for the printer around the corner, can you hold my stuff for a moment? As they tend to round down the weight it's more lucrative to have it all together and pay out at once. They are all very nice there so no problem.

So on top of €0,95 fot the textiles I had an additional 0,89 for trash that had never even seen my house!

Here's another vacuum cleaner that is going there soon. Found across the street years ago. It's a bagless model and it works, so I wanted to keep it as an extra to my still perfectly working AEG that was given to me. However, though being a Philips it may be an early model or so, getting any dust in I need to turn it to full power, which makes a terrible noise and scares me of the thing exploding or cause a power short cut. Otherwise dust seems to not want to pass the filter. I could take that out but then? To say simply I don't like it and maybe the previous owners for the same reason.