Good vacuum, but not perfect

Having had several less expensive vacuums over the years, we decided to pay a little more in hopes of a better unit.  Much of our carpet has been replaced with hardwood floors, so we needed one that allowed the beater bar to be turned off for use on hardwoods and selected thid DC24.

Design: What an odd looking design!  But hey, if it does the job, then who cares?  Well, the "ball" part of the design is interesting.  Yes, it does make it somewhat easier to manuver around a corner quickly without as much "back and forth", but not so much that you think "gee, this is great, every vacuum should have this!"  And the disadvantage of that big ball is that it limits how far you can pust the unit under furniture.  That's certainly not on the "must have" list for all future vacuum purchases.

Extension/Attachment:  They sure engineered a creative system for attachments.  The only attachment that comes with it is a brush, but that's the only one we ever use anyhow.  The handle pulls out and gets turned upside down to be used as part of a "wand" that the attachments go onto.  Open a little cap at the top (now the bottom) of the pole to attach the hose, which stretches up from the base unit.  So you're now holding the same handle as you use to push the unit when not using it for attachments.  Slick.  The hose does stretch out a good bit, but I would guess that it migh not be far enough for some people's needs.  One odd thing about this design is that the brush attachments ends up on the end of the pole making it impossible to use to clean the top surface of anything above a certain height since it's not flexible.  If you skip the pole and attach a brush directly to the flexible hose, it stretches up to a height of about 5 feet, so any surface higher than about 4 feet needs the pole.  Forget about cleaning the top of a bookcase or hutch, and definitely not something like ceiling fan blades. 

Handle:  With the use of a release button, then handle can be pushed down into the unit, making it nice and short for storage, just 30" in height.  One little annoyance though is that it doesn't lock in place.  I keep grabbing it by the handle to lift it out of the closet and end up pulling the handle up rather than picking the unit up.  Instead, it has to be lifted by the handle for the dust collector bin.

Size and weight: Very compact, espeically when handle is collapsed down all the way.  This makes storage easy.  This is a short width unit too.  The cleaning head is only 11 inches.  This makes is easier to get around and under chairs and other furniture and into tighter spaces, but of course, it means more back and forth to cover large open areas.  We have more of the former than the latter, so this is working out pretty well in our home.  It might end up being more work in larger homes with larger rooms and more open spaces.  The DC24 is very lightweight too.  For those who need to carry a vaccuum to different floors, this would be a big plus.

Performance:  We've had the unit for a couple of months and so far, so good.  The big test was to see how well it cleaned the hardwood compared to flat mop.  So when it was time for a good cleaning, we first used the DC24 on all the hardwoods.  Then to test, we went back over them with a clean white pad on one of those flat mops with the disposable pads.  We were pleased that it picked up very little, showing that the Dyson DC24 didn't leave much of anything behind!

Dust bin: The dust collection bin sure is small!  For carpeted rooms, it must be emptied after each room.  In fact, the 12 X 14 rug in the center of our living room sheds enough fibers and dirt to fill it up.  The good news is that it's easy to empty.  Press a button to release it from the unit, and while holding the same handle just hold it over the trash can and press the button again to release the bottom door and dump the dust.  It's easy to snap back onto the unit.  Occasionally though, you have to reach up into it to scrape stuck clumps of dust from the air holes.

Other observations:

The noise level of the DC24 is not too bad.  However, it does have a rather high pitch element to it.  It doesn't bother me too much, but my wife, who is more sensitive to that sort of thing, is bothered by it.

The on-off button and the hard floor button are cheap, plastic, and non-responsive.  By that, I mean that there's no solid "click" to them.  Ever after using this for awhile, I still find that sometimes I have to press twice to get it to turn off or on.  A bigger grip about the buttons is that the beater bar button is "locked" to the power button, always getting turned on when you press the power button.  So this means you have to remember to press them in the right order.  I still sometimes press the hard floors button to turn off the beater bar first, then turn on the power button, only to find that it has turned the beater bar on with it.  You don't actually know that it did this until you press the handle release button with your foot to start to vaccuum because the beater bar never turns on when the unit is in the most upright locked position.  This setup also means you have to keep remembering to turn it off as you clean the house and turn the unit off to move to another location, then turn it back on.  It's really very annoying.

Lastly, there's no excuse for providing such a short cord.  Even in a medum size room I can't get to all the corners if the cord has to stretch around even a single piece of furniture.  What's worse is that the cord wrap that you put the cord back onto for storage is just barely big enough for the cord, so you can forget about leaving a short extension cord attached and just winding it back onto the unit when finished.