Vacuums: Japan vs America

Has anyone done much vacuum shopping? Due to having a Japanese wife, I have done a LOT of research on the web, at least 4-5 hours of reading.

The average vacuum in Japan weighs about 7-12 lb. The ones advertised as lightweight are even less. In America, feather-light vacuums are about 14 lb.

But the biggest difference is canister vs upright vacuums. They ONLY use canister vacuums in Japan.

This is an example of a canister vacuum. So when the whole thing is 10 pounds, the part you are manipulating most of the time is much lighter. Canister vacuums in America are usually over 20 pounds. And most canister vacuums in the US are advertised being for large houses with lots of upholstery, stairs, and hard wood floors.

We live in a studio that's primarily carpet except the kitchen and bathroom. And canister vacuums are always more expensive.

By the way, the don't really have thick carpet like we do in Japan. At least traditionally, they only have hard wood floors and tatami. If there is carpet, it is like the really thin carpet you see in offices, so it's natural the vacuums would be different.


Anyways, I weighed our vacuum that works perfectly well: 17 lb's. The 3 lb difference than the lightest vacuums I could find is not close to enough to invest 100+ dollars. So I kept on looking. I found a random blog that was saying Eureka makes the lightest vacuum in the world. So I started to look at reviews for Eureka vacuums.


Then I found a vacuum with perfect reviews on multiple websites.


It is cordless and weighs 5.5 lb. It's kind of like an oversized dustbuster. But times have changed. I looked at all the reviews and while advertised as being used like a canister vacuum to clean furniture, rugs, etc., people are buying it for their college apartments, dorm rooms, and some for their larger houses. For us, this should work just fine. It seems to work for 20-30 min with one charge which is more than enough for our place. So I went and bought one.

Keiko seems to love, so life is good :)

This is a pic from her Japanese blog where she says she is rather impressed, despite it being American technology. She has lately been putting baking soda on the carpet to do something with the smell of carpet (don't ask me) and it sucked all the baking soda up.

When I vacuum, I'll still use the bigger one as it's wider and will take less time. But 17lb vs 5.5 lb and no cord to worry about... I can see how this works for Keiko.