General > General Technical Chat
Bullshit units of measure
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Halcyon:
This is a new one... I'm shopping around for a new vacuum cleaner and Dyson boast on their website that their particular vacuums have x-number of "Air Watts" (even abbreviating it to AW). In the fine print it says "Suction tested to IEC62885-4 CL5.8 and CL5.9, tested at the flexible inlet, loaded to bin full, in Boost mode by independent third-party, SGS-IBR Laboratories US in 2022".

This smells of PMPO and other "made up" units of measure.

Edit: I stand corrected, it seems that there is some merit and standardisation to it. Looking at Wikipedia, the Air Watts article was created in 2008, so it seems it's not a new thing.
jpanhalt:
Output of air compressors can be related to watts (https://www.vmacair.com/blog/how-to-calculate-air-compressor-cfm-to-kw/ ). That's helpful in evaluating some wild claims of output from consumer units.  I wasn't aware of the same type of conversion for household vacuum cleaners. 

If done rationally and by third parties, I see no problem with it, particularly if other manufacturers follow suit.  It is, of course only one metric in a vacuum cleaner.  I have a Dyson bought 20 years ago.  It's OK, but there was a lot about my old Hoover that I liked better.
james_s:
It does annoy me, but the problem is there is no standardized unit accepted for measuring the performance of a vacuum cleaner. Power consumption is an easy one, but that obviously doesn't tell the whole story, it's easy to consume a lot of power producing mostly noise. I think actually air watts could make sense if it was made standardized. Connect a standardized air suction powered generator to the vacuum cleaner and record the power it is able to produce. Even that isn't necessarily a great measure of cleaning performance but it's a good start.
bdunham7:
If the airwattage is not some huge inflated number determined using some bogus method (like the ridiculous peak power rating) and it is applied uniformly, then I think it is great.  That does appear to be the case, airwatts are less than electrical watts by some margin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airwatt
MikeK:
I think the bullshit unit of measure is the bucket, no?
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