Pet peeve (Dyson)

W9GFO · 2011-10-22 22:48

[h=2]Air Multiplier technology[/h]Air is accelerated through a narrow aperture around the fan loop. This creates a jet of hot air that passes over an airfoil-shaped ramp, which channels its direction. Surrounding cool air is drawn into the airflow, amplifying it 6 times through processes known as inducement and entrainment.

http://www.dyson.com/fans/heaters.asp

Blah blah blah, hype hype hype. A regular fan does the same thing. At least they are not claiming greater heating efficiency like some other overpriced electric heater mfg's do.

A $20 heater will heat your room just as well as this $400 thing. Though I admit, it won't look as cool.

Microcontrolled · 2011-10-23 05:08

Let's not also forget the Dyson Air, which was hyped because it used similar "Air multiplier technology" and had no blades. It cost about $300, which is about 15 times more than a normal fan, and very little to show for it. Also, when disassembled, it was revealed that it did indeed have blades, 12 little fans that pushed air though the side, so the advertising really meant "No blades that you can see".

bill190 · 2011-10-23 08:54

I think it is funny when salespeople get a hold of an electronic product, then create their own technical sounding words for advertising.

And the thing is, non-technical people fall for this BS. They swear by it!

One example is speaker wire for stereos. One manufacturer sells wire with very small gauge wire inside, but very large insulation on the outside. So the wire looks bigger on the outside. And people swear this wire is better than the wire which came with the stereo, which might have the same gauge wire!

I like to debunk this myth. I connect one speaker with the factory wire and the other with the "big" wire, then have the person enter the room and tell me which is which. (They both sound the same...)

And same thing with house paint. I tell people to walk into a room and tell me how much the paint on the walls cost. Was it cheap Walmart paint or expensive Ralph Lauren paint? They can't tell.

kwinn · 2011-10-23 09:29

bill190 wrote: »

I think it is funny when salespeople get a hold of an electronic product, then create their own technical sounding words for advertising.

And the thing is, non-technical people fall for this BS. They swear by it!

One example is speaker wire for stereos. One manufacturer sells wire with very small gauge wire inside, but very large insulation on the outside. So the wire looks bigger on the outside. And people swear this wire is better than the wire which came with the stereo, which might have the same gauge wire!

I like to debunk this myth. I connect one speaker with the factory wire and the other with the "big" wire, then have the person enter the room and tell me which is which. (They both sound the same...)

And same thing with house paint. I tell people to walk into a room and tell me how much the paint on the walls cost. Was it cheap Walmart paint or expensive Ralph Lauren paint? They can't tell.

I have to agree with everything you say,except for the paint part. While the cheap paint may look as good as the better quality ones do once they are on the wall the cheap paint does not cover as well, generally require more coats, and are nowhere near as durable. What you save on the paint you more than pay for in labor and durability.

LoopyByteloose · 2011-10-23 10:55

Selling vacuum cleaners is a fundamentalist religion - always has been. Whilst good engineering may be far to generic for the modern world.

For instance, it took me quite a while to realize why Linux zips along on old hardware that my Windows never accepted; and even W7 bogs down on hardware it is meant for when Linux zooms along. M$ too is a religion and so, it uses NTFS; while Linux is good engineering and uses EXT3 for its file system (which searches vastly faster and doesn't require defragmentation).

It is just a great divide in human nature. I once has a beautiful girl friend that worked for a major advertising firm. She of course dumped me as I was 'too generic'. But the truth is I was rather relieved to get rid of listening to endless dazzle.

GordonMcComb · 2011-10-23 11:48

I once had to come up with an alternative term for a film cleaning machine that used a shot of steam instead of the usual full water immersion and ultrasonic agitation. I used "high pressure vapor," which somehow convinced the movie studios it was okay -- regardless that the technology is actually superior to the old immersion techniques. They never would have subjected their film to S-T-E-A-M!

-- Gordon

Gadgetman · 2011-10-23 14:23

Not all heaters are created equal...

Take the normal panel heater you mount on a wall, usually under a window...
It's Smile at heating, everyone knows it, but thy still buy them.
"Oooh, look! it has a thermostat and timer! It must be good!"

A local company akes one where the top edge is a narrow slit, and the fron and bak panels slightly bent so that it's supposed to move the heated air further away from the windows and therefore be more efficient...
Yeah, right...
Maybee if the air was moving a bit faster?

Oil-filled space-heaters...
Maybe they give a bit more even heat, because of the heat-retention of the oil.
I still don't want to see one in my home. Give it a few years and the constant expansion/contraction of the metal because of the oil also expanding/contracting, and leaks appears... Not good when you have hot oil under pressure...

I have an air-air inverter (heat pump) to heat my home...
Yeah, it does give 3.7 times back what I put in, if it isn't too cold....
But now a new manucaturer is trying to push their pumps in Norway, announcing that they have the best efficiency, claiming a 'heat effect of 4500W with a -15c outside temperature'...
How much power do you have to put in then, to get that out?
And what is it rated to at 0 degrees?

I believe one English computer manufacturer back in the good ole days(8bit era) had a good one...
Their marketing drones looked at the specifications, and noticed the number 65536, and that others had '64K'...
"We have over 1500 more of whatever that is, than the others, we have to use that in an ad..."

OS and file systems...
Did you know that MS made the HPFS(High Performance File System) still used in OS/2?
and still receiving royalties for it...
And they still can't cobble together something for Windows that works for more than a few months without needing a defragment...
One MS drone I talked to, and accidentally mentiond the speed of HPFS, told me that I should switch to something else(preferably NT and NTFS. This was soon after they released NT 3.5... ) because HPFS was critically flawed and that IBM would never bother to fix it.
It felt good to shoot him down by asking 'Why should IBM fix the programming mistakes of MS?' then explained to him the history of OS/2 and HPFS.

localroger · 2011-10-23 14:55

One example is speaker wire for stereos.

Since roughly 1988 I have had my stereo speakers connected to the amplifier with 22 gauge telephone wire. This would not be adequate if I was trying to break the windows with a 100 watt amp, but it works and sounds fine at normal listening levels.

erco · 2011-10-23 19:55

In the time before Brookstone, Sharper Image, and Abercrombie & Fitch, there was DAK! Drew Alan Kaplan IIRC. Here was a man who could hype ANYTHING with nonstop technobabble and make DAKonians rush out to buy it. There was a DAK store not far from my house with factory seconds and amazing discounts. Yes, I got suckered into a breadmaker or two way back when they were new. They folded 15-20 years ago, but now there's a whole new DAK presence online.

Since a certain other thread brought out all the record-lovers here, check out this must-have record cleaner:
http://www.dak.com/reviews/3306story.cfm

And more DAK offerings at http://www.dak.com/

prof_braino · 2011-10-23 22:40

W9GFO wrote: »

Blah blah blah, hype hype hype. A regular fan does the same thing.

I thought the whole deal was about the hydrodymanic entrainment, the way it uses an enclosed impeller instead of exposed fan blades; the air stream has less turbulence so the hot air flows where you aim it, and doesn't just bubble up to the ceiling. I think physics is kind of cool, laminar flow and vortices and all.

The vaccuums I know for a fact are well worth their higher price, they actually do not lose suction and do trap dust; whereas a old style bag vaccuum is clogged by the same dust before the bag is even partially filled. Whether you pay the premium for the new tech or not, that Dyson guy knows something about air flow.

W9GFO · 2011-10-24 02:57

A regular bladed fan will also entrain air. So will a centrifugal fan, without buffeting, and quieter than the Dyson too.

I don't think there is any type of electric fan/heater that can prevent hot air from bubbling up to the ceiling. It may well be able to direct the heat better than the average cheap ceramic heater but probably not as well as a parabolic heater.

I have Dyson portable vac. I like it alright but truthfully, it fills up with dirt and needs to be emptied as regularly as my other one.

prof_braino · 2011-10-24 11:25

W9GFO wrote: »

A regular bladed fan will also entrain air. ... prevent hot air from bubbling up to the ceiling.

I have Dyson portable vac. I like it alright but truthfully, it fills up with dirt and needs to be emptied as regularly as my other one.

A regular bladed fan makes lots of turbulence and doesn't go very far, the whole "entrained" deal (to me) is about a smoother stream that stays coherent longer and goes farther. So you can send the heated stream where you want it rather than having to wait for the ceiling and upper half of the room to be heated before your intended target gets heated. I really don't think its just "hype", I think there is evidence of actual cool technology, unfortunately overpriced and packaged in layers of marketing BS.

I have found that the Dyson needs to be emptied a LOT more frequently, which is the whole point. It sucks up and captures WAY more crud than a bag style vacuum. Because of the Dyson airflow, even very fine dust gets trapped while maintaining very high flow, the trap has to be emptied at every use. A bag style gets clogged and the suction falls off rapidly, which is why they take weeks to fill the bag. But we don't want to maximize time between emptying, we want to maximize amount of crud removed in a session.

Gadgetman · 2011-10-24 11:40

My vacuum doesn't clog up even with the bag nearing full...
Of course, mine is a FOMA centrally mounted type, with the exhaust pipe ending outside the house, and therefroe no need for a filter to clog. And sine the bad is so much larger than for a normal vacuum, it's enough to last me through a year(that means I get to vacuum my flat before mas, easter and possibly even once or twice after summer... ;-)

Pet peeve (Dyson)

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