While their vacuums suck, Dyson rocks

Needing to replace our vacuum cleaner and tired of buying vacuum bags, three years ago I picked up a "demo" Dyson DC07 via eBay for $145 + $20 shipping. I wanted to see if the Dyson stood up to the hype. It does. To date it is one of my best eBay purchases.

Over the last three years, my DC07 has been abused. Aside from use as our family vacuum cleaner, I've cleaned out the fireplace with it, used it to clean my work truck, and often treated it as a shop vac. With the abuse, a few things have given out--the hose cracked (repaired with duct tape), the elbow on the handheld floor cleaner broke, and the hinge on the canister bottom cracked. The vacuum was completely usable despite these problems, but I like to keep my tools in good condition so I decided to price out replacement parts.

I found a place in the UK that sold the parts for around $90 shipped. On a whim, I decided to contact Dyson to see whether they sold replacement parts directly to consumers. They did, but I was confused--the customer rep was more interested in knowing what items broke and where they broke rather than taking my order. A customer rep who cares is a novelty, so I walked him through the problems I had with the three items. The Dyson rep explained that the hose cracking was a known product defect and would be replaced free of charge. The same applied to the handheld floor cleaner. While they didn't have any feedback on cracked hinges, he said that Dyson stands by its product. He was apologetic in explaining that they don't have just the bottom to the canister but that a new canister of course has a new bottom, and I would receive a new one for reporting this problem. So despite my DC07 being out of warranty, Dyson shipped me all of the replacement parts free. And no, they didn't even charge shipping. I was floored (no pun intended). There's a service lesson in this story somewhere. I'm a Dyson customer for life.