On Reddit, there’s a sub-section called Buy It For Life — it’s filled with posts about belts, boots, hair clippers and other ephemera made to last a lifetime. One topic that seems to pop up more often than others is vacuum cleaners, and whenever that topic is discussed, the Miele brand seems to get mentioned more than you’d expect.
Image credit: scumbagatheist on Imgur
On /r/BuyItForLife, there are a few Miele fanatics, chief among which is touchmyfuckingcoffee — he’s a vacuum repairman in the US. He recently shared an album of photos of his personal vacuum cleaner, a hot-rodded Miele Mercury from around 10 years ago — upgraded with a fully electronic control setup, so that power and suction can be adjusted from the vacuum cleaner hose itself.
It also comes with two fancy power heads, one of which has an array of LED lights to light up a dark room (for all that secret midnight vacuuming, I guess?). The guy explains his choice of power cleaner to an extremely interested audience here.
For a 10-year-old vacuum, the Mercury pictured actually looks pretty good, and it’s obviously stood up to some pretty punishing tests in its time. It’s also the favourite tool of the same guy who did an amazing Ask Me Anything session entirely devoted to vacuum cleaners. Apparently he also uses the Miele as an air purifier, regularly running it without the hose attached to draw in and clean the air in his house.
With almost 8000 comments on his AMA, plenty of interest in his personal Miele, and easily a dozen glowing comments across a few vacuum cleaner threads in the Buy It For Life subforum alone, it’s obvious that there’s just something about Miele vacuums that gets Redditors worked up. [Reddit: /r/BuyItForLife]