Kenmore Progressive 36932

This vacuum is a real pain, it is heavy and bulgy, not a great item for a pregnant woman to lug around. Living in a 3 story house it was a pain to drag up and down the stairs when not pregnat now it is… worse, there is no handle in the front to get a good grip. The extension wands have pluses and minuses, they are flimsy, however nice to use to get under the beds and fruniture. Like using a tank vacuum. The ohter issue with this item is pain getting over thresholds etc. Also, each time you hit something all the extra brushes fall off and the bagless tank comes crashing off. The good thing about this vacuum it does vacuum well, great suction. I have two cats and it picks up the fur no problem love that. So all in all it is ok, just heavy. Guess it best for the main living area and better to buy smaller one for the other floors in the house.

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This vacuum is great. Besides being able to "see" the dirt my other vacuum missed, I've noticed that it's also bringing back the carpets "piling" if that's the correct terminology. In other words, I can see… my footprint in the carpet now and that wasn't happening with my other vacuum. My previous vacuum was the blue Kenmore Progressive with a bag. This new bagless Progressive vacuum has much more suction.

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It's hard for me to express in words how much I dislike this vacuum. If I held my own version of Burning Man, called Burning Vacuum, that might do it. I don't normally like to post negative reviews (and I… usually like Kenmore products) but if I can prevent one person from making a mistake and getting this vacuum it will be worth it. My wife purchased this vac because it was highly rated by Consumer Reports. Unfortunately, due to her back injury, I do almost all the vacuuming. First, this thing is a behemoth. It's huge and weighs a lot. I'm not a weak guy, I have my own construction company and I'm used to carrying lumber and 80 lb bags of cement around, but 20 minutes pushing this vac back and forth and my lower back is hurting. It's like pushing a Hummer through your living room. (It seems to have unusually high rolling resistance, which adds to the problem.) When using it I ended up walking all the way to one end of the room, then all the way back to the other end of the room, like I was mowing the lawn. That was much easier than standing and yanking the beast back and forth. Given its size, if you want to vacuum in tight spaces you can forget it. Want to pick up the front of the vac to get it over a threshold or trim strip? The designers didn't bother to include a handle on the front, so picking it up is a pain, there's no good place to grab on. The bristles on the rotating carpet brush (the main one in the head of the vac) are about as stiff as a wire brush so you have to be careful not to have the brush height set too low when you vacuum carpets. The vac did obvious damage to our expensive hand-carved area rug the first time I used it out of the box, with the height set to low. I noted that the bristles on the small hand-held rotating brush attachment are softer. Why they didn't just use the same bristles on the main brush, I do not know. The plastic wands are the flimsiest I've ever seen on any vac, even a cheap one. They bend all over the place if you put any pressure on them. I could duct tape cardboard paper towel tubes together and have a more sturdy wand than the one that comes with this vac. The "Intelliclean" feature is a truly bizarre concept. The idea is that when the vac senses that no (or very little) dirt is being picked up it switches the suction (motor speed) to low. When it detects dirt being picked up again it switches the suction back up to high. The problem is, once it switches the suction to low it does a poor job of picking up larger pieces of dirt, like pine needles or bits of dried mud from shoes. So, after it switches the suction to low you can run the vac over pieces of dirt like that several times and it won't pick them up. Of course it won't switch the suction back to high, which it would need to do in order to pick up the dirt, because it doesn't detect any dirt being picked up, because it switched the suction to low ... This is truly a "feature" that serves no useful purpose to anyone outside of Kenmore's marketing department. You can't lay the vac down flat to vacuum under things. Once you tilt the body back more than about 60-70 degrees the front lifts off the ground, so it's no longer picking up dirt. (I had an old Hoover that would lay all the way flat and still keep the carpet brushes on the floor. You could lay it down and vacuum under the bed with it. There's no way you could do that with this vac.) In order to vacuum all the way under things you have to pull out the hose and attachments, and if you're on a rug or carpet, you're stuck with the tiny Handi-Mate Jr. rotating brush attachment. It is near worthless for areas of any significant size, with a pickup width of barely three inches. It's like trying to paint your house with a one inch wide brush. After running it back and forth several dozen times you'll be inclined to say the heck with it, the dirt's under the couch so no one will see it and you have better things to do with your time. The hose attaches to the vacuum rather high up on the body, so when you try to stretch the hose to its rated length the vacuum tends to fall over on its side. Not a good thing when your house if furnished with antique furniture. If the designers had attached the hose lower (below the center of gravity) it would have been better. Someone else noted their difficulty in using this vac on small throw rugs, and I've had the same problem. Even with the brush height all the way up and the suction on low it still wants to eat throw rugs, and the rear wheels won't roll smoothly from a hard floor up onto a throw rug. Given the heavy weight of the vac, the rear wheels should be larger diameter so they would roll over offsets in the floor more easily. Bottom line, I'll be doing most of the vacuuming using my Electrolux Sanitaire Commercial canister vac (http://www.amazon.com/Electrolux-Sanitaire-SC3683A-Commercial-Canister/dp/B0006HUYTE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1234749076&sr=8-1) which is so light and compact you can put a luggage strap on and hang it on your shoulder - no dead weight to push back and forth or drag behind you. Only problem is it doesn't have a rotating carpet brush, so I'll be stuck wrestling the Kenmore beast when I do the carpet. To be fair, there are some good things about this vacuum. If you're a professional football player or bodybuilder and you want vacuuming to involve an upper body workout, this is the vac for you. You'll definitely build your biceps yanking this monster back and forth around the house. It also seems to do a very good to excellent job pulling dirt out of carpets. If you have a house with large, open, carpeted areas this may be a good vac for you. And the 30 foot long cord is really, really nice. I have to give Kenmore credit for eliminating my need for an extension cord (which I've had to use with every other vac I've owned). The long cord also makes this vac useful as a boat anchor in water up to 30 feet deep.

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I have the Kenmore CANISTER progressive which I absolulely love, even though the power head has electrical issues. So, me being a VACUUM nut and owning about 5 at a time for each section of the house,… thought I would give the upright of the same a try. The intelli-clean works well, it's not that noisy, however....it doesn't leave lines in the rug (suction is okay, but not as good as my canister), and unlike my canister vacuum, I cannot easily run over the throw rugs in the tile areas (baths, entrances etc). I can lift the canister vac head at the end of the rug after running over it without it catching, but the upright does not have a "locking" position on the handle to make that lift. It eithers locks upright or is free moving when out of the upright position. That's a huge problem (for me anyway). I've tried lowering the suction, slowing the brush speed, etc, but NOPE - not good enough. Also, the handi-mate (powered nozzle) is NOT POWERED by the motor, but powered by suction which we all know does not work when you put pressure on the brushes. When I clean, I put pressure - I want it CLEAN. It has alot of great features, but after trying it for 5 minutes, I realized it's not worth the $300 I paid and it's going back in the morning!

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