Vacuum cleaners

I am interested in purchasing a good canister vacuum for cleaning
the floors in our collection storage area.  Rather than buying one
of the very expensive brands that are sometimes advertised in some of
the archival supply catalogs, I am interested in looking into one of
the more common household brands (Kenmore, Sharp, Hoover, etc.) that
are available for much less money and seem to be much improved these
days in terms of emissions and HEPA filtering.  I know Consumer
Reports has done some evaluations of these using some of the
criteria that museums would be interested in, and I was wondering if
any of you folks out there had used any recent models of these
household brands in a museum storage setting and which ones seem to
work best.  I'm mostly concerned about emissions, reliability, cost,
ease of use, and the style of the vacuum bags.  Any comments would
be appreciated.

Chris White
Collections Management Assistant
Mystic Seaport
The Museum of America and the Sea
75 Greenmanville Avenue
PO Box 6000
Mystic CT 06355-0990  USA
860-572-0711 ext-4260
Fax: 860-572-5371


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 15:52
                Distributed: Thursday, January 24, 2002
                       Message Id: cdl-15-52-021
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