It Lives to Suck Again!

The carpet in the house that we moved into has a fuzz problem.  Lots of little balls of carpet fuzz are all over the surface, and keep reappearing after vacuuming.  A little online research indicates that this is common with new carpets  But in the process of preparing to have our neighbors over tonight, our vacuum stopped working.  The sound was probably twice as loud as normal (and it's normally equivalent to a 747), it smelled like it was burning, and it wasn't working at all.

I cleaned out the roller and tried it again, to no avail.  Amanda has owned it since before we were married (over 13 years ago), so we were considering whether to just trash it and look around for a new one.  As a last ditch effort though, and since we have many other things that we need to spend money on, I thought I would take it down to the basement workshop and take it apart to see if I could figure out what's wrong with it.

I requested Lucas' help with it, to which he complained incessantly, until I was at the end of my tolerance and threatened punishment.  Once we started taking it apart though, and I was showing him how it worked he started to gain interest.  Once the major vacuum pieces were separated I realized that the whole suction path from bottom to bag was clogged with compressed carpet fuzz. 

Lucas ended up somewhat enjoying himself, using the needle nose pliers to help pull out what turned out to be a small mountain worth of carpet fuzz.  

Now the old Hoover lives to suck another day!