Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you don't have a dirty house, and don't have to maintain your vacuum very often - this is the vac for you. WHY? because the maintenance on this unit is more work than the actual help the SHARK gives you. At first I loved the suction, however I decided to wait before I wrote a review. We are a multiple-cat household, and there were things I really liked about this vacuum. For one thing, it's more quiet than most other machines (doesn't frighten the cats to death, and doesn't make me go deaf). Today, about 8 months after my Amazon purchase, I had to clean the power brush for the second or third time. The fur collection in the roller makes it very necessary to clean out, mostly because the collection of fur also prevents air suction to the canister. ROLLER CLEANING: When I previously cleaned out the roller, it took me an hour just to pull all the fur out with tweezers, needles, needle nose pliers, and any tool that would help. This time I thought I'd try to remove the roller from the housing so that it would easier to clean. What a JOKE - Surprise!! after about 1000 screws (about 10 or so, some hidden by small rollers) to remove I finally got the roller out to clean it. When I removed the housing, BOY, I was surprised that I also had exposed all the wiring innards, too. ugh! Disassembling the housing is labor intensive just to clean the brush! I have pictures. :) NOW, after about 3 hours of re-uniting the two main pieces of housing, tucking in the wires, mating all the screw holes, (I had to get my husband involved with putting things back together) I can't believe how insane it is not to be able to easily clean that stupid power brush! This is absolutely the last time I will clean the brush by removing it. FILTERS: Now - as for those filters. Be sure and buy about two or three sets of them so you can have some in the laundry with a set on the vacuum. You need to change the top filter AFTER EVERY USE if you even hope that the suction is adequate to clean. SUCTION: it does lose suction - I couldn't believe it when I first read some of the reviews with this complaint. Even with a clean canister, and clean filters it just has lost the suction strength after I used it about 4 months or so. When I vac rugs, I can still see dust sitting on the carpet. The test they show on TV - well, they should take the same SHARK vacuum and run it over the same place they ran the SHARK the first time - they'd find that it will pick up more dirt that the same SHARK left the first time. CORD: I've had to re-fashion the path of the cord to keep it from dragging on the floor and out of my way. The length is okay. TOOLS: Poorly engineered - I've done another work-around for the tools - I use an empty paper towel roll to hold the cord up, and then I can also drop a tool inside the paper tube. The plastic hose is way too short to clean anything - useless for most cleaning. There's more I could probably report, but I'll end with this ... I WON'T BE RECOMMENDING THIS VACUUM!