How to Troubleshoot a Vacuum Cleaner

Video Transcript

"Hey, I'm Tim Gipson, and I'm going to talk to you about troubleshooting a vacuum cleaner. Now, if your vacuum cleaner's not working properly, really, the most common thing is your bag needs to be changed. And this is a bagged-type. Of course, there are vacuum cleaners you can get now that do not have the bags, and those will have usually a filter in them. So if you have that kind and you have reduced suction in that and it's not really picking up, those types, you probably need to just replace those filters that come with them. In this particular style of vacuum cleaner, the bag holder itself acts as a filter, and then you have the filter bag inside here. So that'd be the first thing to check. And usually, they have a fill line on the side of the bag that will say if it's up to here, then it's time to change that. But if it's getting pretty bulky, and on this particular one, you know, we've got about a third of the bag left, so it's probably okay. We don't need to change that right now. Now, the other two common things that you have go wrong with your vacuum cleaner is you have a light in here. Now, if the light goes out, usually, there's just a couple bulbs in here. As you can see, we have a couple screws here on the top, so we could just remove those screws. And the bulbs that are inside here are something you can pick up at your local automotive store or hardware store. The next common thing with vacuum cleaners is the belt that's in here that actually drives this roller brush. This particular model has a convenient extra belt that is stowed right here in the bottom. And to access this, again, we would take a Phillips head screwdriver and remove these four screws right here and this bottom plate lifts off. Then the roller pulls out, and you can replace the belt with there. And those are the common things that you'll find when your vacuum cleaner is not quite working like it's supposed to. So I'm Tim Gipson, and that's how to troubleshoot your vacuum."