If they offer to clean two rooms of your house for free, they will clean one after trying to sell you a vacuum for $3,000. My dear mother agreed when the girl on the phone insisted they were not Kirby and they would not send a salesman. The sales pitch was about two hours.
Kirby hates salesmen!
To be honest, the Kirby is pretty well-rated by Consumer Reports, but two or three times as expensive as the next-expensive vacuums, while eight places below the Kenmore Elite 31150 for $350, although the Kirby did better on carpet.
I am not sure if I have mentioned this in these forums, but a previous tenant ruined our carpet. Professionals cleaned out the carpet itself well enough, but a roommate told me over and over that the pad was ruined and stains kept coming back up. I bought a secondhand carpet cleaner and use it every couple of weeks. The old stains eventually went away, but my roommates were good at making new ones.
Wikipedia quotes Kirby's claim that:
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Made primarily of aluminum, it converts into an upright vacuum cleaner, a canister vacuum cleaner, a carpet shampoo system, a floor buffer, a tile cleaner, an air pump, and a sander
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While it works, it would be worth
something to have one machine that both vacuums and shampoos. There are 983 reviews on
Top 983 Complaints and Reviews about Kirby Vacuum Cleaners, with an average rating of 1.5/5. I skimmed ten or twenty reviews, nobody said the vacuum was great, they just had other issues, but a fair number of people complained about their machine working poorly.
The salesman kept talking about the lifetime warranty. Wikipedia states:
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The registered purchaser of a Kirby home care system currently receives a three-year Manufacturer's Limited Warranty, access to a Lifetime Rebuild Program, and a Fire Protection Plan.
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and
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The current rebuild price is determined by the United States Consumer Price Index (currently $175 for original owners and $350 for non-original owners), plus shipping cost.
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I wish there was something that lived up to Kirby's promises. I have probably had five vacuums. I would love keeping my carpet so clean that a vacuum salesmen could not pick up anything.