Dyson cinetic Bigball Animal permanently on hose - fixed

[John Little]

Our Dyson vacuum cleaner head stopped sucking and seemed permanently switched to the hose. Normally, when that happens, it's due to a blockage.

I checked all the obvious places (and there are a few) and couldn't see anything blocking the suction pipes. I decided to remove the bottom hose (connecting the head to the ball) for a more thorough check and noticed it was split in several places. Thinking I'd found the problem, we set about finding a replacement. The availability of that is another story but not the main problem.

Googling, I found a couple of YouTube videos that dealt with the lack of suction at the head end and both suggested the problem might be the change-over valve hose being split which is harder to locate being buried inside the ball.

However, I tried following the video instructions and, of course, our model wasn't the same. But I removed the outer ball cover and filter and could see the changeover valve hose which looked fine and didn't appear to be split. But it didn't move when you angled the head down into the vacuuming position.

This hose is on a spring mechanism which flips it between the head and the top wandering hose. But it wasn't "flipping". On investigation, opening the inspection plate, I noticed a long piece of wicker lodged in the change over valve hose which was stopping it flipping over.

I removed the offending item through the inspection plate with a pair of long nosed pliers and the changeover valve hose was now able to resume flipping between the head and the hose.

We are waiting for our lower hose to come into stock (if it ever does) and in the meantime, I patched up the old one with a cut up plastic milk bottle and a glue gun and it's works a treat.

The open inspection plate with cylinder removed.

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[John Little]

The hose was ordered from "E Spares (apparently linked to Screwfix). We found it on their site, paid for it and then got a messages saying it was out of stock. When we paid, we had been given a delivery date so we thought we'd wait to see what happened but expected a fight to get our money back. But the hose turned up as promised over Christmas.

It had fitting instructions inside the bag suggesting I needed to remove the ball covers. I had never done that to take the old one off and managed to fit the new one in the same way I had put the old one back after gluing the slits. But job done and the Dyson is now more powerful than ever