Never vacuum clean again without this amazing enhancement: a microphone and speaker to amplify the sound of the dust being vacuumed!

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Background:

Some vacuum cleaners are capable of measuring how much junk they’re currently pulling up off the floor. These vacuums will usually turn on a “this surface is now clean!” light to notify the user that their vacuuming job has been sufficiently through on a particular tiny section of the floor.

The Issue:

The “floor is clean” light is often redundant, however: when vacuuming a floor, you can often determine how disgusting the surface is by listening for the clicking and clacking of tiny pebbles, small leaves, and spider husks being sucked into the vacuum (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: The high rate of clicking and clacking lets the vacuum operator know that there’s still a bunch of stuff on the floor being vacuumed up. It’s sort of like listening to the sound of microwave popcorn in order to know when to take the bag out.

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the sound is very dependent on exactly what the “dirt” on the ground is: small pebbles and leaves are easy to hear, but a bunch of cat hair is not particularly audible!

Proposal:

Let’s fix this problem: we’ll simply make a system that provides an audio measurement of vacuum cleaner activity that works no matter what the material being vacuumed is.

The simplest idea would be to have a microphone inside the vacuum that would detect the sound of the objects being sucked up and would then provide an amplified sound to a connected speaker (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: Thanks to the microphone-and-speaker arrangement of this enhanced vacuum cleaner, even a single cat hair being vacuumed can be heard.

A problem with this method is that the vacuum cleaner itself is already incredibly loud, so we’d need to a complicated multi-microphone noise cancelling system to isolate just the sound of the dirt hitting the filter.

This audio-isolation problem could be solved by using the same sound-generation approach used in a Geiger counter (where detected radiation is converted into audible “clicks”). Instead of amplifying an existing sound, we’d just need to convert the detection of particles in the vacuum cleaner air column (detected optically) into a corresponding rate of “dirt is being picked up” clicks. (The only downside of this approach is that, by default, all types of vacuumed material would sound the same: a large leaf and a spilled bag of flour would both make a bunch of emphatic “click” sounds.)

Conclusion:

For accessibility purposes, there could also be a mode to convert the audible clicks into the flashing of a small LED light. Nearly everyone should be able to enjoy this new vacuum cleaner breakthrough!

Don’t buy a new vacuum until this technology is added to it, or you’ll be faced with decades of disappointment when using your old vacuum cleaner!

PROS: Adds an indescribable satisfaction to the vacuuming process.

CONS: Since it would be even louder than a normal vacuum, dogs would probably hate it EVEN MORE.

Originally published 2025-11-17.