‘hard floor test’ means a test of two cleaning cycles where the cleaning head of a vacuum cleaner operating at maximum suction setting passes over a wooden test plate test area with width equal to the cleaning head width and appropriate length, featuring a diagonally (45°) placed test crevice, where the time elapsed, electric power consumption and the relative position of the center of the cleaning head to the test area are continuously measured and recorded at an appropriate sample rate and where at the end of each cleaning cycle the mass decrease of the test crevice is appropriately assessed;
‘test crevice’ means a removable U-shaped insert with appropriate dimensions filled at the beginning of a cleaning cycle with appropriate artificial dust;
‘carpet test’ means a test with an appropriate number of cleaning cycles on a Wilton carpet test rig where the cleaning head of a vacuum cleaner operating at maximum suction setting passes over the test area with width equal to the cleaning head width and appropriate length, soiled with equally distributed and appropriately embedded test dust of appropriate composition, where the time elapsed, electric power consumption and the relative position of the center of the cleaning head to the test area are continuously measured and recorded at an appropriate sample rate and at the end of each cleaning cycle the mass increase of the appliance dust receptacle is appropriately assessed;
‘cleaning head width’ in m, at an accuracy of 3 decimal places, means the external maximum width of the cleaning head;
‘cleaning cycle’ means a sequence of 5 double strokes of the vacuum cleaner on a floor-specific test area (‘carpet’ or ‘hard floor’);
‘double stroke’ means one forward and one backward movement of the cleaning head in a parallel pattern, performed at a uniform test stroke speed and with a specified test stroke length;
‘test stroke speed’ in m/h means the appropriate cleaning head speed for testing, preferably realized with an electromechanical operator. Products with self-propelled cleaning heads shall try to come as close as possible to the appropriate speed, but a deviation is permitted when clearly stated in the technical documentation;
‘test stroke length’ in m means the length of the test area plus the cleaning head distance covered by the center of the cleaning head when moving over the appropriate acceleration zones before and after the test area;
‘dust pick up’ (dpu), at an accuracy of 3 decimal places, means the ratio of the mass of the artificial dust removed, determined for carpet through the mass increase of the appliance dust receptacle and for hard floor through the mass decrease of the test crevice, after a number of double strokes of the cleaning head, to the mass of artificial dust initially applied to a test area, for carpet corrected for the specific test conditions and for hard floor corrected for the length and positioning of the test crevice;
‘reference vacuum cleaner system’ means electrically operated laboratory equipment used to measure the calibrated and reference dust pick-up on carpets with given air related parameters to improve the reproducibility of test results;
‘rated input power’ in W means the electric input power declared by the manufacturer, whereby for appliances that are enabled to function also for other purposes than vacuum cleaning only the electric input power relevant to vacuum cleaning applies;
‘dust re-emission’ means the ratio, expressed as a percentage at an accuracy of 2 decimal places, of the number of all dust particles of a size from 0.3 to 10 μm emitted by a vacuum cleaner to the number of all dust particles of the same size range entering the suction inlet when fed with a specific amount of dust of that particle size range. The value includes not only dust measured at the vacuum cleaner outlet but also dust emitted elsewhere either from leaks, or generated by the vacuum cleaner;
‘sound power level’ means airborne acoustical noise emissions, expressed in dB(A) re 1 pW and rounded to the nearest integer.