We bought this refub version from Woot! in an earlier offering. It arrived quickly. For $200, it’s quite a deal. The thing looked basically brand new; I wouldn’t have known it was a refurb. It has enormous suction, and it picks up pet hair like a dream. A couple of thoughts about the turbinehead. Consumer Reports didn’t like the turbinehead feature. However, their coin with me has dropped precipitously in recent years as they seem to get it wrong a lot – toilets is one example where they just blew it completely in their recommendations, and found a purported “problem” with one great toilet; the real problem is that the problem doesn’t exist and nobody else can duplicate it. Meanwhile, they recommended some toilets that break easily, are noisy, and don’t work that well. So I take their critiques with a grain of salt. Their beef with the turbinehead is that it purportedly doesn’t get deep dirt because it has no motor and thus doesn’t beat as well. They seem to ignore the fact that it also weighs a fraction of a giant motorized thing like on our old vacuum. Personally, I have mixed feelings. I think the head works fine. However, it is a little small, and because it’s air powered you lose some spin when pulling back towards you; it finds it hard to overcome that motion. Then you have our cleaning lady, who feels compelled to lean and push down on the center of the wand, pressing the head into the carpet so hard I’m afraid she’s going to snap the wand, and in so doing she grinds the turbinehead to a near-stop. I fear she is expending a ton of extra energy insofar as her method induces a lot of drag and makes the head hard to move; I think the best way to move the head is to slide it around by the grip, slowly, standing up straight and just letting it do its thing, rather than using her “scrubbing” technique. Even with her slowing the head down, due to the enormous suction, the thing still picks up a lot, but a better beater would be nice; I would love to see a Motorhead for sale on here. (All this said, she just LOVES this vacuum, and my family members, young and old, find that the lighter weight makes it more feasible for them to just go grab it instead of a carpet sweeper or broom. A head with a motor (like our old Kenmore canister) can really beat the carpet, but it’s HEAVY and makes just going and getting it a chore. The Turbinehead is so AGILE you have to love it. But don’t expect the beating action of a motorized head, which is also why positive reviewers always talk about great performance on thinner carpet. Heavy carpet overloads the head’s ability to spin. Also, there isn’t a lot of room between the beater bar and its casing, so if you get a pebble or anything that size in there, it’s going to need to be removed by hand. Dumping is easy, just push the button while holding over a bag or waste can. It sure picks up a lot of stuff. The reason it’s so good on pet hair is that it has such a huge amount of suction, and the brushlets on the beater bar are spaced far apart so hair doesn’t seem to wrap around it. So the Turbinehead is a gift and a curse, in the end. On balance, we like the whole package. We could have gotten a refurb top-rated Kenmore with a motor head for about $20 more online, but that sturdy, reliable, heavy beast would only have come out once a week to be used by the professional, not grabbed by family members for little “oops I spilled it” remedies. And, as far as I’m concerned, if our professional loves the vacuum, she’s the primary user and my own observations don’t mean as much when evaluating whether we made the right choice, and it’s certainly the right choice for the duty that the family puts it to; we wouldn’t use a heavier vac for a lot of day to day stuff. Finally, let’s talk about how great Dyson customer service is. I had a question about the fact that the Turbinehead seemed broken. When I disassembled and cleaned it off, it still didn’t seem to turn freely, and it plainly wasn’t spinning the way it used to. I had cleaned the accumulated lint from the filter over the little valve you pull and push to activate it, and it didn’t help. I called Dyson. They said, okay, you have a FIVE YEAR warranty on this, so don’t worry about it; either we’ll fix it together or you can have a new turbinehead. They suggested I blow out the little valve with compressed air and if that didn’t fix it, call them back. Really? How could that work? I bought a can of Duster keyboard blower from the store, put the little tube in the nozzle of the can of Duster, blew the valve out thoroughly, and VOILA! we were back in business. Hardly thought I would get such reassuring helpful people when buying a refurb – and I even told the lady that I had bought this through woot! when she was registering it in their system. She treated me as if I had been bestowed my vacuum as a personal gift from Sir Dyson himself. I have only had the thing a few months and feel like I have gotten my $200 worth already. Hope this helps.