Good marriages change people, and some of my own post-nuptial recalibration involved vacuum cleaners. My wife was raised in a central vacuum household. I came from a strictly hand-push, upright-vac tradition. “Central vacs are overkill”’ I used to preach. “Nobody needs to get that fancy.”

But being the sensitive and caring new husband that I was, I installed central vac pipes when building our house as a newly wed back in the late 1980s.  (“No need to actually hook the pipes up to a vacuum”, I schemed. “Maybe my parents will let us have that howling old Kirby they bought in 1972.”)

But fast-forward 18 years, and I’m a happy convert. I plug in our central vac hose every Saturday morning as I clean our wood pellet stove. Any push-type vacuum would simply be an unbearable hardship. Perhaps I’m getting soft, but central vacs are great. And as I’ve learned, they’re also getting better in three specific ways.