Well this sucks

From the London Daily Mail:

Now Europe wants to make it harder to clean your carpets with new rules BANNING powerful vacuum cleaners
Bureaucrats in Brussels are trying to make it harder to clean your home by banning the sale of powerful vacuum cleaners, it emerged today.

New European Commission rules will outlaw any new machine with a motor that exceeds 1,600 watts from next September to make them more energy efficient.

Currently the average vacuum cleaner on the market has a wattage of 1,800, but by 2017 that figure will have to fall to 900W.

Christ on a corndog. There is a direct correlation between power consumed and work done. Some designs can tweak efficiency 10% or 20% by dealing with turbulent flow and filter efficiency but you cannot save any more than that. The basic physics of these machines states that if you go from an 1,800 Watt unit down to a 900 Watt unit, you will have to operate the 900 Watt unit at least twice as long to remove the same amount of dirt. Where is the savings? You are doubling the vacuum's running time and cutting it's life in half.