Kyogre386
New Born Pup
I was wondering if anyone has any good recommendations for handheld vacuums to use on fleece that handle hay...less badly. I've had guinea pigs for over 3 months now and handling hay has been by far the hardest part. I've opted to avoid hay racks of any kind because of the potential dangers and initially I just put the hay on the fleece, I've also tried bowls/plates though to have it scatter a bit less. Piggies being piggies, after the hay's been scattered a while they don't really eat it and want more hay, so ensuring they always have hay to eat means there's always a bunch extra lying about that I need to clean up. I have a dustpan and brush, but the hay sticks to the bristles or gets flung about and I'm honestly just not that good at getting it into the dustpan. When I first got the pigs I got a handheld Black+Decker vacuum to help with cleaning. It was louder than I expected but after they got settled for a week or so I tried it and their reactions ranged from couldn't care less to curious, and eventually I started using that. It works great for the poop, but much less so with the hay. It does pretty well with smaller pieces, but not so much with the bigger ones. I've been using the dustpan and brush to get the bigger pieces up, but I'd like to have to do less of that and more with the vacuum. I found out pretty quickly after getting the pigs that I was allergic to hay. Timothy was really bad, I switched to orchard grass which is better and that combined with an N95 for cleaning helps a lot to the point that it's workable. But using the brush kicks up hay dust more than with the vacuum which doesn't help, and also a vacuum is just easier. I know from searching the internet that no vacuum can really handle larger hay pieces well (except maybe shop vacs, which I'm not sure I want), but I'm just trying to see if there's anything out there that can at least do better than the first thing I got before I even had the pigs yet. The current one I use has a pretty narrow nozzle and that definitely makes it harder to get the larger pieces unless it's at the right angle. Also the stuff the vacuum sucks up doesn't go straight into the part where it collects everything, it then has to go sideways through a valve to get there, so that contributes to clogging meaning I have to quickly take it apart and unstick it more often. It also seems like the space between the filter and the sides is a bit narrow which hay doesn't fill as well. Has anyone else had similar experiences and found a good handheld vacuum that is better with the hay? Or is what I already have about as good as it's gonna get?
