[silvestrov]

I think it would better if the EU had required listing the "sucking power" of vacuum cleaner in addition to the power usage, and require this number to be in bigger font size than power usage.

And require "suckage per watt" also.

People went by power usage because that was the only measure they got.

[rsynnott]

There's no metric for that that's well understood by the public, though. People have been trained that more watts == more better over the last century by lightbulbs and things (and more dubiously by hifi makers; they tend to use very dubious marketing watts). Air watts (ie power of air movement) might have been a good compromise; most super-high wattage machines don't have substantially better air watts metrics. It still isn't that helpful to the consumer, though; a poorly designed machine may have high air watts but limited suction.

[silvestrov]

People can be taught.

Example of typical packaging of LED bulb in Denmark: https://imgur.com/a/J5PiGLb

It has: actual watt usage, "old watt equivalent" and lumen. It won't take that many years before people know the lumen value they want.

[nitrogen]

Inches of water column were directly demonstrated by the last door to door vacuum sales pitch I saw, as a measure of suction. CFM are a perfectly comparable measure of airflow. And an abstract "cleaning power" could be defined for various surfaces by putting a standardized dirt load on the surface and weighing what percentage remains after a standardized sweep.

[foobar4567]

The EU did introduce a label with information about cleaning power and noise, in addition to energy use.

However, these were removed following a court ruling in favour of Dyson, which complained that the cleaning power tests were not realistic, as they were always conducted with an empty bag.

https://www.which.co.uk/news/2018/11/dyson-wins-eu-vacuum-ap...