Since vacuum cleaners go cord-free, the businesses involved, big or small, have been driven to make all-round changes.
Some of these attempts may change the form of the product and even the pattern of the vacuum cleaner industry.
Power tool players with certain strength opt for battery pack platformization. A battery pack can be applied to dozens or even hundreds of tools.
Take TTI’s Milwaukee as an example. There are currently 2 platforms, M12 and M18 platforms, which correspond to 12V and 18V power tools. The M12 platform currently supports more than 50 products, and M18 products support 175 products. The 36V product platform will be worked on subsequently.
Power tool companies benefit a lot from using their own battery pack platform:
1. Increase customer stickiness. Once the customer starts to use a certain brand of products, they are inclined to purchase the same brand of other products, making the battery products universal.
2. Improve the industry threshold, making it difficult for small and medium-sized brands to enter the market. A large brand with hundreds of products and a universally used battery pack seems unparallel for small and medium-sized counterparts. This makes the industry more and more concentrated.
3. Even if some small companies barely enter the market, large companies can beat them easily by selling mainframes at low prices and batteries at high prices separately. In this way, SMEs are no rivals merely in pricing.
4. The battery pack resembles the cash-generating machine. What the battery to power tools is like what the ink cartridge to the printer. It is a consumable item (the cycle is relatively long), to bring continuous profits to the company after the tool power is sold.
In view of this, after the vacuum cleaner goes cord-free, many companies explored this path. For example, Bosch unveiled the Ulimited handheld vacuum cleaner that adopts the battery pack platform of the power tool. It marks the cord-free vacuum cleaner can use a universal battery pack for the power tool. However, the use of 18V platform results in its performance far lagging behind the counterparts. Therefore, simple use of the existing battery pack platform is not feasible.
Can the cord-free vacuum cleaner use the battery pack platform? TTI’s Hoover brand announced the One Power series, taking a step toward the platformization of household appliances battery packs.
This time Hoover released eight household cleaning products, from small handheld to Stick that can work wet or dry to hand-held vacuum cleaners, incorporating all forms of household cleaning products.
The product seems more angular and muscular than the usual household appliances. The core battery pack is completely redesigned, and differs a lot from the battery pack of the power tool (as shown in the figure below.
One Power’s battery pack uses 5 battery cells with voltage of 20V and capacity of 2.0Ah, 3.0Ah, 4.0Ah. Batteries of 21700 and 18650 have no such a large capacity. If it is really 21700, more and more players will follow up and use 21700 batteries in large quantities.
