It’s now been almost two years since I spent an enormous sum of money on a Miele vacuum, and I’ve been meaning to do a review of it for awhile now. Here you go: a review of the Miele Titan vacuum after two years of ownership.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve realized that I have spent a lot of money on stuff because it was cheap, but been totally unhappy with it. This includes everything from clothing to furniture to vacuum cleaners. I’ve been working on training myself to make do or do without until I can afford quality items, and incredibly, I’ve found that I’m almost always quite happy with more expensive purchases because I really took the time to evaluate whether or not it was worth the money I was spending. My Miele vacuum is one of those super-expensive-but-never-regretted-it decisions.
I went with the German-made Miele brand after doing a fair amount of research online and browsing in the store. We vacuum a lot – I’m not exaggerating when I say we vacuum daily – and I wanted one that was going to keep doing its job for more than a year or two. I wanted a canister vacuum so it was easy to tote up and down stairs, and I wanted something that would work well on hard floors, since we planned to replace our main floor carpet with wood floors and I didn’t want to use a broom and dustpan every day.
I bought the Miele Titan 
I upgraded to Miele’s Powerbrush
The handle on the Titan has a button where you can choose to turn the brush on or off, so it’s easy to switch from carpet to hard floors using the Powerbrush. Also, the Powerbrush stops spinning when you accidentally get the corner caught on a throw rug, so it doesn’t burn the belts or whatever causes that awful smell when normal vacuums get caught on something.
The Miele Titan has different levels of suction, and you can just turn the knob on the canister to adjust the amount of suction. We almost always keep it on the highest suction, but it is nice to be able to decrease it when I’m doing stuff like sucking dust off artificial floral stems. (If you leave it on high, you’re likely to lose a few flowers!)
One thing that took some getting used to is that the vacuum doesn’t really have a stick like most of the other vacuums I’ve used, so if you need to reach higher than the hose will allow it to reach, you have to lift the canister up, which isn’t a big deal because it is pretty light and easy to handle.
I also had to get used to the fact that the power switch is on the canister, and not on the part you hold – it’s actually great, but it took me a long time to stop feeling around for the on/off switch on the handle!
The handle is also really easy to adjust for different heights of vacuum-ers, so we can let it all the way out for Jeremy (who vacuums almost every night) and pull it all the way in for the kids. It’s also really easy to attach and detach the Powerbrush, parquet floor tool, and attachments.
Now that we finally have wood floors, I can actually say how it works on hard floors: great! The parquet floor tool works well and it slides under the furniture quite well – much easier than a regular vacuum or a broom.
One drawback to the Miele Titan is that the bags are kind of expensive – about $4-5 per bag, and they are not terribly big, either, because the canister is small. The boxes of bags also come with pads for the two filters on the vacuum. I think we end up changing it once every month and a half or so, and it would be more often for people that have pets. The bags are really nice, though – very thick and I have no doubt that they hold the dust in better than the cheap bags in other vacuums. But, it can be a case of sticker shock if you don’t realize how much the bags are!
I’m totally happy with my Miele purchase and would do it all over again in a heartbeat! I’m also glad that I bought it at a local store so that I have a place to take it if there are ever issues, like when the brush attachment broke.
This is an unsolicited review of a product I purchased. It contains affiliate links.