Despite all the fuss about whether bagged or bagless vacuum cleaners are better, there seems to have been comparatively little attention paid to what happens to dirt trapped in rugs and carpets. In the old days, people would simply take their rugs out and beat them on the washing line.

This invention attempts a more convenient version of this approach.

Each rug or fitted carpet would have a slim, ferrous plate placed beneath it (yellow). The plate would be about the size of a vacuum cleaner head, coated in ptfe and be multiply-perforated.

A vacuum cleaner brush head would be fitted with an electromagnetic ring (yellow). As the cleaner moves across the carpet, sliding the plate along with it, the magnet is switched on and off rapidly so that the plate beneath the carpet oscillates up and down and beats the dust into the airflow moving through the plate’s perforations.

The cleaner would work as normal on wooden floors, for example, and the plate would need to be returned to a known starting position after each usage.

Such a system might even be retro-fitted to existing vacuum cleaners, given that it consists only of a metal plate and a switchable electromagnet.

This would greatly improve the cleanliness of fitted carpets, reducing eg asthma attacks and decreasing the necessary frequency of a boring domestic chore.