I had a Miele S5360 dropped in for repair today that turned out not to be a real repair at all. The customer brought it in with the fault that the lid was lifting up on it's own while they vacuumed. With a quick look and a listen to the machine I was able to identify and fix the problem.

Basically from listening I could hear that the machine was straining and I could actually see that the lid did lift up when running on full suction. Unfortunately when I shot the video the lid decided to behave like it normally would so you will just have to take my word that it did have a problem. Anyway the issue is a pretty exteme case of what can happen if your vacuum filter gets totally blocked. The motor is still running as per normal however it can't force the air through a blocked filter so it needs to find an alternative path to the outside world. What happened in this case is that the force of air lifted the filter up and away to allow the air to escape. THis in turn actually forced the lid to lift up as well. Generally a filter will literally split in the middle but I am thinking that the Miele filters are just stronger than the average filter. 

Once the fault is identified the problem is easily fixed, simply put in a new filter. In this case the correct filter is part number SF-AAC 50 Miele Active Air Clean Filter. As a related note this machine had been using generic paper bags which are generally ok to use but I would suspect that the dirt is more fine than normal wherever this vacuum is used and the paper bags were not filtering well enough. So I also changed the bags for the proper Miele GN vacuum bags. With new bags and filters the vacuum lid stayed down while vacuuming and as a nice bonus the suction was noticable better too. Here is the video of my repair.

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