Spent today installing the central vac I shoulda installed when building this place, but got talked outta (by a central vac distributor, no less!). I’m in housekeeping heaven. I love it already, and so does DW. Even the 5 yo was spellbound, and vac-ed the entire dining room. She used to run from the old vac.
Fun little project. Just a bit of drilling, some wire nuts, zip ties, and a good bunch of pvc glue. Nice and clean.
Benefits? Oh so much quieter than the upright. The power unit’s in the garage, so no dust stirred up. Power to spare…just gotta get into the same zip code as a dust bunny to suck it up. Hose isn’t a problem either. Most of the cleaning is at the far reaches of the hose, so not tripping over it. Easier than carrying that stupid Eureka around. Got Vacuflo…no bags or filters or anything. God I love conveniences.
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another benny ... if you exhaust it to the outside, most of the dust that gets thru the filter goes out too... along with a lot more of the noise...
with a conventional drag-around vac.... while you're sucking dirt in the hose.. the exhauset is blowing dust all over the room
Yeah, love getting the dust 100% outside! And the noise. And the unit's to the side of the house as my "favorite" neighbor, so guess who gets the noise? Ha ha ha. OK, I sprang the $8 for the muffler. It surprised me. Just a 8" long square box line with foam. No baffles or anything. A hole down the middle and foam on the sides. Does a good job though.
You won't believe this...as I'm sitting here typing this, my daughter wakes up. I head "Dad, dad!" as she paddles over to the library. Does she say, "Good morning"? No, first words out of her mouth are, "Can I use that vacuum thingy now?"
"...teach, your children well..."<g> Sounds like you have that one covered!
I never knew how handy a central vac was until I had my own.
Cloud
Did you have to heat the pvc pipe to bend it round them thar walls of yers? LOL.
I pulled a fairly new Sears central vac from a house I was gutting due to major fire. The vac was in a concrete garage so never saw any of the fire damage. Been lugging that thing around with me for the past seven years.
Maybe this thread will have inspired me to install it in this old house when I do the additions.
Be sucked...lol
Namaste
andy"Attachment is the strongest block to realization"http://CLIFFORDRENOVATIONS.COM
I put all of my inlets at 36" off the floor and floor sweps at each door and will have one on the kitchen counter. I have been useing mine a while and the house is not done yet . very handy!!
don,
When I was roughing in the central vac outlets in my house, I initially had them down at the level of the electrical outlets (top of the boxes about 14" above the floor).
My wife walked by and asked why I was putting them "down there."
After I gave her a blank stare with slightly glazed over eyes and a feeble reply of "so they'll line up with the electrical outlets?", she suggested raising them up another foot or so off the floor.
Smart girl.
I do plumbing service and can't tell you how many "professionally installed" system I see that are not exhausted to the outside.It's my opinion and I'm entitled to it.
yes.. but i don't know what your opinion is.. do you want them exhausted to the outside ... or don't you ?
i have a reading comprehension problem.. bear with meMike Smith Rhode Island : Design / Build / Repair / Restore
We had one in the house my family built in the early eighties. Didn't care for it much. The rotating brush attachment was vac-driven and didn't lift up the carpet fibers as well as the conventional unit. Same reason I don't care for canister type vacs.
I have seen some that have a hose system that carries power out to a brush-head. Never used one, but thought that might be the way to go. Perhaps they have improved even more over the years.
Kinda reminds me of a baseball diamond; when you vac and back your way out of a room and leave a symetrical pattern in the nap of the carpet.
We also did not have the dust-pan "inlet" (?) described earlier. That is way-cool.
Now imagine if someone would invent a unit that has retractible hoses built into the wall outlets (like airhose reels in a shop)! Just take the attachment room to room.
Anyone ever try to plumb a whole-house vac using a wood-shop type collector as the base unit? Heck, its big, it sucks, its already in the garage.Steelkilt Lives!
They have a unit that stores the hose in the wall.
If your old vac didn't have enough suction ,that would be the problem of that unit only. Mine will pull the flat nozzle down to the floor tight enough that it can't be lifted straight up but has to be rotated to break the suction.
I also found that the vac powered heads are worthless.
But I replaced mine with an electric head and realy like it.
I was simply making an observation that I see a lot of vac systems that are not vented to the outside. We installed our system to vent the dust not captured in the bag outside, not so we could drag a thirty foot hose around. As a kid, I remember watching my mother's Electrolux exhaust blowing dust off the floor into the air and float through the rays of sunlight that filtered in through the cracks in the blinds only to land someplace else. Doesn't make any sense to go through all the trouble of installing a system and not vent it outside. I guess I was agreeing with you. Oh, the phrase at the bottom, it's just a personal signature. It should've been further down though.
Yesterday I couldn't even spell plumber, today I are one.
That dust thing you mentioned and noise were my two biggies. Now, no more bags and no more hepa filters to ever buy!
How much dust do these things lose? I'd prefer to vent into the house to avoid throwing away heat.
Pete
You'd loose only a tiny amount of heat during the short time you vacuum, and for how infrequently it's done. I've seen a statistic that 15% of dust goes through a standard bag. It would be the very fine stuff that does, which are the very things that cause allergies and are otherwise irritating.
gotcha.. i remember the same dust trails in the sunlight..
i was talking to my HVAC sub.. he said studies showed that the greatest dust problem in homes is with conventional vacumns.. the only solution is to either use a HEPA filter ( which still does nothing for the dust kicked up by the exhaust )...or to use central vacs exhausted to the exterior......
this is from studies done by the mfrs. of the filtration equipment he installs...Mike Smith Rhode Island : Design / Build / Repair / Restore
A central vacuum system has been on my wish list for quite some time. From what I have seen of the few I have wired in and got to play with they seem grand. I like the idea of getting the dirt and dust Out of the house completely and not just stuffed into a leaky bag.
Sounds like a good job. You have right to feel proud.
Do you have any tips or suggestions for any of us that might want to install a system? Any tools or techniques that worked better than others? I need all the gory details. The blow by blow, or suck. As the case may be.
And pictures ... don't forget the pictures. I need visuals ... lurid shots of wires. Mmmmore wires ... and ssssawdddust in crawl spaces ... by flashlight. The horror ... the horror. Oh yea ... that's the good stuff.
Sorry went into handyman overload. I feel much better now.
:b
Hi 4Lorn1,
You know if I get pix, I'm gonna hafta include my favorite model, right? :) All I know about whether it's a good job or not is that it worked the first time! And the nice thing about this lil' handyman special, is that I could leave the messes from the cut plaster at the outlets, knowing I'd be right back there with the vac to clean them up! Kinda Zen.
Central Vac is high on my list.
One thing I learned is for a setup with a single long hose, they have an fabric sock/sleeve that helps prevent
the hose ridges from catching on corners and onto itself, making the hose much easier to handle and drag around.
I put a Beam in our house.
They have an installation guide on their site, should be fairly universal for running pipe. I don't know if the others do or not.
Beam wanted the unit with 10 ft of the wall if you were exhausting outside.bobl Volo Non Voleo Joe's BT Forum cheat sheet
Sure, some tips. The outlets need blocking installed around them. You can't just fasten them to the side of a stud with that puny sheet metal bracket, because it flexes too much. The hose goes in and out hard, and if I don't hold the cover with my other hand it feels like it's going to rip out of the wall when I remove the hose.
In a horizontal run, don't have any addional runs come up from below. If you do, something flowing from one end of the pipe to the other may fall down the vertical pipe. Eventually it may fill up. Connections from below, except the last one on the end, have to go up past the horizontal duct, the turn upside down and go into the horizontal run from the top.
The "vac-pan" feature is great, and a good conversation piece. It's an outlet in the baseboard that's flat, like a dust pan. On a hard surface like the kitchen floor you just sweep into the outlet and whoosh! You don't even have to bend over.
We installed a Vac-U-Flo almost as an afterthought. With 3 kids & 2 dogs I'm glad we did. We did a lot of research, and found Vac-U-Flo to be the best. They do not reccomend installing in the garage, as temperature & humidity variations can corrode the motor & controls. The fine dust is exhausted to the outside.
Hmmmm. I don't remember any mention of that. The rep saw my house and piping diagram. I saw some diagrams with garage installs, too. Hmmm. Hope it doesn't become an issue.
Wonder how fast the salt air will affect it.
(Just kidding, no salt air for 300 miles.)
garages are ok.. but the basement might have been better ....
When we needed a new vac, I wanted to put in a central unit. I think they're cool.
DW thought it was ridiculous to spend that much on a vacuum cleaner. So she went out and spent $700+ on a new Electrolux.
We should all help stamp out, eliminate and abolish redundancy.
$700? That makes sense! Mine was $860, with benefits no Electrolux can touch. The install was easy and kinda fun. Have her call me...I'll sell her on it! Did I mention it was quiet enough that you can watch tv while the vac is running?!
Yea. When I plug in the hose I have to listen for the air rushing sound to make sure that it is on . If there is any noise you have to see if the hose sticks to the floor to tell if it is on.
I put most of my electic outlets up there so that they line up with the vac.
Not only is my wife smarter than me, but you are too!<g>
Don't know as though I would go as far as to say that. Because I got a lot of info from you and the post that you stick in breaktime. I think a lot of the idea came from old age .
Love our central vac system. Never thought I'd want one, until we moved into a house with one. They're great.
I intend to add a vac pan in the kitchen, and maybe one in the garage/shop. And replace the hose plug ins so I can put in a good hose that allows you to turn the vac on and off from the nozzle end. Plus has a powered head, ours doesn't. Even w/o a powered head it does a better job then the junk vac we had before.
The outside exhast is great. I use it to clean out my fireplace once or twice a year. And when sanding sheetrock all of the dust goes away.
Never want a regular vac again. Much much nicer for stairs too.
>And replace the hose plug ins so I can put in a good hose that allows you to turn the vac on and off from the nozzle end.
Oh, absolutely. That's a must have. And they gotta be wired to the outlet, too--not the kind that you have to plug in separately for juice. The switch at the nozzle lets you keep it connected and then you can just grab it and zip, zip, zip.