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Years ago they seemed to be much better than domestic vacuums.
Are they any better/more powerful nowadays?
I've not used one for years but I'm always bewildered by the queue in the local Morrisons petrol station.
What do you think?
Jeez. How long is the hose - or do you live next door to the filling station?
I was jet washing the van today and there was a few in the queue
Titan from screwfix. If you only need a dry vac, the one on special offer at £60.
I've had one for 6 years, it's bullet proof has really good suction and I've bullied mine. Its used for the car, decorating, bit of woodworking and never misses a beat.
I actually read the post unlike @arcing , however my reccomendation had i not, would be the same. Screwfix, Titan. Vaccuum up dust, dirt, masonry, rocks, gravel, blocked toilets, floods, hotwheels cars.... brilliant.
Thirded for the Titan. Absolute monster of a thing. Relentlessly abused for a few years and keeps coming back for more! Rocks and Gravel a speciality!
If you mean the static ones. Yes, they are bigger and have no restrictions on weight, people don't mind if they take ~3 seconds to spool up, they can have much more sound deadening, so more powerful fans (but worse sound characteristics). So they can suck harder. They also have bigger/more filters so are less likely to clog and lose suction.
If you mean a home workshop/garage vac, yeah, most of the same things apply. My cheap(ish) workshop vacuum (bagless/wet/dry/HEPA filters etc) makes a stock domestic look like crap. It also sounds like a jet engine taking off from a graveled runway. But will suck massive piles of mixed gravel/dust/sawdust/nails up in about a second without breaking stride.
I also have a built in vacuum for the house, that's also massive, noisy and extremely effective. I close the door to the room it's in when i'm running it.
I've got a battered Hetty in my garage I picked up for free somewhere. No more powerful than the Henry in the house.
I know this is literally NOT what the OP was asking...
But i'm gonna join the new conversation...!!
I've a bosch cordless 18v wet/dry vacuum, and it's fab (I've a few bosch batteries)... I also got the wall-sucky-adaptor thingy, which is amazing when drilling into walls as it really does get all the dust!
DrP
Another Titan user here. 30L wet and dry. Lives in the garage and gets hooked up to woodworking tools and used to clean the workshop and car etc. It's got a plug socket on it so you can plug your router, saw or whatever in and it switches the vacuum on automatically when you start whatever power tool you're using. It's a powerful, robust (though noisy) bit of kit which takes loads of abuse and just works really well. I was using it bagless, but the filter gets blocked with sawdust pdq. So I've started using bags and a better filter (HEPA) than the one it came with, which stops fine dust blowing back out through the exhaust. I have got a homemade cyclone attachment which was brilliant at catching all the crud, but it's made out of a beer fermenting barrel and the vacuum is so powerful it's starting to implode when I use it! I need to find a stronger plastic barrel.
Ignore me, I completely misread the original post!
Depending on your garage setup (i.e. make sure you're not blowing grit into anything) a leaf blower can be good way of getting all the loose crap off the floor of a garage.
I will also ignore the OP and suggest a bottle of Caol Ila 12 can distract you for long enough to not care about vacuuming the inside of the car
+another for Screwfix titan. MrsRNP also loves her Makita cordless hoover for chasing moths and flies around the house and their vortex sucked up doom
I've got one but I basically never use it any more, cordless got really good. So I have a makita cordless that takes the same batteries as my other tools- not massively powerful, but always handy so I use it more than I ever did when I had to get the big snake out. And an inexpensive Hoover which is stupidly powerful (at the expense of draining batteries in about 5 minutes), overkill for the house tbh but really useful in the car, it sooks dirt out of seat fabrics that I didn't even know was there
Only time I get the oldfashioned garage one on wheels out is for dust collecting from wood tools, and that doesn't call for much power anyway. Oh and for the wet-and-dry mode
I have been using a Cleva Vacmaster 20litre wet and dry vacuum with power take off for about 10 years for garage and outdoor jobs and it has performed pretty well:
I originally bought it so I could attach it to my circular saw to reduce the amount of sawdust spewed out by the saw. I needed something that was light and compact so avoided the next size up which is 30l. The power take off means you can plug the power tool 240v plug into the vacuum cleaner for power. When you switch on the saw the vacuum cleaner switches on, and when you switch off the saw the vacuum cleaner powers off after about 5-10 seconds. Also used it for loads of more mundane tasks. It also turns into a blower quite easily (just make sure you empty the dust collection part…)
Not sure how it compares to others mentioned here, but I can recommend it if you’re looking for something smaller with those particular features favouring power tools.
The queue at the garage is either that people want an excuse to get out of the house or they suffer the misfortune of owning a super duper technical vac which blocks up when you look at it.
My Titan wet n dry is more powerful than the local garage vac, and doesn't stop before I've finished the job 🙂
The real beasts were the early garage jetwashers, a mate accidently blew the paint off his colour coded bumpers and mirrors the first weekend the garage had it.