Central House/garage vacuum system?

[albaran]

The house we bought came with the central vacuum which we use all the time. You don't have to lug a vacuum cleaner up the stairs if you have a second floor. However, the main canister is in the garage but I still use a shop vac out there. I didn't like the way the canister looked so I put a fake gas pump cover over it.

 

[gungatim]

I've never understood the attraction of these things. wife wanted one when we built, priced it out, and is crazy expensive. when saw she still had to drag around a heavy head/hose setup, and was limited to only using it where the outlets were permanently installed, we opted to buy 3 good vacuums (one for each floor). much cheaper, more flexibility, portability, and backup if one goes down.

also keep in mind the exact same parts that wear out in a regular vac will wear out just the same on the built-in...

 

[mjbasford]

I recently saw a system where the hose retracts into the wall. This was on a new house build and the stuff in the wall and ceiling looked too complicated for my comfort. I'm not ripping down a drywall ceiling to fix a stuck hose.

while i am sure there are others, it sounds like the Dirt Devil Hide-a-hose system. I have installed lots of these over the years, and can say only one time did i ever need to access the piping to fix a hose issue (customer pulled the end of the hose off, which prevents it from sucking back into the pipe.) Luckily we are almost exclusively crawlspace, so the cut and repair was performed there.

Biggest pain in the *** is running 50' of pipe, with minimum turns, per outlet before tying into the homerun, looks like hack work if you dont know what is going on (and had more than 1 builder flip out because of that)

 

[UpstateNY]

I've never understood the attraction of these things. wife wanted one when we built, priced it out, and is crazy expensive. when saw she still had to drag around a heavy head/hose setup, and was limited to only using it where the outlets were permanently installed, we opted to buy 3 good vacuums (one for each floor). much cheaper, more flexibility, portability, and backup if one goes down.

Add my name to this camp. Last house had a Nutone, the product is fine, the concept (central vacuum) totally *****. The OP will put it in, it'll be a semi-pain to install in an existing house, and somewhat expensive. From this thread, he must realize that, even though he's a total fanboy now, there's about a 50/50 chance he'll end up not using it eventually. The only people that know how bad the concept is are the people that have already owned one.

 

[PoorOwner]

It's a 80s-90s thing, do they even offer this option anymore when buying a newly built home today?

There is a reason they are not so popular now, people are pretty lazy to be wanting to drag out the hose. Uprights do not cost a lot these days. It does offer cleaner air, quieter, no motor or vacuum smell and exhaust is going outside. It really does offer more suction. Quietness is helpful if you have young kids and pets.

There was this vacumaid thing which works similar to the other one, it just cyclone with no filter. However everytime it turns on it looked like a smoke bomb from the exhaust. I replaced with a Honeywell unit and it's in the garage, it's quiet enough I can still be in the garage it's only around 60db or so.

I have a hose inlet in the garage too to vacuum cars with, but I still find it useful to use a dedicated shop vac to clean up saw dust and metal shavings.

 

[D. Patina]

We have one and it doesn't get used very much if at all. House is 38 years old and we used it a lot when we first moved in, but dragging the long bulky hose from room to room got old quick. Maybe newer ones are different, but the one we have is not very convienient.