Questions on Central Vac

[cfidler]

Hello,

My spouse and I just bought a townhouse. It is roughed in for central vac - the pipes and the outlets are all there. So I went and bought a vac at Sears. I want it in my basement. The basement is unfinished. In the ceiling on either side of the stairwell are two (one on each side) pipes, that look like central vac pipes. So the woman at Sears said it was easy enough to install it ourselves if the rough in is there. She said to connect the two pipes coming from the ceiling and then connect that to the central vac. Okay sounds simple enough - is that the correct way to do it?

Secondly, I discovered we have no electrical outlets in the basement except for the ones for the laundry. I'm going to have an electrician come and put some in. Do I just need an ordinary one for my central vac (I haven't taken it out of the box yet to check it out, incase I have to return it).

Thanks for any responses, in advance.

[RBM]

The unit will need a dedicated circuit, some actually need two dedicated circuit outlets, but the electrician will know once he looks at the unit. I think you have to try to identify the two pipes you have as one or both may be inlet pipes, however one may be an exhaust pipe to the outside

[herron1967]

Basement outlets generally require gfi protection (unless the basement is finished), but if you put in a dedicated circuit for an appliance you can get away without gfi. Dedicated here means literally dedicated: if the vac has one plug, your receptacle on the vac circuit cannot be a duplex receptacle. This way, once the vac is plugged in, nothing else can be plugged in to the circuit.

I believe it is good practice to have stationary appliances on their own circuits. If I were in your shoes, I would definitely put in a dedicated circuit.

mh

[wayne]

[Joseph Meehan]

I did not need a dedicated circuit for mine, but I put one in. Just a good idea in my mind.

The two pipes may be two different area or one may be the exhaust. If one has some wires coming in with it, then that is the outlets and the other is likely the exhaust.

You will need a few fittings and some pipe along with a saw to cut the pipe. Find a good vacuum store, which is where you should have bought your unit, not Sears, and they will help you out with instructions. There should also be some instructions with the unit and they should tell you about both of your questions.

If all this seems a little complex, maybe you should contact that vacuum store and see who they would recommend to do the job for you.

When you get it done, I suspect you will love it. I sure like mine

[kevin]

If I remember right, the only reason to avoid the GFI on a dedicated appliance is to avoid situations where a tripped GFI might go unnoticed for a while and cause problems. Think: refrigerator..

[Jeff Wisnia]

You described two pipes, but are there any wires there also? Hopefully you'll find some light gauge doorbell wiring style stuff taped to at least one of those pipes.

You need a means to turn the central vac on and off and that's generally done by some sort of switch on each of the hose inlet plates (Which I perefer to call inlets, rather than outlets, as they suck, not blow.)

Often the switches are nothing more than two contacts which get bridged by the hose end when it's stuck into the inlet plate. The pair of wires from each plate are connected in parallel and used to complete the coil circuit of a low voltage power switching relay in the vac unit.

If you don't find those wires then you are either going to have to add them, figure out some other remote control (Think X-10 stuff), or resign yourself to running down and up the basement stairs to turn that vac unit on and off whenever you need to use it.

HTH,

Jeff

[cfidler]

Yes there are some thin white wires stuffed up into one of the pipes and the other pipe has some thin white wires wrapped around it.

[On My Way]

If you have a shop vac or another hosed vac, tape it up to one of the pipes and turn it on and check all of the inlets to see if they suck. If only some of them suck then tape it to the other pipe and see if the rest suck. At least that way you will know for sure if one is an exhaust. The other wires could be for a flow meter for the exhaust or the other pipe could be for your neighbors unit since you are in a townhome