I recently bought my first big shop vac. For years I've had a little
12-gallon vac with the small diameter hose. It's been a workhorse, but it's always been annoying in the shop. Every dust port is rigged for big hoses, chips and shavings clog it very easily, etc.So this year I got one of those $99 18-gallon "6.5 peak HP" combination blower/vac jobs from Lowe's. The blower on this thing is indeed mighty powerful. It took the town forever to get around to cleaning up the gravel left on the road from winter, so when we got out the bikes I went up the street around my house and blew as much of the gravel into the ditch as I could. (As luck would have it, the damn sweeper truck came by the very next day. I'll bet they were watching me out there the day before, and laughing their asses off.)
So anyway, the motor spins, and it moves a lot of air, but the thing doesn't seem to have much suction as a vac. I've never used a vac that had big pipe before, so I have no idea if this is normal or expected. It seems it could be that the size of the bore means effectively high volume, low suction. It does seem capable of sucking up sawdust, chips, and filings, but the thing won't pick up small finishing nails or tiny sheet metal screws. It so reliably refuses to pick up anything the slightest bit heavy, that I can suck dust out of my bins full of small nuts and bolts without any fear that I'll loose things down the pipe (which is sort of a feature, I guess, though I'm actually too paranoid to feel quite comfortable doing that.)
There's a conical accessory that stops the bore down to about 1". If I fit that, it will suck up nails, and then it becomes a cyclone. At the end of the session, I can dump the nails out the business end of the hose. They never go up the pipe at all.
I'm learning how to use this thing to do what it can do, but it seems I won't be getting rid of my trusty old small bore shop vac at this rate. I'd just like to know if this behavior is typical of the breed, or perhaps the side effect of some compromise from making the blower detachable. I debated on that point, figuring it was a stupid gimmick, but this one was the second or third beefiest vac they had, and the next one up had a blower thingie too.
Did I get hosed, or do big vacs suck at sucking? :)