Central Vac silencer

[HeyBub]

You'll never get an FHA approved loan...

[JIMMIE]

My father in law put his in the utility room. He had the forsight to insulate the walls. He also installed the washing machine, dryer and to his wife's annoyance the dishwaher in there.

I love it. You can sit down and wath TV or talk and dont have to worry about hearing major appliances running.

Jimmie

[Robert Green]

[Wayne Boatwright]

On Sat 15 Aug 2009 12:24:29a, Robert Green told us...

Bobby, the truly simplest approach is to relocate the unit outside the living space. My parents had central vacuums in their homes since the first ones were introduced. There were three scenarios of their installations. (1) Garage, (2) Basement, (3) Spare Closet, where the interior walls of the closet were heavily insulated. Another possibility would be the attic. At least half of those years I was living at home. I could never tell when the unit was running unless I entered either the garage, basement, or opened the closet.

It shouldn't be that difficult to run an inlet pipe to the new location, be it through closets, hollow walls, etc. The other upside to doing this is not tampering with the environment that the vacuum naturally requires. I would never consider enclosing it in a box, despite the efforts to ventilate it with fans.

[ransley]

Google motor and music studio sound proofing for ideas, the common way to do music studios is a seperate wall of maybe 1" or more drywall both sides with fiberglass batts, but it floats it doesnt touch the other wall and its on rubber pads, moving it off the mounting you have now may have a giant effect from stopping vibrations through block. Sand inbetween 2 sheets of drywall is used for machinery, even an old Bass amp of the 60s had sand. There is alot you can do cheaply, even experimenting with hanging some carpet around it will let you see to be its effect now so you can gauge results, who knows , an isolation mount and carpet might do it. Radioshack sells cheap and good "db meters" to measure sound volume.

[JIMMIE]

Does the unit have an exhaust pipe? I used to have a Kenmore unit in the garage and even there it was bothersome until I extended the exhaust pipe outside. When the motor on it finally went out I decided not to replace it.

Jimmie

[Roger Shoaf]

High risk? The lead is not in contact with water, nor is it in a form that will give you any grief from breathing in the area where installed.

Google lead soundproofing for details. The sheet lead would be a whole lot easier than the lead apron and probably a whole lot easier to obtain and use.

[Bob]

In an attic installation, how much performance is lost with an uphill pipe run?

[Tony]

Go digging through some old dishwashers and remove the black heavy tar like sheets of sound deadening material. (It's fairly expensive to buy.) Now I'm not sure what would work better, putting this soundproofing material on the outside of the vac, or on the box you propose to built around it? I would think putting it on the outside of the vac to be the best, and the messiest to do. Regular lightweight foam won't do much, you need something with a lot of mass so it absorbs the sound waves.

[aemeijers]

Even if it actually works, sounds like a lousy place to put it. You have to haul the dirt back out through the house, and it is a pain to get to. I'd probably never get a central vac (even if I won the lotto), but if I did, I'd want it as close as possible to where the trash cans were, ie the garage. I'd only consider the basement if it was a walkout.

Personally, I put central vacs in the same category as trash compactors- a solution in search of a problem. Unless you a clean freak that vacuums multiple times per week, dragging the vac around is simply not that big a deal (especially since they aren't made out of heavy steel any more, and modern super-magnets let them make the motors tiny). You already have to shove the furniture around. But YMMV, of course. Only place where I could see a central vac being useful, is in a wood shop, with dedicated hoses at each tool station. AKA, dust collection system. But those aren't really the same thing.

-- aem sends...

[Wayne Boatwright]

On Sun 16 Aug 2009 12:51:24p, Bob told us...

possibility

I have no statistics, but I can't imagine much would be lost. I've know a couple of families where their installation was in the attic. These homes had no basements nor free space on the main floor. I don't recall anyone mentioning a problem.

Consider that many, perhaps most, HVAC air handlers are in the basement, yet the air easily reacheds the 2nd or even 3rd floor of houses. Perhaps not a great comparison, but true nevertheless.

[AZ Nomad]

Are you joking, or just stupid?

[Robert Green]

[Robert Green]

I tend to agree, but I am sure Murphy's law would cause the motor to fail immediately if I attached soundproofing "schmutz" on the outside casing. Hell, had someone not reminded me, I might have forget to add a service hatch! (-: I do like the idea of acquiring some sound proofing from a junkyard dishwasher. I'll have to search a little more in Google, Ebay and other places to see what's available cheaply. Fortunately, nearly all the sound "power" is concentrated at a few distinct frequencies, so I just need to find sound deadening that's most effective for them. I'm liking the idea of sand more and more because it's so cheap and a lot of sound energy will get dissipated from the motion of the tiny sand particles as the sound waves travel through it. My fear with sand is that it will compact over time and fall away from the very top of the enclosure where the motor and most of the noise resides.

Correct. Wrapping a foam mattress pad around the motor was nowhere near as effective as an old piece of heavy carpeting. I thought the foam would absorb a lot more sound than it did, lending support to the lead and sand methodologies. Today I'll go "sound mapping" again so I can report back which frequencies are the worst offenders.

Thanks for the input, Tony.

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

Yes, it's vented outside and through a Hayden muffler unit, but an awful lot of noise still escapes. Worse, still, it's now pointed directly at a neighbor's bedroom window. That's one of the reasons I am moving the unit to the back of the house. The exhaust would then be pointing to my backyard and the park beyond and shouldn't bother anyone.

Thanks for the input, Jimmie.

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

I've lived with CV's for a long time, too. I live pretty close to neighbors on each side and relocating outside my living space puts me closer to theirs. In the interest of peaceful coexistence, I don't want to foist the noise onto my neighbors, but to mitigate it as well as I can. That means enclosure, as far as I can tell.

Well, advice on "enclose or not to enclose" has been running all over the map. Unfortunately I think it's the only option left considering all of the issues. I'm hoping that several added safety interlocks will overcome what I agree is the possibility that the unit might overheat. I'll be monitoring the temperature in the box very closely. I also have a HomeVision controller that I can set to make sure that the unit does not ever run more than a set amount of minutes at a time and that the internal temperature of the box never rises above a certain amount. A good friend says he doubts the unit will even get noticeably warmer since the unit is always sucking cool room air into the unit as part of the vacuuming process and the Hayden CV design has that air flowing around the motor assembly.

Thanks for your input, Wayne.

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

I respectfully disagree. No matter how high the filtration of a portable vac, they output a considerable volume of air into the room that blows dust around and around. They're terribly noisy as well, and that noise follows the user around through the house, making it hard to hear music, the door bell, etc. Most people I know that use central vacs would never think of going back to a drag-around device. In the case of my unit, the horse power is about 5 times that of a conventional vacuum and the suction much greater. I can't imagine pulling the Hayden around on a cart. It's rather huge. CV's improve the air quality of the home by removing 100% of the vacuumed air and filtering it to the exterior of the living space and are great for allergy sufferers. And there's no chance some temporary cleaning help like we had when my wife got sick will decide to plug a vacuum into a UPS outlet and start a small fire. (-:

We both love our CV, although each for different reasons. We ran through a series of three Orrick cleaners before switching to a CV. The Orricks cost nearly as much as the whole (uninstalled) Hayden system and so far, we haven't even had to have the motor replaced once let alone three times as we did with the Orrick. Vacuuming carpeted stairs is much, much easier with a CV than with almost any kind of stand-alone vacuum. You can see the difference when strong sunlight enters the room. Vacuuming with the Orrick filled the air with so many dust particles it looked like a 3-D planetarium. The CV on the other hand barely produced any noticeable increase in visible airborne dust particles.

My CV is hooked up to my radial arm saw for just that purpose. Adding another branch and outlet was a cinch and unlike the leaky shop vac I used to use, the CV truly ejects dust without stirring up a lot of airborne particles. Running a powerful standalone in a small room not only kicks up loads of as yet unvacuumed dust into the air, it adds ozone from the motor brushes and lot of extra heat into the room. The big downside is that I will probably have to leave the CV as an "attached fixture" when we move whereas we could much more easily take a stand-alone with us.

-- Bobby G.

[bud--]

The frequencies may change as you load the motor - go from sucking air to pulling a vacuum.

[Robert Green]

Interesting observation. The whining noise does change considerably when something large enough to block the nozzle gets stuck without getting sucked in. In that case, it's a good thing to be able to hear the increase in noise and remove the blockage before the motor goes into thermal overload. Lots of things to consider when boxing this bugger up!

-- Bobby G.

[Robert Green]

Certainly you are working against the force of gravity and heavier objects will stall going up a upward vertical intake instead of being helped along a downward one. Who hasn't had to work a vacuum hose like a snake swallowing a rat to get a stone or some other heavy object to move along?

While I do distinctly recall some discussion of how water lift (the traditional method of measuring suction) was lower in "up to the attic and down again designs," that could easily be because of the longer pipe runs and the potentially greater number of leaks.

When I first looked into CV's I had to learn a whole new terminology to compare units and estimate "suckiness" (in more than one dimension!). The first oddball term was air watts, which at first sounds useful in evaluating air guitars but is really an attempt to express suction power at different nozzle diameters. Some CV accessories are air powered and put an extra load on the system, hence the attempt by manufacturers to express the ability to perform work with the air flow, giving us air watts. Anyway, what I discovered was that a properly plumbed and sized CV system has more than enough suction power to work from any location in the house.

I won't be mounting mine in that attic for reasons other than any possible slight performance loss. Attic installations are not fun to service in general, but the incredible heat genned in many attics leads to summertime failures where you may encounter near-lethal heat, high humidity, wasps, squirrels, bees and yes even ("who would hang all these teeny little black bowties upside down inside this closet?") BATS!!! That's why I would avoid the attic and do.

But many folks are fine with attic installs, and since the installation manual:

(No affiliation, no recommendation, for all I know the worst virus in the world will infest your machine upon visiting the site - use at your own risk!!!!)

shows layouts for older homes where a single pipe ascends to the attic and then comes down from above - an up and over design familiar to old house rehabbers. So obviously it's not enough of a hit to be a serious issue. It may be a blessing in disguise in that big heavy stuff is *less* likely to get sucked into the main intake run because it would never rise high enough to reach the attic run and might just fall out of the outlet at next operation.

A much more serious set of performance robbing problems are leaky outlet cover plates, poorly thought out pipe runs, very sharp bends, bad solvent welds and burrs left on the inside of the pipe that catch the tiniest hairs at first that eventually turn into full blown clogs. All of the branches need to be designed with gradual sweeps and not elbows (except right before the main intake on the motor unit) so that longish debris doesn't get forced to make too sharp a turn and clog.

I thought CV installation was going to be just like drain pipe installation but it was quite a bit different. All piping had to be cut with a tubing cutter and then sanded out to make sure there were no rough edges. Since it's a pressurized system, I didn't have to pay attention to pipe slope. Vacuum piping has a much thinner wall and lighter couplings than similar sized drain pipe which surprised me. I thought that they both used the same type of pipe but I was wrong. When my unit is sucking sawdust generated by the radial arm saw, no one can do any vacuuming elsewhere because the vacuum level is too low if more than one outlet is active. I could get around that if I were willing to add a second motor unit the way water heaters are ganged together. Not likely!

Even during operation, I never run the hose without some sort of narrower nozzle or attachment on the end to keep as many nasty things as I can from clogging the hose (most of the time) or the pipe (much larger diameter than the hose, so happens very rarely).

As far as bang for the buck, aside from the noisy motor unit, CV is great. No motor whine in the same room you're working in, no blown-up dust swirling around your head from the output air. That's all piped outside along with a few million dust mites and the carcasses of their fallen brothers.

-- Bobby G.