Shop vacs for home use compared: gallons, peak HP, hose and cord

What a home shop vac has to do

Inside a house, a shop vac usually handles three jobs: a spill or an overflow on a hard floor, the inside of a car, and the garage. Each one asks something different of the machine. Water pickup asks for tank size. A car asks for hose length. The garage asks for a cord that reaches and, sometimes, a blower port. This comparison is research-based, built from the current listings and the makers' spec pages; we have not run these vacs ourselves.

What a tank of water weighs

The gallon figure on a shop vac is the size of the drum, and the water it takes before its float shuts off suction can be somewhat less. Still, the drum size tells you two things: how many trips to the drain a flooded floor takes, and how heavy the drum gets.

The USGS gives water as 8.34 pounds per gallon. So, as a rough guide for a drum filled with water:

Those weights are for the water alone, before the vac itself. That is the practical limit on tank size in a house: a 12- or 16-gallon drum picks up more water per trip, but you will not carry it full up a flight of stairs. A large drum is easier to empty where it stands, by tipping it toward a floor drain, or in stages. If your water cleanups happen in a basement with a floor drain, a large drum is little trouble. If they happen upstairs, a 4- or 5-gallon drum you empty more often may be easier on the day.

Why peak HP is not a suction figure

Every vac here leads with a peak HP number, from about 4 to 6.5. CRAFTSMAN's own footnote on its shop vac pages explains what the figure is: a level at or below the motor's maximum output, measured in a laboratory with a dynamometer. That is a property of the motor on a test stand, not of the airflow at the end of your hose.

What you notice at the nozzle depends on airflow and sealed suction, and those depend on the motor together with the hose diameter, the hose length, the filter and how clean it is. Some makers publish airflow (CFM) and water lift figures on their own spec pages; the listings rarely do, so they are not in the table. In practice, read peak HP as a rough size class within one brand's range, and do not compare a 5.5 peak HP vac from one maker with a 4.5 peak HP vac from another as if the first must pick up more.

Which one if...

• Mostly spills and the car, vac kept indoors: look at the 4- and 5-gallon rows, then at hose length (stairs and car seats) and cord length (how far from an outlet you clean).
• A basement or garage floor that gets wet: the 9-, 12- and 16-gallon rows. The 12-gallon Vacmaster and the 16-gallon CRAFTSMAN have the two longest cords stated here, which matters when the outlet is across the room.
• Leaves and sawdust in the garage as well: check the blower column. The two CRAFTSMAN vacs, the 12-gallon Vacmaster and the Shop-Vac name a blower function.
• Little storage space: the DEWALT 4-gallon is the smallest drum here.

Reading the table

"Hose stated" and "Cord stated" are the lengths each listing gives. Where we confirmed a length on the maker's own spec page, the cell is marked with an asterisk; the CRAFTSMAN 16-gallon cord, for example, is given there as 246 inches, which is about 20.5 feet. A listing that states the hose length two different ways shows "Listing gives two values" rather than a guess. Hose diameter matters for clogging and accessory fit, but the listings and maker pages we read do not give it consistently for every model, so it is not a column here.

What this page does not tell you

We do not measure suction, airflow or noise, and we do not rank these vacs. We have not tested how much water each one actually holds before its float shuts off; the gallon figure is the drum size the maker names. Filters, bags and accessory fit differ by brand: check the maker's page for the filter your model takes before you buy spares.