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Great vac overall, just one major drawback…

This vac hits just about every mark right on the nose for me.

PROS:
It has a ton of suction power (as long as you keep the filter relatively clean).

It has a large diameter hose that can suck up large chunks.

Well thought-out attachments. I didn’t think I would, but I’ve used all of them for different applications, and found all to be very useful.

It is very quiet for how powerful it is.

Great carrying handle, and easy to use snap-locks to take the lid off and put it back on.

Long cord, long hose, quite portable.

Great casters, very stable.

CONS:
Just one, but it’s nasty: The output blower blows with incredible force on the opposite side of the suction input. Some form of this is to be expected to a certain extent, as the air that is sucked in has to be pushed back out in some way with equal force; I’ve just seen other designs that manage this much better. This design pushes with equal force out of a hole equal in diameter to the input hole, horizontally out the opposite side. Like I said, the force is great. It is like a leaf-blower. This design is supposedly set up this way so that one could hook the hose up to the output hole and do things like blow leaves… but if you’re not blowing leaves, you blow dust, dirt, debris, and other unwanted things out into the air to fly off and settle somewhere else. A nightmare for, say, cleaning up drywall dust after hanging, taping and sanding drywall — by turning on the vac, you are effectively distributing all the dust on the output side out into the rest of the house.

Don’t get me wrong; the suction is amazing, and what you suck up is sufficiently filtered and deposited into the base… It’s just that anything that happens to be on the wrong side of the vac will be lifted up off the ground and spread off into the distance. The only way I’ve found to avoid this is to aim the output hole out a door and be mindful not to tug the vac in too far while cleaning. Seems like a serious nuisance to me.

Are most shop vacs designed this way? I guess I’ve only seen one other brand’s design, which came out the top and somehow spread the “impedance” of the air so that it exited gently out of a vent that ran 360 degrees around the motor, instead of being concentrated into a tight, forceful air jet shooting out of one side.

Overall I really like the vac. It’s the most powerful of any I’ve ever used and has really worked well for all the things I’ve used it for. I just have to pay close attention to where that exit port is and make sure it won’t cause any problems.

Update (5/19/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen.

The featured review for this product, Ridgid WD1450 14-Gallon 6-Horsepower Wet/Dry Vacuum Tools & Hardware, was written by M. Hibbard.

The average rating for this item is 4.7 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.