My Shop Vac Blew Up!

[Greg R Bradley]

All Fein units will accept the 2.25" or 1.25" hose. Nice to have both as each works better for different functions. The Turbo I and II come with the 16' 1.25" and the Turbo III comes with the 10' 2.25". I just bought an extra 1.25" hose as that seems to be the most used. Nice to have the bigger hose for either vac when it works better.

Turbo III is the one most similar to the big shop vacs from Craftsman, Ridgid, Shop Vac. You can ignore the specs as the cheaper units all lie outrageaously. The 12 Amp 6.5Hp units actually draw about 8.8 Amps and are about 1.25-1.5 Horsepower. These guys make the absurd "universal motor peak horspower claims" seem mild since they drawjust over half the peak current of the 3.25HP big routers, which actually have almost 2HP. Fein Turbo II specs say 10A on one list and 9.7A on another. Mine draws 9.7A. Turbo II is slightly less powerful, rated 1050watt vs 1200watt.

During a flood, I had a worker buy the big Rigid for wet cleanup. They claimed an absurd amount of water pickup, actually MORE than my Jamco wet pickup unit that has two cords to plug into two separate 120V circuits. The Jamco picked up water at about 20x the Ridgid.

The Turbo III seems to have just slightly more lift and slightly less volume than the cheap shop vacs. The difference is SMALL. The actual difference is that increasing filtration gets you less flow, as you would expect.

Different units for different jobs, I'm not sure anything is ideal for everything.

Fein can be found on sale. I paid about $350 for each of my Turbo III and Turbo II HEPA. Great vac for the money, especially when you consider that I paid almost $200 for my first Fein vac almost 20 years ago. It is still in regular use in a shop environment.