>>106318915
>Not having a central vac
>5 horsepower continuous duty motor in the basement
>Enough suction on high to peel the varnish off a bookshelf
>No weight to carry. Literally just drag the hose around the house.
>Collection bin is so big you only need to empty it 3-4 times a year even with 2 dogs, a cat, and 3 children tracking dirt, sticks and god only knows what else all over the place.

Honestly, shitposts aside, the battery vacs have gotten fairly decent in the last 3 years, but the only ones I've tried that have vaguely usable suction require hearing protection to use. With the motor in the basement there's no noise except air flow, and none of the cordless ones I've seen have even half the suction of our corded miele. Even that's paltry compared to the yawning abyss that is the central vac.

My rule of thumb is the wet sand test. Any parent of two boys is familiar with their propensity for magically generating sand and spilling it all over your kitchen. How it's possible to go outside for less than 5 minutes and come back with pockets full of sand in a yard of pure grass is beyond me, but believe me they find a way. With the central vac you can pull wet sand out of the grout channels in the tiles. That takes a power head with anything else I've tried.

The other big thing is that you aren't kicking up and recirculating dust. It creates a massive amount of airflow into the room your cleaning so any dust that you do manage to kick up without immediately capturing it doesn't go anywhere. When we had our kitchen redone a few years ago we just hooked up two tubes to nearby ports and ran them into the dust barrier the contractors put up and let the vacuum run for 4 days. Zero sheetrock dust in the rest of the house. The electric bill was a bitch because we were dumping hundreds of CFM of chilled air outside, it was clean.

Before buying this house I would have said that central vacs were stupid. Now that I have one I don't think I'd want a house without one.