Reboot My Garage has endorsed the VacMaster VWM510 garage vacuum for the past four years. If you're on a tight budget, the VacMaster is still a great buy. But if you want the very best, check out our new winner.
The best garage vacuum for 2023 is the VacuMaid GV50PRO. The HEPA filtration keeps that concrete and spring dust in the can and out of the air. The 50 foot hose reaches from the wall to the driveway without pulling. The VacuMaid power can suck the paint off your car. I just wanted a longer hose, and I got a more powerful and therefore quicker cleaner than my old vac.
What about wet pickup? The VacuMaid is NOT a wet pickup vacuum. So if that's a box that needs checking, I have the perfect powerful wet dry vac for you below.
The Best 2023 Garage Vacuum Cleaner
The VacuMaid GV50PRO is a wall-mounted machine with a 50 ft. hose, steel wand and four accessory attachments. The canister holds a HEPA filter beg that prevents leaking even the tiniest dust particles back into the air. This is important, because garage floors are naturally dusty. The GV50PRO gets to call itself “professional” because the motor has a long average life.
That's why this machine has a five-year warranty when some cheaper models are as short as 90 days long. The GV50PRO is also quieter than the average consumer or professional garage vacuum, making it so much less unpleasant on the ears than its competitors.
What makes the VacuMaid the best is the powerful suction you get even with a 50-foot hose.
The VacuMaid does not hesitate to suck up heavy bolts, and wood cutting dust does not clog the hose or canister. And to do that while quieting down that motor makes it a pleasant accessory to the garage and not an annoyance to the ears.
Fifty feet is as good as it gets. There's a 30-foot model if you don't need as much hose, but I am going to bet you that you'll use those extra 20 feet.
My VacMaster has 21 total feet of reach so I can tell you that it's not enough. It does not reach from the front of the garage to the car unless the car is near the doors. I'm looking forward to getting another 30 feet of hose reach.
I read a Vacumaid review thattt said the GV50PRO could not pick up a leaf. How long could Vacumaid stay in business if their product was that bad? If you want a vacuum cleaner to last — I don't care if it's for the garage or the house — you have to keep it clean. That's right. I want you to vacuum your vacuum cleaner.
We use our Electrolux house vacuum to clean our garage vacuum. When the hose or canister is clogged, the motor can't pick anything up. So remember, no one sells a brand new vacuum cleaner that can't pick up a leaf. If you have suction issues, clean the hose and remove blockages where the hose attaches to the motor.
The other possibility is that the lid is not sealed well enough. The “vacuum” part of a vacuum cleaner is restricting air flow, which you can't do without a well-sealed lid.
The VacuMaid has 138 CFM (cubic feet per minute) of pure suckage power, more powerful than most other vacuum cleaners. The manufacturer also makes whole-house vacuum cleaners that sit in the basement and use hoses that snake through the walls. They know how to build a powerful vacuum cleaner. The hose is 1.25 inches in diameter so it can pick up a leaf pile without clogging.
VacuMaid Gotchas
The biggest complaint I have is the hose hanger is made of plastic. I live in New Hampshire, where plastic gets frozen every winter. I'm getting the Coxreel V-117-850 to store the hose in a nice, neat package rather than hanging all of it over one piece of plastic. It has a built-in controller to avoid free reeling, and is made of heavy gauge steel that doesn't break down in freezing weather.
Love it But — I Need Wet Pickup Too
While it's not a HEPA vacuum, the Bissell Garage Pro vacuum cleaner is a wall-mounted, dirt-sucking machine with a reasonable 32 ft. cord. In exchange for the extra fine dust cleanliness and 50-foot reach of the VacuMaid GV50PRO, you get a wet pickup machine that cleans both dry and liquid messes. The tank is slightly larger than half the size of the GV50PRO, but you need a smaller tank when doing wet pickup. Tanks get heavy fast when filled with water. Also, remember that a wall mounted wet vac only makes sense if you take it OFF the wall before pulling up liquids. If you pull up liquid mess with the tank on the wall, you have to dismount up to 36 lbs. of water (9 lb. per gallon, and it's a 4-gallon tank).
Speaking of weight, if there is any chance you will use wet-pickup while this machine is on the wall, then the machine has to be mounted to the studs. Honestly, it should be mounted to the studs regardless. Mounting to drywall is asking for failure. Water is heavy, drywall could never hold onto a vacuum cleaner full of liquid pick-up.
The Bissell Garage Pro competes with the VacuMaid GV30PRO, which is the same as the GV50PRO except the cord is 30 ft. rather than 50 ft.
The Bissell Garage Pro converts to a blower. If you ever need to get a lot of dust out of the garage, remove the cars to the street and set the Bissell to “blow.” You can make your own tornado in the garage while kicking the dust to the driveway.
This is a high-quality vacuum cleaner and it has the same hose-holding problem as the VacuMaid. There is too much hose to store, so it's better to just get a decent hose reel than to use the hose wrap that comes with either machine.
If I were to buy the Bissell rather than the VacuMaid, I'd get the Coxreel host reel so as not to fight the hose into a nice hanging position. It's a luxury but I value not being annoyed but things that can make me trip and fall.
View the Bissell Garage Pro on Amazon
Bissell Garage Pro Gotchas
The Bissell vacuum hose is not the strong yet pliable work of art you get from VacuMaid. It feels cheesy and if you have freezing cold winters you might find that it pops a hole sooner rather than later.
Cheap plastic can't suffer through cell-cracking cold spells without creating molecular wear and tear on the corrugated ripples. You'll put a piece of duct tape on the hole but the vacuum pick-up will never be the same.
The hose is 1.25 inches in diameter, a 1/2 inch narrower than the Vacumaid. Remember that diameter when you are shopping for a replacement hose in two or three years.
View the Bissell Garage Pro on Amazon
But I Want Wheels for My Wet Vac
You do want wheels with your wet vac, because carrying water without wheels is like asking for a sprained back. So let's forget the wall-mount altogether, and talk about wheels. The most popular and well-rated wheeled wet-dry vac for the garage is the Craftsman CMXEVBE17595.
It's a crazy 16-gallon pickup vac, meaning that it weighs 144 extra gallons when it's full of water.
The Craftsman allows you to switch from Suck to Blow, so create a garage tornado and get rid of the dust in a fun five minutes.
The hose is a gigantic 2.5 inches in diameter. To get good suckage through a hose that big requires a strong motor and a short hose length. You get 7 feet of hose with the Craftsman, which is as short as a hose is going to get. You'll always have the vacuum cleaner at your feet using this model. This is good for wet messes.
The Craftsman is surprisingly versatile, though, because you can get several different kinds of filters to master the cleanup job at hand.
It's 177 CFM (cubic feet per minute), making the Craftsman a strong machine for leaves, dust and the nuts and bolts that landed on the floor. The Craftsman is a “shop vac,” you can pick up fine dust from wood or wallboard without having to unclog every five minutes.
Craftsman Filters
The versatility partly comes from the different filters you can use. The higher up in the filter chain you go, the better the suckage of finer and finer materials.
Get these filters as follows:
CMXZVBE38754: for cleaning woodworking dust and car carpet
CMXZVBE38751: for cleaning woodworking dust, the car carpet, cold indoor ash from the fireplace, and fine particulates indoors
CMXZVBE38753: for cleaning woodworking dust, the car carpet, cold indoor ash from the fireplace, fine particulates indoors, drywall dust and for cleaning up allergens
CMXZVBE38773: for wet pickup
But I Want Wheels and Wet Pickup
I want wheels and a wet pickup on my wall-mounted vacuum cleaner. That's why I rated the VacMaster wall mount wet/dry with an available wheel-kit extra as the first-place vacuum cleaner four years in a row. The VacMaster VM510 is a wall-mounted wet/dry vacuum with a blower function and 21 ft. of hose. With an optional wheel kit, it's the only garage vacuum that picks up water while on wheels but lives the rest of the time on the wall.
It's not as powerful as the VacuMaid GV50PRO, nor is its hose as high quality. By comparison, though, the VacMaster wall-mount vacuum cleaner is cheap at less than half the price of the VacuMaid. However, winter has taken its toll. After four years, the Vacmaster's hose broke where it connects to the cannister. The freezing temperatures got the plastic.
View the Bissell Garage Pro on Amazon
2023 best garage vacuum: View the VacuMaid on Amazon
