Central Vacuum

We just decided on another feature in our house, to install a central vacuum system.  This consists of a large vacuum motor in the garage, and ducting distributed around the house.  These terminate into sockets into which you plug a long hose that is the same as any other vacuum (only about 10m in length).

The system activates when you plug the hose into a socket.  This activates the motor and creates a vacuum in the duct system.  There is also a floor pan system for the kitchen, where by you activate the system with your foot and sweep into it from the floor as you would a dustpan.

Its certainly a little bit of an extravagance, but not too much so.  There are genuine benefits to the system, primarily the fact that the really small dust is taken out of the room rather than recycled through the motor back into the air in the room, also the motor is considerably stronger than a standard vacuum cleaner, giving a better clean to the carpet.  You have the less compelling benefit of not having to carry the heavy motor unit around.  All in all it's about even but I think given we have the opportunity to add this in now I'd prefer to do so.

The ducting runs through the finished floor (a sand & cement screed on top of the pre-cast floors) at the same level as the underfloor heating.  We also have to plan to insert runs through the walls and around where the sockets will live in order to minimize the effort of installing the system - with the walls being constructed as I speak we ran close to the wire on this, but with all the other primary issues to get sorted this had to wait until the important stuff got sorted!