These Small Shop Vacs Are Handy for Cleaning Cars, Little Spills, and Leaky Plumbing

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Shop vacs—also known as wet/dry vacuums—are indispensable. They suction up sawdust in the workshop, dirt at the potting bench, salt and road sand from your car’s floor mats, and water from a plumbing leak. Because we use small shop vacs almost daily, we know what separates the great models from the okay versions. We’ve tested a range of the most promising models to determine the best small shop vacs on the market, and we rounded up some advice to help you choose.

Looking for more ways of tidying up? Check out our picks for the best robot vacuums, all-purpose cleaners, and vacuums for pet hair.

The Best Small Shop Vacs

• Best Overall: Ridgid Stor-N-Go WD5500

• Best Budget: Vacmaster VHB 305M

• Most Versatile: DeWalt Max DCB205CK

• Quietest: Armor All AA255

• Most Capacity: Snapper XD Max 1688061

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What to Consider

How Do Wet/Dry Vacuums Work?

A shop vacuum consists of a detachable motor and a fan assembly called the vacuum head. The head sits atop a plastic drum (or a steel drum in some industrial models), which holds the waste the vacuum picks up.

Shop vacs also have a nozzle and a hose that fit into an inlet port. Debris or water gets sucked up by the hose and pulled into the drum, while the air used to pull it goes out of the exhaust port. (Pro tip: If you need a blower in a pinch, you can insert the hose into the exhaust port.)

Small shop vacs are often configured like suitcases so you can carry them around easily. Some even have shoulder straps. Many small wet/dry vacuums also come with wall-mounting hardware so you can store them near a workbench or on the wall of a garage—wherever you’ll need it most often.

Capacity

The volume of the vacuum tank is measured in gallons—it’s an approximation of how much the tank can hold without the vacuum head and air filter in place. Typically, shop vacs for residential and light commercial-grade use have 5 to 20 gallons of capacity. Most small wet/dry vacuums, however, are 5 gallons or less.

Power

Most shop vacs run on power supplied by a power cord that you plug into a wall outlet. The cordless shop vacs on this list run on batteries. Like many other consumer-grade power tools, each battery is brand-locked. That means a DeWalt battery only works with DeWalt tool systems and isn’t compatible with Hart or Snapper devices. This could be a dealbreaker for those who don’t already own batteries or a no-brainer for brand loyalists who already have some on hand.

The cordless options below—the Snapper XD Max 1688061, the DeWalt Max DCB205CK, and the Hart HPWD01B—don’t come with a battery included, and although these shop vacuums are small, their respective 18- or 20-volt batteries aren’t cheap. For example, the Snapper XD Max 1688061 works exclusively with a Briggs & Stratton 82V Max 2.0 battery, which retails for $167 at the time of this writing. If you don’t already own batteries from a tool system, we recommend grabbing the Hart HPWD01B, which includes a battery and costs $120, all up.

How We Tested

We gathered several small shop vacs that are easily portable and ideal for small to mid-size jobs around the house, the garage, and the yard. We put most of these models through a thorough test: We timed the corded vacuums as they sucked up 2 pounds of sawdust, 2 pounds of screened topsoil, and 1 gallon of water. We averaged out the times of those three tests to get an idea of how efficient each model was, and looked at other features and performance characteristics like the machines’ noise under peak load, handle comfort, cord length, and whether the hoses attach securely.

We selected cordless options based on our experience using them, their portability, and their battery life (and battery expense). If you’re interested in cordless options, have a look at the 2-gallon Hart HPWD01B. We added this model in our latest update based on a recommendation by the original test editor of this story, Roy Berendsohn, who enjoys Hart products for their solid, bargain-forward value. We didn’t run the time trial, but we did use it as a portable dust collector in our office.

Our Full Small Shop Vac Reviews

The small shop vac winner from our test is fast and powerful. Its large-diameter, clog-resistant hose is supple and easy to work with, even in cold weather. The same goes for its power cord. And nothing else came close in our water test: It sucked up a gallon of water in 2.2 seconds, which was twice as fast as any other machine we tried.

It also has the best accessory kit of any vacs we tested, including a well designed wall-mounting bracket. Its only demerit is that it’s a bit top heavy—but that becomes less of an issue as you fill the tank with debris.

This is the only small shop vac with a four-wheel caddy we tested, which is surprising given that it’s also the cheapest on this list, and its wall-mounting bracket is very well designed. This makes it a very adaptable appliance.

It’s easy to wheel around the house like a normal canister vacuum, as well as a handy tool to keep permanently in the shop or garage for car cleaning—an application made more practical by the 6-foot hose. (You need as much hose as you can get in auto cleaning to reach floor mats and between seats.)

The only vacuum that works as both cordless and corded in this test, this model is powered by its manufacturer’s well-regarded XR (extended run) battery. You can drill and saw with the company’s other cordless power tools and then plug the same battery into this machine to clean up your mess.

You can also run the vacuum on 120-volt power. The icing on the cake is the air filter, which was the best during our testing—and you don’t need to change it when switching from dry to wet clean-up.

Our only complaint is the tank’s lip. It catches dirt when you tip the tank over to empty debris. It’s not a deal breaker, but it could be improved.

The quietest ­vacuum in this test is great for sucking up debris and other messes in the car (though you should still wear hearing protection when using a shop vac). It has enough power for light-duty cleaning and a handy Velcro band to wrap up the cord.

We also particularly like its oddly shaped (and oddly named) accessory: the Deluxe Car Nozzle. Calling it deluxe may be overstating things a bit, but it’s aptly suited to the low-pile carpet in cars, along with ribbed floor mats. Our only complaint is that the sufficiently long power cord is stiff—especially in cold weather. Our advice would be to leave this model in the house where a little extra warmth will help maintain cord flexibility.

This cordless model from Snapper runs for more than 20 minutes on its sole battery, and we found that it has enough power to pull in both sawdust and heavier debris, like a mixture of metal shavings and sawdust (we didn’t try it with water).

One of its best applications is to plug its hose into an adapter fitting and connect the fitting to a circular saw with a dust port. In that context, it’s amazing. It forms a rolling dust collector that follows the saw as it cuts.

We estimated that it picks up 95 percent (or slightly more) of the dust the saw produces. We were impressed when we picked up the vacuum head and looked in the tank. On the work surface, there was a thin scattering of dust, but the tank had quite a pile at the bottom, all of which would have been on the shop floor—and us—had we not had the vacuum hooked up.

Because the vacuum kit (bundled with a battery) is quite expensive, it makes the most sense as an accessory for people who already have Snapper’s other yard tools, like the mower.

We also like the Turbo setting, which increases the motor and fan speed for aggressive vacuuming. Of course, this runs the battery down faster, but we did notice that only 15 minutes on the charger will impart enough battery to do an equal amount of vacuuming, probably allowing you to finish the job.

While we didn’t have much hands-on time with the Hart HPWD01B, the original writer of this story, Roy Berendsohn, still recommends it as a solid addition to the list. His reasoning is simple: Hart is a solid, value-forward brand with reliable products. The HPWD01B a great value in itself, but a cordless shop vacuum with battery included at $120 makes it even more worthy of a shot.

We played around with this product in our offices and found it relatively lightweight and straightforward, with easy-to-toggle power switches and locks, and a clean design for stowing it away. We used it to clean up some wet coffee grounds on our office floors, and it did the job fairly quickly, though we did have to squat down a little lower to the ground than expected—a longer hose would be nice. (At 4 feet, the HPWD01B has the shortest hose on this list.)

Outside of our time with it, according to user reviews, the HPWD01B’s tank isn’t very reliable under heavy loads. Its snap-on locks are best suited for dust and debris, and one reviewer points out that a full tank of water caused it to fall off the unit.

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