Nilfisk Attix vacs

Well, hands down my 20+ year old shop-vac - fitted with a giant fleece Wunder Bag (.5 micron) & old pleated paper secondary motor filter (a motor incidentally that if you opened the cover would look like it’s been sitting on the bottom of the ocean) - has better suction than the the Flex / Nilfisk.

What’s worse is that the comparison was done using a very dirty Wunder Bag that’s been collecting drywall dust, mdf, pine, termite droppings, etc, etc. (it’s heavy right now). And the Flex / Nilfisk has a brand new fleece installed and the HEPA removed. Yikes.
Suction was set to max, both 32mm genuine Nilfisk hose and a tapered 2” to 1-½” hose were swapped between. The smaller the hose/tool adapter the more noticeable the difference.

I’m being kind if I say this thing reminds me of those Miele vacs you borrow from a housewife. I’m just not quite sure what these vacuum geniuses have been doing for the past 20+ years.

Worse still is that my antique shop-vac moves / maneuvers better, is lighter, and has volumes more tub space (and storage too if you don’t mind housing everything in with the fleece bag). Heck they even make a .3 micron HEPA disposable fleece bag now.

I know I wrote about / suspected all this before but now I have the proof. So why did I buy a eruo vac if my shop-vac is ‘all that’? I have zero idea how the shop-vac lasted this long, for the wars it’s been through, but it’s gotta die soon.  Besides, I was curious about the euro vacs. So why not just get a new shop vac? I might eventually have to, they now have their place on the job site since the large fleece bags came along. *mod required to fit bag or depending on model not even possible to use unless mfg. makes one. But there’s always Dustless Technologies pricey version of a shop-vac.

The good thing I can say about the Flex/Nilfisk is that it’s quiet. I took it apart and ran it with zero filters or cowlings, motor exposed, and surprisingly it’s hardly any louder than when assembled. A very fine motor. Often you can open a vac and add foam here & there to make it even quieter but I’m not sure it would make any difference in this case.
I also like that it was easy to add an RF remote (externally or internally) to control turning vac on without a tool attached. (then again the foot switch I use with the shop-vac is hands free).
And without a full bag I don’t think the vac is all that heavy either though there is a lot of wasted internal air space.

I can also say it will be nice to use a much quieter vac for sanding etc for sure. And for use with also quieter brushless stuff as I acquire more of it. But my shop-vac will remain indispensable for hogging up the rough stuff without worrying, and collecting mountains of the fine stuff without losing suction using the oversized fleece bags.

The anti-static hose that comes with the Flex (in matching Rhubarb color) is not the same hose that is supplied with the Nilfisk. It’s slightly, just noticeably, lighter & more flexible. Almost feels thinner. Looking at the two you can see the inner wall construction is different accounting for the slight improvement in flexibility. The FLEX hose has a more V shaped valley internal ribbing while the Nilfisk uses a closer/tighter pattern giving you a flatter interior wall. I can only guess that the Nilfisk version might do a more thorough job of drawing at lower suction (?). I’m sure that the hoses are probably made by the same people but there was a design change for the FLEX.

Disassembling the vac and comparing parts diagrams of the H/M/L shows that you can turn your vac into various versions just by ordering a couple of parts (even stickers) - though the M would require some external parts - but just saying.

In one of the photos below you’ll notice the motor cooling filter pathway draws air directly over the PCB then through the motor internal windings and out the other side of vac near exhaust. The supplied open cell sponge filter might allow max airflow but I’m definitely considering buying the high dust environment optional pleated filter to replace it. Can’t see how that black porous sponge is stoping anything fine from being drawn into motor windings or across circuit board (there’s all kinds of conductive particulate being stirred up on a job site).

I’d like more storage but the L-box adds too much bulk & weight so I might try those bungee nets for bikes hooked on top - or similar - holding down a mesh bag.

Got a box with some good quality foam used for packing and thought I'd stuff some in the Nil-FLEX to see if it made any difference. 
I downloaded a sound meter app, ran the vac stock and wrote down the level.
After installing foam I was surprised to see a drop of 9dB.  (exact same location & orientation for both vac and phone). 
Could you tell the difference with your ears alone?  Mmm, well it definitely didn't sound any louder. 

( I also have a nice mod coming along for the vac, unrelated to SPL's, that I think some others might find useful too but that's a couple of weeks out waiting on parts.)

Hearing about some holiday deals out there for as low as $240 but they all disappeared quickly as I guess they were just to get people talking and drive visits.
When I originally spoke with the rep he told me that Acme bought everything they had - “thousands”. Maybe Acme needs help selling these or Flex needs more space again and has let others in on the deal.

I’m not sure if my foam treatment made enough db difference to warrant opening it up. I did go further and rip the entire machine apart looking for a ‘silencer’ (most vac mfgs install one) and found it (photo). While it’s hard for me not to believe that removing it wouldn’t improve suction I’ve left it alone since taking these apart (while not difficult) is still a lot of busywork and fiddling, so to take it out and test and then replace… eh… I bought the thing for quiet and you have to think Nilfisk wouldn’t have sacrificed that much performance over sound attenuation so what’s the point. When I do need more draw I just hook up a 2.5 tapered hose. All that said the Nilfisk's noise reducer version does 'seem' rather invasive.

The optional storage adapters aren’t my cup of tea since they screw on - so that half the time you’ve got these albatrosses stuck on top in the way doing nothing. Instead I built a simple platform out of exterior mdf with fangs/cleats that drops in place and pulls off as easily. I’ll finish it off when I have the time with a cut out handle and one other small detail.
After placing it on I discovered that the vacs aren’t that level front to back and so I shimmed the front wheels with spacers.
For my purposes the top is to help keep miscellaneous items off the floor at a more back friendly level and make use of space in tight quarters. Additionally because I use stick-on rubber feet on the bottom of my systainers etc they grip the mdf like a mutha and stay put if I want to park boxes there. And once a box is on top a person could of course add another mdf ‘cutting’ top atop their systainer.

If you want the mdf platform to do double duty you can bolt on some swivel casters at the corners. It will still mate with the top of the Nilfisk vac using up to a 5” wheel depending on how wide you want your top to be. But the one I made in the photo will just take a 5” swivel caster without the wheels interfering so it doesn’t have to be that large. From my measurements I’m ‘almost’ certain a Tanos/Systainer cart with wheels could also be used if you add/mod cleats/fangs to the bottom too. The idea being that at different onsite job stages the cart mates to vac while also clipping systainers or only acts as a storage platform by itself or keeps boxes mobile on floor when not on vac.

(btw- I should mention none of this has anything to do with the ‘mod’ I mentioned in previous posts, haven’t had the time to figure out how to make them for the market cheaply enough.) 

In the meantime I bought some chinese 120v 1hp wireless relays for remote power up. One should be enough because of the vacs ‘soft start’ helping to not arc the relay(s), (using an ammeter you can watch the current draw ramp up slowly when vac is switched on), but I’m now experimenting with getting two relays to ‘pair’ with same remotes so that I can parallel the current between them and never have to question the relays suspect printed specs. All this junk will get stuffed inside under the upper vac cowling - tons of space everywhere inside (such a waste of space). I don’t like having to carry around those remote dongles that are typically used between cord and wall outlet so with everything built inside vac I can just forget about it and velcro/distribute the keychain remotes all over the place.

If we’re talking about a standard 5 gal plastic painters bucket here I also discovered those things lack wall integrity. Same thing got my attention while using a different vac with the little black Mirka hose and a Dustopper. No blockage in hose, then boom! - you turn around, wide eyed, looking to see what the hell that noise was.

fwiw - the Nil-Flex draws around 8.5 amps without hose connected and less (7.8 ~ 6.3 amps) with 32mm hose attached or under load (my measurements). I’ve measured it drop to 4.6 amps momentarily blocking inlet. When you add the 500watts listed on tool plug to the 8.5 amp you arrive close to their 1440w/12amp label listing.
I’m not sure of how they calculate it but perhaps they assume if a tool is connected that the speed is also usually turned down, further dropping current draw and getting them a UL pass on the 16ga cord (approx 10 ~ 13 amps).

Using a single 5 gallon bucket as the reservoir for a cyclone is not sufficient. Likely to implode if hose is blocked. Simply nesting the bucket inside another identical bucket is sufficient.

Didn't realize that would work, great simple solution.