Specifying a Central Vacuum for RV Production

Specifying a central vacuum for RV production looks like a small line on a coach build sheet. It is also a disproportionate source of warranty calls. The unit gets chosen late, often on price alone, and the consequences show up two years later at a dealer who cannot get a bag for it.

This guide is written for the people who actually make that decision — purchasing, design engineering, and the service managers who inherit it. We build these systems, so treat this as an informed opinion rather than a neutral one. The criteria below are the ones we would apply whether or not we made the product.

Start with the envelope, not the motor

Most central vacuum systems on the market are household units in a smaller housing. That is the wrong starting point for a coach. The available space is defined before anything else: a cabinet bay, a basement compartment, a wall cavity between studs at a fixed depth.

Specify the mounting envelope first and reject anything that does not fit it cleanly. A unit that needs a shim, a spacer, or a modified cabinet on the line will cost you more in install labour across a production run than the price difference between any two suppliers.

Weight matters for the same reason it matters everywhere else in an RV. Our GarageVac GH120, for reference, is about nine pounds in a 29.5″ × 9.5″ × 4″ envelope. Ask any supplier for both figures in writing and treat vague answers as a warning.

Judge power by air watts, not horsepower

Horsepower on a vacuum spec sheet is close to meaningless. It describes what the motor draws under laboratory conditions, not what reaches the end of the hose. Two units advertising the same horsepower can differ substantially in actual cleaning performance.

Ask for air watts and water lift instead. Air watts combine airflow and suction into a single figure that reflects work done at the nozzle. Water lift tells you how the unit copes when the hose is partially blocked, which in an RV means sand, gravel and pet hair rather than household dust.

For a working reference point, the GH120 is rated at 514 air watts, 10.7 amps at 120V, with 110″ of water lift. Whatever supplier you are evaluating, insist on comparable figures measured the same way.

Filtration determines whether the complaint comes back

Road dust is finer than household dust and there is a great deal more of it. A filtration system built for domestic lint will pass it straight through and recirculate it into the cabin, and the owner will describe that as a smell or as dust settling on surfaces a day after cleaning. That call lands on your dealer, not the vacuum supplier.

Specify multi-stage filtration rated to at least 0.3 microns, and ask what happens as the bag fills. Many units lose suction sharply through the second half of a bag cycle because the bag collapses against the intake. Our units use a patented vacuum chamber design specifically to prevent that, so suction stays consistent until the bag is actually full.

The hose is the part the customer touches

Owners judge a central vacuum almost entirely by the hose. A coiled hose has to be stored somewhere, and in a coach there is nowhere to store it, so it ends up in a bay getting kinked and eventually replaced under warranty.

A stretch hose solves the storage problem by design: it retracts to a fraction of its extended length and lives in a fitting rather than a cupboard. Our systems ship with a 35-foot stretch hose, which reaches a full coach from a single inlet and removes the need for multiple inlet points and the pipe runs between them.

Fewer inlets means less pipe, fewer fittings, fewer leak points and less labour on the line. That is usually where the real cost difference between suppliers sits, not in the unit price.

Serviceability and parts, five years out

This is the criterion that gets skipped and causes the most damage. A vacuum that cannot be serviced by a dealer becomes a unit replacement under warranty.

• Can a dealer technician access the motor, filter and circuit board without removing the coach cabinetry?
• Are replacement motors, circuit boards and power cords available as individual parts, or is the unit sealed?
• How long has the current bag format been in production, and what is the supplier’s commitment to continuing it?
• Are hoses and tools cross-compatible across the supplier’s range, or specific to one discontinued model?

On the last point, every InterVac system in current production takes the same 32mm hoses and tools, and consumables carry across models. That is a deliberate decision: it means a coach built today can still be serviced with off-the-shelf parts long after the specific model has been superseded.

Warranty terms your dealer can actually use

Ask three questions that spec sheets rarely answer. Who does the end customer call — you, the dealer, or the vacuum manufacturer? Is the warranty handled by parts dispatch or by unit return? And what is the turnaround, in days, on a warranty part to a dealer?

A two-year warranty administered by parts dispatch is worth more to your service network than a longer warranty that requires shipping a unit back and leaves an owner without a vacuum for three weeks.

A checklist to send a supplier

Copy this into your next RFQ. Any supplier who cannot answer all of it in writing has told you something useful.

• Mounting envelope in inches, and installed weight in pounds
• Air watts and water lift, with the test standard used
• Current draw at 120V
• Filtration stages and rated particle size
• Suction retention across a full bag cycle
• Hose type, length and storage method
• Inlet count required for a typical coach length
• Field-replaceable parts list
• Bag format and years in production
• Hose and tool compatibility across the supplier’s range
• Warranty term, administration route, and parts turnaround to a dealer
• OEM volume pricing and lead time

Where we fit

InterVac has supplied central vacuum systems to RV manufacturers for years, and the OEM side is the largest part of our business. The compact models were designed around the space a coach actually has rather than shrunk down from a household unit, which is the short version of why the dimensions come out the way they do.

If you are specifying for a new model year, send us the envelope and the coach length and we will tell you which system fits and what the inlet layout should look like. If it is not a fit, we will say so.

See the RV central vacuum range or get in touch with our OEM team.