Today I'm going to review the Bucket Head wet/dry vac by the Home Depot. This is a bucket
head... and this is a five-gallon bucket head. "Let's do this!" Yeah! So you're going to
need to buy a separate Homer five-gallon bucket... I've got a dozen of these things.
And the reason I bought this is to clean up things that I don't want to clean up
with my regular shop vacs. For example, really stale smelling dirt from
the basement , or say that cat litter stuff if you get a small oil spill
and you put some of that cat litter stuff on it. If you suck that up
with your shop vac you will never get the smell out. It gets absorbed into the
plastics and even if you throw away the filter, it doesn't matter. So I'm
gonna try this and see how it works. So I'm going to open it up see what we've
got. This will be the quickest unboxing ever because I hate unboxing videos. I
feel like we're not eight years old so we don't need to see this in action. I'm
gonna speed this up. Power head, filter,
and a short hose. Right on! A couple things before I plug
it in because I just said I might use this to clean up some of that cat litter
stuff. You should not do that! In the warnings specifically it says, "sparks
inside the motor can ignite flammable vapors or dust. To reduce the risk of
fire or explosion, do not use near flammable or combustible liquid gases or dust, such
as gasoline, or other fuels, lighter fluid, cleaners, oil-based paints, natural gas,
coal dust, magnesium dust, grain dust, aluminum dust, or gunpowder." Who
would do that? "Do not use on a bucket that contains
residuals of such vapors or dust." Also, you don't ever want to vacuum up
anything that's burning like cigarettes, or ashes from the fireplace, or matches,
unless you're positive that they're completely extinguished. It says, "Do not
vacuum drywall dust, cold fireplace ash, or other fine dust, which may pass
through the bag filter and be exhausted back into the air." So my thought on that
is, I'm going to try this. I'm doing this at my own risk obviously. This is a
Filtrete 3M vacuum bag which picks up fine dust and allergens. I'm gonna see just
how well the vacuum operates if I put this over the top even though you're not
supposed to be sucking up fine dust with this thing. I've got a bungee cord and I'm
just putting it through the bottom hole. It would be nice if they showed you
which end is suck and which is below, and pull it around under the cord.
Before you use
this you want to make sure, and this is really important, that this rubber band here is
properly holding down the filter all the way around because if not, there's gonna
be a mess. There's the bucket head with the vacuum bag attached.
This is the type of situation where I don't like to use my shop vac because
this is a real old house and that's some stinky dirt. I used a rotary hammer,
a Bosch Bulldog rotary hammer, which I'll put a review for up in the upper right
corner, to chisel down two inches in order to pour in new concrete. You never know
what you're gonna find down here so just in case there is something
flammable, I have a fire extinguisher on hand. We'll capture it as I blow up.
There's some dust in the corners over here and along the side that I
want to clean up and we'll use the bucket head to do that.
Not bad! There's, you know, brick dust down there. There's
silica dust from the concrete and Portland cement, and there was some sand so
that's why I wanted to use the extra vacuum bag. I'll show you in a minute how
much dirt was collected and how much actually went into the filter., but the vac
has a reasonable amount of suction. Now I'm not going to show you what it picked
up and how much made it through to this vacuum bag I attached. Now brick dust is
pretty fine so I'm not surprised to see that there's some red dust in there.
Some brick dust and some of the really fine dust particles. And on the inside
there's definitely brick dust on the filter. In the bucket you can
see the sand, rocks, and concrete. This vac is pretty good
for a four dollar bucket and like a $23 head. Roughly 27 bucks total.
It's a good disposable unit when you don't want to use your more expensive
chopped vacs for sucking up really disgusting debris.
I have two other shop vacs... one is a small RIDGID four gallon, and the other a big
Craftsman which I use for removing dust and debris from my saws. Then of
course, you know, using this extra vacuum bag probably costs more than the
whole thing together. It's belongs to like a Miele (I don't how to pronounce
it ), German vacuum cleaner. And the extra bags work really well for catching excess dust and
debris that isn't picked up by the filter in this.
I'm not planning to use the bucket head to suck up water (Hi kitty), but I figure
I'll show you how it works either way. You have to remove the filter, which I've
already done, and there's a float inside here that lifts as you suck up water.
When it reaches the top, the suction will stop. The motor won't stop but the
suction will stop. So let's give it a shot.
This is a two gallon bucket but that's about one gallon of water. Again,
I don't plan on using it for this because to me the nozzle is too small and I have larger
shop vacs that can handle this better. Let's give it a go.
That's not bad at all. Worked pretty well. One thing I want to point out is
the bucket with the hose on it can sometimes, until the buckets
filled, can be kind of unbalanced when carrying it by the
handle. Just wanted to point that out. Now let me show you... All the water
is in the shop vac and I've also cleaned out my hose from all the dust
and debris I showed you earlier. I will say I was very impressed with this
suction when using the unit with water. In fact, I was more impressed
picking up water thanI was when the unit was picking up the cat litter,
dust, and debris, I will say it's a pretty good unit and I'm not a fan of
disposable tools, but it's a great alternative to using my more expensive
shop vacs to pick up things that I wouldn't want to pick up with those
units so I give this thing a thumbs up. And if this video has been helpful,
please do me a favor and like it, and most importantly subscribe because that
always helps me out. And as always, thank you so much for watching!