Living in the Atlanta area, we took a pretty good lick from Hurricane Dennis with some of the heaviest rain I have seen in my 50 years around here. As a result my shop floor took in some water (about 1/2 inch) and I was faced with a mess to deal with. Luckily my floor is painted concrete and all of my tools are on mobile bases and nothing was harmed except my ego and the pain of cleanup. I had to deal with removing the water from the shop. Here I sit with a little 2 gallon shop vac that can suck up 1/2 gallon of water at a time at best (I have no idea why they call it a 2 gallon) to tackle the 2 hour job of draining the shop and drying the floor.
After a 24 hour body recovery, I am inclined to go purchase the biggest meanest Wet/Dry Vac I can find (I know.... over reaction is common) should I ever encounter anything like this again or have other needs for sump pump type operations. This has never happened before and probably never will again (I hope)
Now the questions. The whole while I was sucking and dumping that little shop vac I kept eyeing my Delta AP400 and thinking how much space it takes up in the corner of my tiny shop and how very useless it was at this particular moment. As I have mentioned before, I am still shop building and tool collecting at the moment and have not had a chance to use that "sucker" yet. If I get myself a beast of a wet/dry vac with the proper filters and bags, can I not use it in place of the AP400 with about the same results, except for maybe more frequent dumps in the flower bed? Will it not pull the chips and dust as good as the AP400? Can it not do as good a job over all of collecting and filtering? I know the goal is to reduce dust in the air as well as keep things tidy. Most of my cutting and sanding and routing is done outdoors, weather permitting, but every now and then I may have to actually run a machine in the shop and I need some sort of DC on board for those times. I know I need a filtration system to get the small particles out of the air and that is coming soon. I work with only one machine at a time and don't mind the connecting and reconnecting of whatever suction I go with.
I am looking for some opinions and/or advice on whether a wet/dry vac of Godzilla magnitude would not serve the same purpose of an AP400. I know there are bigger and better DC systems out there than I have and a shop vac would never touch them. I am only trying to compare a shop/vac to what I currently have so I can decide which one really needs to live in that valuable corner of real estate.
Thanks for any and all input.