An industrial vacuum cleaner is designed to provide high performance covering huge areas and in other cases designed to perform specific functions apart from being of a high performance and robust nature. There are vacuum cleaners designed to perform silently in hospital and other surroundings demanding silence of operation, industrial purposes where large debris is to be vacuumed, wet and dry cleaning appliances, anti static machines needed in computer rooms and electronic manufacturing laboratories, industrial machines designed to collect dust, oil, acid along with other toxic material, yet other machines are made and certified to operate in conditions where gases, asbestos fiber, carbon and other chemical substance dusts are to be extracted. So called clean room vacuums are used in operating theatres, private hospitals other medical applications and also the removing of nuclear waste. Some products are intended to be used in flood and other water removal applications and can be used for liquid transfer applications, while yet other machines can steam and suck concurrently, often used in sanitizing applications, like commercial kitchens, vats and so forth.

So, an industrial vacuum cleaner is not something for sale at the local supermarket or furniture shop. They are marketed by providers that understand the industrial purposes requiring vacuuming and as such they offer different types of machines each intended to cope with a specific range of functions and operating situations. Clean rooms are such environments like operating theatres and particular manufacturing facilities in the manufacture of medical devices, consumer electronics, pharmaceutic products, and other critical manufacturing environments. The requirements of a clean room exceed that of vacuuming, but vacuuming is an essential part of the overall cleanliness strategy, which includes air removal along with other measures. Consider the fact that a motionless person will typically shed 100 000 particles each and every minute, and if a person were to be running, he would shed about 100 000 000 particles per minute. This gives some guidance for the requirements of a clean room where a human hair, as debris, could cause a critical situation. This should adequately demonstrate the degree to which a clean room vacuum must perform - definitely something else entirely from that which you clean the carpets with.

There are specialist industrial vacuuming services that are experts in removing debris and waste on a large scale. In some instances the vacuum unit might be even truck mounted as a way to remove residual waste from even engineering sites. Typically such waste would be products like cement, lime, sludge and sand. The vacuum truck strategy is used where conventional removal methods would take too much time and would be too costly. This removed waste would then typically be dumped in land fill projects or some dumping ground. So, an industrial vacuum cleaner in some instances, could well be employed in household as a robust unit, however, many would not be appropriate to household use or would not even fit into your home.