BUILT
TO LAST.
Wheaton future.
Old-school service throughout.
MORE THAN
A VACUUM
STORE.
Central Vacuum traces its roots to 1947, when Wehrli Home Appliances became a self-servicing Hoover dealership in downtown Naperville.
More than forty years later, Bill Wehrli — one of Jim Wehrli’s ten children — separated the vacuum side of the family business and opened Wehrli’s Vacuum Center at 414 W. 5th Avenue in 1988.
Naperville came to know the shop as a place where you could buy a genuinely good vacuum, bring an old one back to life, and talk to someone who actually understood how the machine worked.
OUR
HISTORY.
LEARN
THE WHOLE
BUSINESS.
Owen did not enter the vacuum business through a boardroom.
He learned it behind the counter, on the repair bench, inside mechanical rooms and within the walls of homes and buildings.
That matters. CentVac’s approach to selling equipment is inseparable from knowing how to repair it, install it and keep it operating years later.
NAPERVILLE.
414 W. 5th Avenue is more than an address.
It is where Wehrli’s Vacuum Center opened in 1988, where Owen learned the trade, where generations of customers brought machines in for repair, and where Central Vacuum grew from a neighborhood vacuum store into a company capable of handling sophisticated residential and commercial built-in systems.
As CentVac prepares for its future in Wheaton, Naperville remains the historic flagship in the story — the place where the company we know today was shaped.
OLD-SCHOOL
SERVICE.
NO APOLOGY.
We have grown by preserving the small-town service culture in which this business was rooted while continuously improving what we sell, how we install it and how we take care of customers.
Problems happen. Machines break. Installations surprise you. Products fail. Buildings are rarely as simple as the plan suggests.
Those moments are not interruptions to the job. They are the job.
OLD DOESN’T
SCARE US.
The system pictured here dates to roughly the mid-1920s and was built by the Spencer Turbine Company.
We do not encounter century-old equipment every week. But the willingness to understand it says something important about the way CentVac works.
Old central vacuum, new central vacuum, portable machine, legacy brand, unusual piping, strange motor, obsolete part — we start by understanding what is there before deciding what should happen next.
WHEATON.
A place worth rebuilding.
DuPage Vacuum was founded by Erhard Fussel in 1963 and became a long-running Wheaton family business.
In 1983 it opened on Willow Street downtown, where it remained for approximately thirty years before eventually operating from Roosevelt Road.
On December 19, 2020, fire tore through the Roosevelt Road building. Wheaton firefighters brought it under control in about twenty minutes, but the center of the structure and attic suffered extensive damage.
In 2021, the property was marketed with two possibilities: rehabilitate it, or tear it down and build something else.
CentVac chose the harder answer.
Owen and the team have been restoring the former DuPage Vacuum building for its next life as a CentVac location — preserving a property already associated with vacuum sales and repair while creating room for what the company has become.
NOT A
RESET.
A CONTINUATION.
The move to Wheaton is not about leaving CentVac’s history behind.
It brings together two long suburban vacuum traditions: Naperville roots reaching to 1947 and a Wheaton vacuum business whose own story began in 1963.
The next CentVac will still repair old machines, still sell great portable vacuums and still answer the phone when somebody has a problem.
It will also have room to keep growing what the company has become: built-in systems, retractable hoses, commercial applications, builders, specialty projects, Laundry Jet and the kind of unusual work that rarely fits neatly into a product category.
RESTORATION IS UNDERWAY · UPDATES WILL FOLLOW