Anyone got a hamster

[joe90]

Frankly I think making sure it's cleaned (serviced) regularly is the key, vacuumed at terminals and manifold ( if accessible like mine will be). I am sure it's achievable to get a "service" light to come on in the controller a bit like most cars do.

[Guest MrsRA]

On 14/01/2017 at 13:08, dogman said:

I would love to see a 75mm newt

Bigger amphibians catch bigger bubbles...Ian training a local specimen...

 

[Jeremy Harris]

When this topic came up a while ago on Ebuild, I tried the "blow a bit of string down the duct" trick.  It works fine.  Use wool, with a few tufts of wool tied on the end to give some extra drag, and then use a vacuum cleaner on blow (I have an old one I use in the workshop that has the option to fit the hose on the outlet end).  It's only the first couple of feet of the extract ducts that seem to get dusty, as someone else has observed.

 

Anyway, once I'd got the bits of wool down the duct, I tied a bit of string to the end and pulled it back, so now all our extract ducts have a bit of thin nylon cord in them.  these cords are all tied together inside the plenum end, and tied to the internal terminal at the other end.  When we want to clean the ducts, another short length of string, with a big, home-made, woolly pom-pom in the middle is tied to the terminal end and pulled through the duct and then back again.  It works very well, but only do this when you are due to do an extract filter change/clean, as all the removed dust ends up in the extract filter.

 

It takes maybe 10 minutes per extract duct to do this, so maybe an hour's work all told, perhaps once every year or two.

 

As an extra tip, make the woolly pom-pom a lot bigger than the duct.  I made my first one only a little bigger than the duct bore and it wasn't that good.  The one I have now is around twice the diameter of the duct bore, so is a nice tight fit.

[ToughButterCup]

Hold on, where's that supply of pull-through I managed to appropriate while in the army? I knew it would come in useful.