DIY Air Duct Cleaning Tools, part 1 - How I Cleaned Air Ducts using DIY Equipment, 40 year old house

The ductwork in this house had never been cleaned. Not even a do-it-yourself cleaning. Many things

had found their way into these vents. Including construction debris from when the house was built.

In this video, I'll show how the dust and debris was removed.

Most of the work was done with a homemade vacuum and duct whip.

I used a barrel, a leaf blower, a piece of OSB sheeting, and

some flexible foil ducting to make the vacuum.

One end of the foil ducting goes through a hole in the OSB sheet and into the barrel. The other

end is attached to a certain vent inside the house. There will be more about that later in the video.

A trash can or a fairly large storage tote could also work in place of the barrel as long as the

lid seals okay. Has to be sturdy enough not to collapse from the strong vacuum though.

This is my homemade duct whip. I'll use it on the end of an air hose to sweep the dust and debris

in the section of duct I'm working on toward the vent with the leaf blower vac attached.

I printed part of this duct whip but one or two pipe fittings and some aquarium airline

are all that's needed to build one. Those parts are shown at the end of the video.

It simply threads on to the end of one of my shop air hoses like so.

I'll need a couple more air hoses to get the air from the compressor to all the vents in the house.

Would be nice to install this blow gun for turning on and off air to the whip like the pros use.

But I don't have the fittings right now. So, I'm just going to use a coupler.

I chose two vent openings to work between and then removed their registers. The flexible foil

ducting from the leaf blower vac was then wedged into the lower of the two vent openings. I'll be

sweeping debris toward this duct opening from the other duct opening I chose using the whip.

A new garbage bag was used to seal around the foil ducting.

With the hose from the leaf blower vac temporarily installed at one end of this duct,

I turn off the HVAC unit and close all the vents except the two I'll be working through.

Next, the leaf blower vac was turned on and the air compressor was brought up to pressure.

[ leaf blower starting and running ]

Now I move to that other duct opening I chose and insert the whip. The ductwork

continues past the opening a few feet so I push the duct whip in all the way to the end.

Safety glasses on and here we go.

I plug in the air and pull the whip sweeper back toward me clearing the

debris in this dead in section. When the whip gets back to me I shut it off.

Then turn it around, turn it back on, and send it in the other direction.

Whether I'm pushing or pulling the duct whip, I'm always moving it or sweeping in

the same general direction as the air in the duct is moving, which is toward

the vacuum. The first pass with the whip swept most of the dust and debris out of this section.

See where the debris is piled up. I continue sweeping it all to the other end of this duct

where the foil hose from the vacuum is installed. After uninstalling that hose,

I remove all of the larger debris that the leaf blower vac couldn't quite suck out.

I direct the exhaust from the shop back out the nearest window.

That went pretty well so I select two other vent openings to work through.

[ leaf blower starting ]

I wouldn't use the duct whip near the air conditioning coils because as we see,

it whips around violently and could easily damage the thin aluminum fins that are on the AC coils.

The air comes from a portable 20 gallon air compressor with a max pressure of about 125psi

and it struggled to keep up. This blue air hose is too flexible for it to be pushed all the

way through this next segment of duct I'm working on. I need a much stiffer hose like the pros use.

A plumbing snake will get me by until I'm better equipped.

But I don't use it in segments where there are sharp protrusions that it might get snagged on.

This vent opening is near the center of a particularly long segment of ductwork.

Using a new trash bag stuffed with a couple other bags, I plugged off

one segment of the duct so that the two halves could be done separately.

In goes the foil hose and the unplugged segment is cleaned with the whip.

After vacuuming out the debris left conveniently at the vent opening,

I moved the plug to the other side like so, thus blocking off the clean segment.

This prevents debris from being accidentally swept into the clean side while sweeping the other half.

Working the house top to bottom, I end up in the crawl space to clean this plastic ducting. Only

one end is accessible, so I insert the duct whip all the way and place the foil hose from the leaf

blower vac just inside the duct. Next I close the plastic duct around both the vac and the whip hose.

Turned on the vacuum, pressurized the whip, and then pulled the whip back toward me and the vac hose.

It did a good job of clearing the dust and debris. But like much of

the ductwork, there's still some residue after cleaning. This looks like soot beneath the HVAC.

The residue is a direct result of failing to clean out the ductwork at regular intervals.

I'll need to remove it during another video in my do-it-yourself duct cleaning series. Part way

through the job I looked inside the barrel. This is all dust and lightweight material that the

whip stirred up. Some dust was blown into the yard. The homemade vacuum and duct whip both worked well.

In part two of this series, I'll build a duct whip using pipe fittings and aquarium airline.

I'll also reveal some of what I learned while making and using duct whips.

Thanks for watching.