How I cleared water from pipes to allow soldering

[Darren]

Not sure if I reinverted the wheel, but after draining my central heating system to allow me to do some soldering, there was still water in the pipework near where I wanted to solder a new joint.

To clear it I did the following:-

Cut a hole in the side of an empty 2 ltr drinks bottle, Removed the screw top and connect the bottle top to the pipe using a short lenght of hose, Laid the bottle flat, rotating the bottle so the hole I made was facing up, Switched on a dyson vacuum cleaner and held nozzel close to hole in side of bottle. Water was sucked into the bottle, but wasn't sucked up into dyson nozzel.

The drinks bottle crumpled up a bit, but I still managed to completely clear the pipework of about 6 pints of water in no time at all.

Darren.

[Steve Walker]

Neat idea. I have a yard of old fishtank airline tubing (6-8mm 'ish), which I push down the pipe and suck out any loose water. Not advisable with filthy heating pipes though, might try your trick next time I do that!

[Christopher Tidy]

Neat idea. I have a vague recollection of there being an ancient vacuum cleaner which worked on a similar principle. Two pipes entered a cylindrical chamber through the curved walls. The pipes entered the chamber opposite each other, but one was slightly higher than the other so that they didn't collide. Each pipe extended almost to the opposite wall. One pipe was connected to the fan, the other did the cleaning. The idea was that the debris fell into the bottom of the chamber while the air found its way around the corners and out of the second pipe. Worked well for heavy debris, but less well for light dust, if I remember rightly.

Best wishes,

Chris

[The Medway Handyman]

Genius! I will definately remember that one.

[mrcheerful]

similar idea to my one:

to vacuum out a drain (really disgusting) get a 5 gallon plastic oil can, cut an extra hole in the top which your vacuum cleaner nozzle can fit into, get a bit of whatever tubing you can (I used a bit of exhaust pipe and a radiator hose) which can fit into the usual cap hole, or into the cap, the vacuum is run , the pipe is poked down the drain and all the disgustingness is sucked into the plastic oil drum, which you then just throw away complete.

mrcheerful

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I've got an Apollo HVLP spray set which uses just a glorified vacuum cleaner on blow to power it. And the hose thread is the same as a washing machine one. So just loosely fit a spare tap to the end of the circuit to be soldered and blow out the water with nice warm air.

[John Rumm]

neat. Same sort of idea to a surgical vacuum like used in hospital... the interceptor vessel catches all the gloop before it gets sucked into the pipework.

[Grumps]

And, quite disugustingly, the French (that's where I first saw this) sell a baby bogie sucker which is a small vesel with two pipes. One the adult sucks, the other goes up the baby's nose to relieve, err, conjestion.

[Guy King]

The message from John Rumm contains these words:

It's a glorified insect-collector's pooter. Very sensible.

[Lobster]

Mm, nice. Though being French, I'm surprised they bother with an interceptor vessel...

David

[john2]

Isn't this the same principle as a wet 'n dry vacuum cleaner.

john2

[Guy King]

The message from Lobster contains these words:

Bit of garlic and some bogeys would be indistinguishable from snails.

[The Natural Philosopher]

[bof]

In message , Darren writes

On a similar vein I needed to run some data cabling across the house, there was some disused c/h pipework running between the two locations, but due to the number of elbows on the route I couldn't feed the cables through . . . until I connected the vacuum cleaner to one end and sucked some thin string through, which pulled some thick string through, which pulled the data cable through, lots of floor lifting and carpet removal avoided.

[Fitz]

They sell them in this fair land as well. They don't work they are rubbish. We fbought one in desperation during a 6 month old baby, unsleepingly desperate snot-fest.

We also in desperation tried the 'manual' approach. This also didn't work. Thankfully this meant I didn't get a mouthful of poormans oysters.

Rubbing the bridge of the nose witha warm flannel for a couple of minutes however saw the stuff flying out and led to a significantly calmer little person.

[Guy King]

The message from "Fitz" contains these words:

You can just whirl them round and round by their ankles, but then you have to redecorate. Unless you happen to like green stripes.

[Lobster]

!!! Do you have a URL for it? (just interested, that's all; my kids are now of an age at which if I tried using a mucus pooter (pooter - what a wonderful word!) to suck bogies out of their noses they's probably try to shove the thing up my fundamental orifice and/or phone Childline)

Never mind that, how was the baby?

David

[The Medway Handyman]

That idea has been and is used in industry for all sorts of things. They call them vacuum interceptors. One use is for disgusting stuff, but they also use them to reclaim stuff.

Saw an ice cream factory once where they used big stainless steel interceptors. They made like 10,000 litres of chocolate ice cream mix, which got pumped out of the mixer to go get frozen & packed, but this left

500 or so litres of foamy stuff sculling about. Rather than wash it away so they could clean the tank ready for strawberry, they sucked it into a stainless interceptor tank & stored it till the next batch was made,

[rrh]

A slightly less disgusting version of this was on sale widely in Belgium in the mid-90s where we were living at the time and had our first and only child. As above except that the adult was replaced with a large rubber bulb. Should one forget to squeeze the bulb _before_ rather than _after_ sticking the glass tube up the baby's snout, I suppose it might have produced a v grumpy baby rather than a glass tube full of snot. Luckily I don't think I ever did that despite the joyous delirium of early fatherhood.

[John]

Nice idea but my vax already does that itself as it's a wet & dry machine.

John