Air duct cleaning robot - GIF

[Altair]

Air duct cleaning robot.




Previously:

HVAC duct jack - photo
Bending a duct elbow to shape - GIF
HVAC filter box grabber - GIF
HVAC velometer - photo
HVAC balometer - photo

[nova_robotics]

This is neat, but wouldn't it cause 10s of thousands of dollars of water damage to any building where it was used? Dry ice blasting or even just regular air would probably work good. Not sure how that machine would handle all the self tappers though.

[Moby Duck]

A great idea but unless it can go vertically up and and down it’s going to have limited use.

[clavius]

A friend had a duct cleaning service do the ductwork in is large-ish house some years ago. They attached a big suction blower that they had on a trailer to the return duct where it attached to the furnace that sucked air through all of the vents and out of the house. Then they fed this thing they had on a semi-rigid tube down all of the vents until it reached the furnace. It was essentially a manifold made of a block of some sort of plastic. It had a bunch of maybe 10" long very soft very flexible hoses coming out of it. They looked like surgical tubing and each had some type of little nozzle on the end. They fed air from a compressor through the tube the pushed the thing in with and the air blew out of the nozzles, thus causing all of the surgical tubes to whip around and bang all over the inner walls of the ductwork.

I guess the theory was that the banging and the blasts of compressed air would knock any debris loose from the ducts and the blower would suck it all out the return and out of the house. The theory seemed sound but I have no idea how effective it was. The ducts did not look all that dirty to me, so it was probably more effective at separating money from the homeowner than anything else.

[Frank S]

A The ducts did not look all that dirty to me, so it was probably more effective at separating money from the homeowner than anything else.

Kind of like pest exterminators. Good ones will come in and rid your place of whatever the infestation is then tell you to call them if you have any more problems the rest want to put you on a regular pest control program and cash your monthly check. The bigger the name, the more they advertise to get more of yours and other people's money