Cleaning the Vacuum

See all that food on Baby Doll’s tray? Now do you notice that mischievous little grin? She has a new philosophy. As soon as she is finished, she sweeps all that is left right off the edge and onto the floor. Now this isn’t a problem if the dog is around; Daisy licks everything up real quick. Unfortunately, sometimes she is outside and then I have to sweep everything up.

If I were a stellar housekeeper, crumbs would disappear as soon as they were made. But that’s not my life. I sweep the crumbs (and the cars and the crayons and the candy wrappers…) into a pile and then I wait for one of the kids to take care of it for me. This is probably a big mistake because if I were cleaning “the pile,” I would first PUT AWAY the crayons and the cars and toss the candy wrappers and big crumbs BEFORE I ever get out the vacuum. The kids usually manage to take care of the cars, but everything else goes right up the vacuum!

Maybe if we had a regular vacuum this wouldn’t be a problem, but we happen to have a Central Vac and that means all that dirt (and crayons and candy wrappers…) travels through pipes in my house and down into a large canister in the furnace room. About once a month or so we take this canister off and dump it. It’s a good system …when the kids aren’t using it.

So I finally got tired of having bad suction in my kitchen. We took the 40- minute drive to visit my BIL and borrow the “big drill” and the worm. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that my FIL was a plumber. When he passed away, he left tons of tools to his kids. This particular worm has cleaned tons of drains and it happens to work perfectly for cleaning out vacuum pipes as well.

It’s quite a procedure! My sweetie is at the front of the line and he is responsible for feeding the worm down into the hole. We station kids about every 5 to 10 feet along the worm to keep it from ripping holes in the walls or scraping up the floor (like we’d notice!).


The kids have to wear work gloves to protect their hands from the spinning metal. Because the worm is so long, we have to take it clear out the front door and into the yard. I get the fun job…I get to run the drill! It takes us about 20 minutes to get everything set up. Then it takes about 2 minutes to clear the blockage.

I’m so glad a married a plumber’s son! The company charges nearly a hundred dollars to come out and do the same thing. I know one lady whose kids kept sticking their Hot Wheels cars down the pipes. That’s a pretty expensive racetrack!



But the best story I know about a Central Vac came from one of my students when I was teaching. He tells a story of building a new house. During the process, they had to put a bunch of stuff in storage. When the house was finally done (with a Central Vac installed), they went to the storage unit to get their furniture.



They carried a heavy dresser into one of the bedrooms and pushed it up against a wall. When they opened the middle drawer, they found a huge horrible surprise. A family of mice had nested there and baby mice were suddenly running around everywhere. My student pulled the door of the room closed and quickly plugged in his central vac. Then he proceeded to vacuum up each of those baby mice until they all disappeared. And not a single one clogged up the pipe. Can you just imagine the smell when he dumped his canister? Ewww!

See any mice, Curly? I have the vacuum out!