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Homemade Insulation Vacuum

mackzully | Posted in Energy, Heating & Insulation on May 6, 2007 02:26am

Howdy all-

Thought I’d pass along my experience making my own insulation vacuum. I live in an old rowhouse in DC, and I’m starting to get ready for all the demo on the house. The ceilings on both the first and second floors need to be leveled, but the second floor has a small (3′ -> 6″) attic space above it that the DPOs blew in 2′-3′ of fiberglass. Needless to say, I didn’t want to drop the ceiling and then have the house filled with airborne fibers as I still need to live in it 😉 Nor could I find an insulation company to come suck it out, either they thought the job was too small (646sqft of attic space) or they couldn’t figure out why I wanted to take it out. Anyhow, I got one lukewarm response from an insulation contractor who said he’d come by next week and have a look at it.

Well, I’d read some posts about people using dust collectors and leaf blowers to make their own insulation vacuums, so I figured I might as well try making my own. I call it the wowbagger:

1 Toro Ultra Blower/Vac – This model has metal vanes and variable speed control, both of which I highly recommend.

10′ lengths of corrugated drain pipe – I got lengths that have a female connector on the end so I can lengthen/shorten the hose easily.

24″x20″x1″ furnace filter – the cheapest you can find

10′ x 100′ 4mil construction sheeting – 4mil is about as thin as I’d go

A metric ***kload of duct tape – I’ve gone through 7 60yd rolls. I might be a bit overzealous in my taping though.

A 3″ toliet bowl ring. I use a piece of scrap 3″ PVC pipe attached to this inside the bag, to exhaust the insulation as far back in the bag as possible.

Scrap wood for the fixture.

I made a fixture to hold the furnace filter, tie the bag to, and mount the vacuum on out of scrap wood I had lying around. I found that a rectangular fixture 3’x2′ worked well with the 10′ circumference bags I was making. Obviously any size will work as long as your bags are big enough. I made mine with a 1″ x1″ groove around the perimeter so I could use a rope or something to hold the bag on. Turns out a 26″ bicycle tire tube works a treat.

https://images.finehomebuilding.com/app/uploads/2019/01/26031752/IMG_5947.JPG
https://images.finehomebuilding.com/app/uploads/2019/01/26031752/IMG_5948.JPG
https://images.finehomebuilding.com/app/uploads/2019/01/26031752/IMG_5949.JPG

I taped the bags up with duct tape, making them about 10’W x 25’L. Seems to work well, though you have to watch the seams.

Here’s a shot of the first version of it, where I simply taped the vac to the bag, the bag in these shots is 10’W x 12.5’L.

https://images.finehomebuilding.com/app/uploads/2019/01/26031753/IMG_5937.JPG
https://images.finehomebuilding.com/app/uploads/2019/01/26031753/IMG_5939.JPG
https://images.finehomebuilding.com/app/uploads/2019/01/26031753/IMG_5940.JPG

Looking at it, a 10’W x12.5’L cylindrical bag is approx. 1000 cu.ft? So with the taping and the fact that I can only get the bags about 3/4 full before the filter plugs up, I’m probably looking at 600 cu. ft per 10′ x 12.5′ bag. If my math is correct, a box of Husky clean up bags is (42gal x 32 per box x .13368 cuft per gal) = 179 cuft. I can get eight 12.5′ bags or four 25′ long bags from a $38 roll of sheeting, about 16000 cuft. Add in the cost of the tape, eight rolls per 100′ roll of sheeting, or $24, I get $0.014/cuft. The Husky bags are $15/box or $0.083/cuft. No bad, even if you figure in the $70 for the leaf blower, even better if you already have one. Plus you don’t have to stop every couple of minutes for a new bag. Once I got going it took about <15min to tape up a bag, and you can fill one in about 15-20min with the vacuum.

The best thing? No fibers everywhere and I don’t have to crawl through the stuff to bag it! Plus I’m not itchy!!

Z
DC

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Replies

  1. User avater
    BillHartmann | May 06, 2007 04:17am | #1

    Thanks.

    Go job.

    But I am surprised that the vac/blower would vac that well.

    I was thing more of using the vac in in the attic and then blowing it into the bag.

    .
    .
    A-holes. Hey every group has to have one. And I have been elected to be the one. I should make that my tagline.
    1. mackzully | May 06, 2007 05:07am | #2

      It works well because it was designed for picking up something similar in weight and density. It moves a ton of air and the intake is huge on it. The output unfortunately isn't large, but the metal impeller does a good job of shredding the fiberglass even further. I'd not use anything with a plastic impeller as, at least in my case, there is all sorts of #### in the insulation... I can hear it hitting the impeller before getting shredded. I'm not sure how many nail hits a plastic one would take...As for piping the matter from the vac to the bag (located elsewhere) that'd work fine, I just could not do that as the attic crawlspace would make maneuvering the unit and output tube a real pain in the butt. Also, you'd have an extension cord to tag along with you, so in tight spaces, it'd really not be ideal. This thing also generates a metric **ckton of static. Be careful. Z

      Edited 5/5/2007 10:08 pm ET by mackzully

  2. mike4244 | May 06, 2007 04:24pm | #3

    Dust collector piped to a dumpster. Used 4" pvc sewer pipe fpr the long runs and dust collection hose with a 4'-0" pvc wand. Tarped the top of the dumpster.Worked well, though a couple of times I had to disconnect the pipe to unjam  the pipe.Probably a larger diameter pipe to the dumpster would have been better.

    mike

  3. USAnigel | May 06, 2007 05:24pm | #4

    Great idea! and you can reuse the insulation!

    1. mackzully | May 07, 2007 02:52pm | #9

      Do you want it? ;)I'm not going to be reusing it, which begs the question, what to do with perfectly good insulation (with some plaster in it). My building salvage place won't take it since people don't like to buy used insulation, maybe an insulation shop will take it and recycle it? I really don't want to thrown it away.Z

  4. renosteinke | May 06, 2007 07:30pm | #5

    Hey, Editor! How about putting this in the magazine?

  5. reinvent | May 07, 2007 01:52am | #6

    Good idea. Couple of thoughts on the bags. Don't know the cost but mattress bags might be worth looking into. And there is this:

    http://www.uline.com/ProductDetail.asp?model=S-7922&ref=2103

    Do not know how the cost breaks down compared to your method.

    1. User avater
      BillHartmann | May 07, 2007 02:47am | #7

      My neighbor had this done when they did a remodel a year ago.It used equpment like this.http://insulationblowermachines.com/insulation_vacuums1And The bags where large plastic sausges.but I don't know remember where the air escape was..
      .
      A-holes. Hey every group has to have one. And I have been elected to be the one. I should make that my tagline.

      1. mackzully | May 07, 2007 02:50pm | #8

        I saw those insulation vacuums and called around to the local tool rental shops and no one had ever heard of them, so that's when I decided to make my own. I bet that the bags they sell for these commercial vacs are a loose weave tarp like material that acts as the filter itself. And maybe you'd need that much suction for a huge job, but I never turned the leaf blower above 1/2 speed as with too much suction, it'd try to suck up the batt insulation underneath the blown insulation. Anyhow, it worked and I got nearly all the blown stuff out yesterday in about 4 hours!Z

        1. User avater
          BillHartmann | May 07, 2007 03:25pm | #11

          No, the bags where a thing plastic.Might have had a small holes in it as the insulatio is rather big. .
          .
          A-holes. Hey every group has to have one. And I have been elected to be the one. I should make that my tagline.

      2. GRCourter | May 07, 2007 04:08pm | #12

        I looked at the insulation pick-ups, but $1200+ was a little more than I wanted to pay even though it was a big job.  1800 sq ft of 10-14 inches of cotten blow-in.  This is what we came up with.  Dust collector into a dumpster.  We had removed the roof decking (putting on a second story) and this picked up the insulation, nails and all.  Total cost $725.00 and we still have the dust collector for the shop.  Time wise, 2 men 45 min to set up and one man 8 hours to get it all uot.

  6. mackzully | May 07, 2007 03:22pm | #10

    All-

    Thanks for the feedback! Yesterday a friend came over to help out, and we finished removing about 2500 cuft of insulation in <4 hours. It turned out that I really needed to two people to operate it, one to watch the bag and one to vacuum. And to boot, not a single itch!

    I switched to 25'L bags yesterday morning, stopping every so often to push the material back and tie off a lump at the back. It seemed to keep the material from continually being blown around, and the filter stayed cleaner for much longer.

    The nice thing about using plastic corrugated drainpipe for the vac hose was that it is light and easily extensible (and easily returnable to HD when the job was done!). A 90 degree elbow came in handy, it help get between the rafters, and when we had about 30' of hose pushed all the way back, we angled it about 45 degrees and it kept it from grabbing the batt insulation.

    The biggest problem with this setup is the amount of static electricity it generates. If you do something like this, ground it! The output pipe, a piece of 3" PVC, would sizzle with static electricity. The first time around I simply grabbed the pipe to remove it and got a huge shock, it sounded like a very very large light bulb blowing out. I thought that was a fluke, so it wasn't until I'd shocked myself again on the output pipe that I finally ran a grounding wire up to the roof. Before taking the pipe off, I pushed the wire into the pipe, until yet again, there was a sharp "pop" and the sizzling noise stopped. I wish I had some way to measure that, it was far more than just shuffling your feet on the carpet (which is ~35,000V in dry conditions).

    Some more pics:
    http://www.speakeasy.net/~zmully/img_5951.jpg
    http://www.speakeasy.net/~zmully/img_5957.jpg
    http://www.speakeasy.net/~zmully/img_5955.jpg
    http://www.speakeasy.net/~zmully/img_5952.jpg
    http://www.speakeasy.net/~zmully/img_5963.jpg

    Z

  7. Sasquatch | May 07, 2007 10:05pm | #13

    Outstanding!

  8. moriartyl | Jun 11, 2012 07:36am | #14

    insulation vacuum

    Hi, I just seen  your post.  We need to make something like this.  Unfortunately it will not allow me to view your pictures.  Is there another way to access them?

  9. IdahoDon | Jun 12, 2012 01:42am | #15

    I had great luck with nothing more than the blower off a dust collector - the impellers are tough and made to handle chunks of wood.   Input hose is a 6" flexible hose made for dust collectors and the output hose was 6" flex duct.You can blow the stuff whereever you want it or into bags or a dumpster with cover.   Total cost was less than $300.

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