How To Make Cyclone Shop-Vac With Secondary Water Filtration (Wet Scrubber) All out of Junk 

Thanks! It took couple iterations to figure out how to prevent the water from shooting out

Thank you Ivan!

Thanks! If I ever get around to building another one, I think I'd mod an electric leaf blower into a vacuum

Yea I completely agree. I think 3rd version would have this implemented. I'm thinking 3rd version would also implement Thein baffle instead of mini cyclone as cyclone can get clogged if sucking in large debris. Thanks for comment and for watching!

Thanks! Yea definitely room for improvement. I've yet to find a technology that trumps fabric HEPA. Next iteration would contain a 3rd stage fabric filter.

I took this unit apart since I moved but I may build version 3 and try it on ash. It will work to some extent but the invisible particles will still get through unless a 3rd stage HEPA fabric filter is used . I'd suggest wearing a respirator.

Hi Yes, absolutely this is possible to put the motor after the wetscrubber. To do this you would have to make the wetscrubber chamber air tight. This way the vacuum can suck the air through the water. I think I will do this for my 3rd design of a shop vac

@@LockeLaboratory thanks, but when making the wet scrubber air tight, there won't be a possibility that water goes in the motor??

@@jasongroupindustries there is a possibility but this is where it is very important to design the wetscrubber properly and size the wetscrubber chamber with enough size as to not suck all the water out of it. If you find a container the same size as the wet scrubber chamber in my video, that is about as small as you can get for this size of vacuum without sucking out the water. If you check out some my other videos, I created a wet scrubber that has the motor after the wet scrubber but they are a bit larger. I especially designed the chamber and wet scrubber so the sloshing water doesn't get sucked out. Here is a playlist, ru-vid.com/group/PLL_-ccTEzH_w45_Y4fsiG4JVpCwvVgggU If you noticed on the how to make wet scrubbing shop vac video, the wet scrubber had a plastic cup on top of the plastic bottle tube to direct the water+air back downward, this is a rudimentary mist elimination device. You can also place some foam filter material (say and aquarium filter) at the port in which the air is getting sucked out to catch any finer water droplets.

@@LockeLaboratory thanks for your help, I agree with you, was thinking the same way. Thanks again.

I dont believe that to be entirely true. I think the caveat is that they can be ran without regulation if there is a load on the motor which in this case is the compressor fan of the vacuum. Same with blenders and routers and other power tools that use universal motors with basic on off switches. I've only seen thermal switches or fuses in most cases.

Hi cky83, I took apart an old upright vacuum cleaner to extract the motor as well as the power cable. I'm not exactly sure of its power rating but I would guess it is at least 1hp or around 750Watts. The water filter simply takes the particle laden exhaust air of the vacuum and pushes it through water, this bubbling action will cause the small particles to embed into the water. The most basic version of this is simply to have a pipe submerged into a bucket of water. Problem with that is that the bubbles will spray water everywhere. I was trying to explain in the video how the water filter was designed to allow this bubbling of the water without having the water spray everywhere. The water filtration tubing is almost exactly how a bubble pump is designed except it has a cap on the top to allow the bubbled up water to fall back downward. I found this video that explains bubble pumps. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-frPOuHi9KQQ.html Let me know if you have further questions or something that isn't clear. Best to you!

Water is aloud to enter at bottom of clear pipe. It is bigger then the 90 . At the end of the 5th 90

daniel wold hi daniel i dont see why that wouldnt work. the shop vac has a wet filter? that setup should have basically the same functionality of what i built.

Did you try this? Did it work?

PtotheRum thanks for reaching out. Although I don't fully grasp your setup without a diagram, I've a couple suggestions. First is to get a dimmer switch or router speed control so you can vary the power to the pump, you can then determine of it is simply a pump sizing issue. Is the water pump submergible type? Is the plan to have the debris flow through the pump impeller? Or are you trying to do some venturi effect to create a vacuum. If the latter you'll need some kind of restriction in the pipe to create a pressure drop

@@LockeLaboratory Thanks for the quick reply. I'm using the harbor freight sump pump www.harborfreight.com/14-hp-submersible-sump-pump-3000-gph-63892.html I choose this because it was not a fish tank pump with a small outlet line. I wanted enough pressure to suck the debris from the bottom and be able to push it through a filter and back. So this was the next size up and cheapest. I'm not sure I can restricted the suction with a voltage regulator. I feel like it will hurt the pump and void any warranties I have. My plan was to suck this water from the pool and filter out the debris and dump the filtered water back into the pool. So I chose to use a 5 gallon bucket filled with sand with some plumbing. Starting at the top, I used a bulk head fitting to allow the water to flow in through the sand media and back out the bottom from the opposite side of the inlet. Using a short pipe with end cap and drilled holes facing down in the bucket and back out using another bulk head fitting. After a few attempts I noticed when the pump was running, I could not keep the lid on. I figured the pressure inside was to great. And maybe it's from the tiny holes I drilled. So I drilled more holes and then just ended up going a little bigger. Still blew the lid off. I tried ratchet straps to keep the lid on. Still with the same issue. I just gave up and decided to remove the end cap from the pipe at the bottom. I figured I still need some kind of filter to keep the sand contained. So I used a fabric screen at the end. None of these ideas worked without blowing the lid off. Even with the straps holding it down. So my next thought was to some how reduce the pressure inside the bucket. I figured I could use a vacuum from the pump and pull the water through the sand filter instead of pushing water through it. You would think by putting a "Y" from the pump to the pool would create a suction. No matter which direction I put the pump on the "Y" I still got water forced out of every direction. Imagine the "Y" in the upright position. Now imagine pushing water down hill from either side. You would think the water would only push down hill and create a suction from the other top port. To my surprise this pump doesn't care. I tried even placing my hand in front of each hole to see if that maybe would help create a suction but it didn't. I'm lost.

​@@PFab I think I see what the problem is. Your sump pump is quite powerful and the fact it can pump from the depth of your pool to the surface, that is already a couple PSI of pressure. Buckets can only withstand about ~2psi before the lid pops off. I don't know how much pressure the bucket walls themselves can withstand without bursting but I'm sure it isn't very much. Your pump is rated for 22ft max height which equates to about 9.5 psi, this is more than enough to give you trouble trying to keep your lid on. You would need to switch to a PVC/ABS pipe to make a pressure vessel which can withstand the pressure. Concerning your "Y" fitting problem I think you are trying to create a venturi vacuum effect from it to make a vacuum. To create a venturi effect you need to create a restriction on the outlet of the pump. This restriction creates a pressure drop after the restriction which creates the vacuum effect. Please watch this vid I found to show a explanation: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cpmEQctfqcI.html You can create a venturi using the "Y" fitting --just make the leg that is connected to the output of the pump narrower than the other legs. I think a "T" fitting may be easier to work with since you can use off the shelf pipe fittings to vary the diameter of the leg connected to the pump outlet, the "vacuum" leg, and the "outlet" leg of the T fittings. Hope that helps. Best, Jimmy

@@PFab I have a quick fix that may or may not help. Like you have said you have a pressure issue causing the lid to blow off so you need to reduce the pressure. The pressure is building beacuse the water has to pass through thre sand which is quite a dense filter for water to pass through. I was wondering how much sand do you have in the bucket? and can you reduce the amount of sand to still cause the filtration effect you are after but not cause the top to blow off. If you dont want to lose any filtration by removing sand can you replace it with another filtration material. A primitive water filter comes to mind where you would have sand(a reduced amount in your case), charcoal, and then rocks on top to keep the sand/charcoal in place. If not that then maybe sand(reduced amount) on bottom, then cotton/wool/old clothes(t-shirts) then rocks on top to hold them down.

@@cheesevampire110123 I might try this. I have thought about it. But I had my own weight on the bucket (240) lbs on the lid with ratchet straps. Didn't work.

Yes the clear plastic pipe is loosly mounted concenric on the bottom elbow that is submerged in water. Therefore the water level will always flood the bottom pvc elbows as it will flow between the gap of clear pipe and elbow

Hi Damian, unfortunately this will barely make a dent in filtering out any smoke. Most of the smoke will fly right through this machine. For smoke you'll need a true HEPA filter third stage fabric filter after the wet scrubber or an electrostatic precipitator. Wet scrubbers scrub down to about 10um particles with decent efficiency and don't do so well with ultra fine particles so one would need to make the a super high pressure wetscrubber, make the wetscrubber 100 times bigger, or use some sort of cloud chamber/condensation technology for it to have any effect on smoke.

@@LockeLaboratory try to make one for a new project and video

Actually this woukd work great for smoke. All you need to do is place the vac discharge outside of the area youre trying to remove smoke from.. And why the fuck is your dumb illiterate ass watching vacuum videos for smoke dissipation? Your the type of person to install a disposal in the sink and call the company bitching for a full refund when it breaks from you trying to put cans in it like “this isnt a garbage disposal, it didnt dispose of any of my trash..”

​@@LockeLaboratoryYou should use an active coal filter for smoke and HEPA behind that. The same for EPOXY, active coal and then HEPA or you will regret it in the long run

Hi Keith thanks for your comment and question. The water is introduced by having the "u" bend of the pipe simply submerged in water and dust laden air is pumped in and when the dust impacts the water it sticks to it. Thats the basic idea. Going a little deeper you may want to research the keyword for this technology: "wet scrubber" but I'll try to explain this in more detail. No current filter technology is 100% efficient in capturing dust, and collection efficiency is generally a function of particle size and power inputted. With wetscrubbers, like this basic one, the efficiency of dust capture is related to a couple variables... the dust particle size (a major factor)...how hard and fast the air is being pumped into the water... the pressure drop (how deep the water is)... how tiny the bubbles and water droplets get, and the amount of dust concentration in the air to name a few. There are 3 mechanisms of particle capture with wet scrubbers: impaction (droplet rams into particle, it sticks), diffusion (particle randomly runs into droplet), and electrostatic (particle is attracted electrically to droplet). Thus making an environment where these 3 mechanisms happen more often will increase dust collection efficiency. There are many wet scrubber techniques, --the most impressive I've being cloud scrubber tech but I've yet to figure out how to make it compact enough to fit into a vacuum cleaner... The reason why it isn't 100% in this case is because air acts as a buffer and kind of gets in the way from the dust touching the water (the dust particle floats inside the air bubble and doesn't touch the water). This is why the more power applied in trying to force the air+dust to touch the water only increases the chances of this happening but does not guarantee it. Hope this makes some kind of sense. Let me know if I can clarify anything.

Locke Lab Many thanks for taking the time to reply and to reply in such detail. That was all clear but I was still not understanding how the air was getting into the water so I watched the video again, twice and am I right in thinking that the white PVC pipe is essentially sealed but where the white PVC corner goes into the Sport Bottle there is no seal? You mention that the Sports bottle is screwed to the 90 degree elbow, looking at the video it looks open to the water, is that the case? If so then it is all clear and I want to start playing with this idea because it looks very promising for a home application. Thanks again.

Keith Stanley Ah yes, the PVC pipe is sealed but the sports bottle has the bottom cut out of it, it is simply a clear tube so the water can flood in from the bottom to flood the elbow. I'd advise you use a respirator when experimenting as dust is dangerous when invisible and I have woken up next day with a terrible cough for a few days because I was not being careful.

Thanks for all the information and YES I always wear a mask when exposed to dust, I have seen what happens to people who don't!!!

Some dust will remain within the bubble. The smaller the bubbles, the better the filtration. A fine grid halfway up the water column can create smaller bubbles, but beware of back pressure affecting the flow rate.

Hi Sorry for the late reply. You can check out some instructions on the wet scrubber here: hackaday.io/project/7237-household-electrically-enhanced-wet-scrubber It is a larger project but you can scale down the wet scrubber portion to have it work as a shop vac.

He use bong to filter smog and very small dust.

It may work for hotboxing the entire garage hehe :)

I hope Asia doesn't steal this idea and make a ton of money. I didn't think it would be worth patenting in US however since the vacuum industry is so saturated. I figure the build would be more helpful for hobbyist's so open sourced the video.

@@LockeLaboratory You could hire a patent attorneys to do the search for prior art, you’ll need to draft this in 2D for the design patent

@@coffeeisthepathtovictory1290 By definition, this idea is not patentable in the US because it is now in the public domain. Thank you to Locke Lab for sharing it!

Louis Cypher hehe yea i learned the hard way. I first thought cyclone was enough but it wasn't and ended up with a nasty cough after an experiment so donned a mask in case there was a leak with this experiment. I did end up using this as a shop vac for a long time with no prolem. Later on, I also learned wet scrubber of that configuration will have trouble with sub micron particles similar to a cheaper vacuum. A third stage hepa or ESP is actually needed to filter just about everything.

@@LockeLaboratory lol. I hear ya. Better safe than sorry.

Just as precaution. One of my early prototypes that didn't have the water filter appeared to work but next day ended up with bad cough. Turns out it just shot the dust really fast, so i couldn't see it.