The drain snake actually helped!! God bless this vid for teaching me how to unclog my inlet! I tried everything from using another vacuum and nothing worked until I used the drain snake! Mine was clogged for 20 years, it was clogged before I bought my home. I took out half a bad full of dirt from inside!! Best thing ever!
Thank you for posting this idea. I got an elastic exercise band clogged in the middle of our hose! More difficult to grab, but thankfully our clog was not in the walls of the system. After some finagling, we decided to do a push-pull method. We taped (really sticky red contractror's tape) a screw driver with the smooth handle toward the end, to a long contractor's wire-fishing contraption. The screw driver handle was just the right size to fit inside the hose. We pushed the clog (with the wire-fish metal tape with screw driver,) toward the way it got sucked in. Once the clog was close to the handle with the switch, we use the the little snake you show in your video to grab the elastic and pull it right out. Voila! Thanks so much for helping us with figuring a way to fix our problem.
Thanks so much for the suggestion. All of our outlets were having poor suction, so I thought the clog might be close to the main unit and disconnected the duct close to the main unit. It was not taped or glued so it was easy to disconnect. The clog was about 15 feet from the main unit and the snake got a lot of it. The rest was loosened by the snake and was sucked into the bucket. Problem solved! Dog hair was the culprit.
I have tried this and haven't been successful. The snake I bought is only 15' (I didn't even look when in the store) and I fear it has just moved it further down the pipe and out of our reach. I have not even got one hair out :( I'm running out of options.
