Building a Vacuum for Cleaning House Gutters

The equipment in use here consists of:

1. a step ladder,
2. a bucket,
3. a pair of 'Marigold' rubber gloves.

The colour of item 3 is not critical.

Hello PWSlack,

We used to do gutters by hand. The area we are in everybody has gone to vacuuming gutters. I currently use a vacuum but it has electric motors and just doesn't have the power I need to do the quantity of gutters we need to do. The gas option that I am trying to build also gives me much more flexibility in its portability and can be used where there is no power. We also live in a very wet climate and must have the ability to take up the water sitting in the gutter as well as the debris.

I put little screen thingies over mine.

but... why not use a leaf blower?

A leaf blower will get the stuff out usually just fine but it sprays everywhere and makes a big mess, that's the main reason we are using the vacuum now. We have been cleaning gutters for over a dozen years and we know all that farely well. I don't have much of a clue about the different types of blower units I might be able to attach to a gas engine. Could anyone offer advice in this respect please?

Hi Steve, I'm very interested in this project of yours. I currently use venturi type vacuum cleaners for cleaning up after shot blast cleaning, but they are very thirsty on compressed air. Typically we use 100cfm for one of these unit, this comes from road drill type compressor (about 175 cfm) which we use for the blasting so its there at the time. Your 11 hp engine might give you about 30 cfm at 100 psi with a suitable compressor. With these venturi type suckers its good to keep the suction tube short. Maybe you could fit the venturi part on your back and have a short suction hose coming over your shoulder. The discharge with the rubbish from the gutter could go into a bag carried at your side. The only bit you would have to take up the ladder would be the compressed air hose, say 3/4 inch bore only. Please correspond with me at demachy@hotmail.com as I would be interested to work with you on this.

Come on guys these peope who do lawn work all summer need small jobs like cleaning gutters to keep their employees over the winter. Not worth all the trouble and cost let them do it.

An 11 HP Honda should blow you away with the leaves.

You will need a suction hose of 4" dia. a U shaped section with a pick up nozzle and straight pipe/hose to reach the gutter from the ground. Biggest problem is to find a vacuum blower that won't clog up with leaves and a separator to prevent them blowing all over the yard.

I use to worry about this. I finally bought the kind that the debris falls off the side and the water goes in the gutter. Here's an example

http://www.harryhelmet.com/

You won't be able to run the leaves straight through a regenerative blower. You will need a way to remove the sand, leaves, twigs, or whatever you vacuum up before you pass through the blower. Why not just use a nice big commercial wet/dry vacuum available everywhere? For portability get a generator!

Too right. You'll have to have some sort of shredder upstream of the blower and quite possibly a first discharge for the coarse stuff and then vent the blower into the collection bag or whatever later with the fine material. You could use the centripital force of the shredder to throw the large stuff out a side discharge. If you wanted to get really fancy a counter-rotating shredder would be the thing, but we're getting crazy expensive here. But heck, with an 11hp engine you should just about be able to tear the gutters off the house...

I have a 5 hp Troy Built chipper/vac that comes with an 4" hose attachment that replaces the front vacuum nozzle. The blower is a fan type that shreads the leafs and debris through a metal screen before propelling them to the bag.

I did what Stan had suggested which was to purchase a couple of 4" PVC 90's and a short length pipe and afixed them to the flex hose. I added a telescopic pole to raise and lower the nozzle to different heights. It works pretty good but then realized that I couldn't see inside the gutter to know if the leaves were cleared. A bicycle mirror attached to the nozzle provided enough of a visual to keep me off of the ladder.

I just went out and bought a Gutter Cleaning attachment for my Weed Wacker Vacuum.

Works great.

I thank you all for your answers. The system I am trying to create is to have two 50' lines at 3" or one single line up to 150' long coming off the vacuum. I will have an 11 hp gas engine attached via belt to some sort of vacuum blower (this is where I need help). The blower will be ducted through silencers and gauges and tie into the collection bin. The collection bin will have plenty of filter area so that only clean air goes through the blower unit. I am looking at using a 250 gallon water tank to use as the collection bin. All this will be skid mounted onto a trailer that I can tow to the job site. The extra perk is that I should be able to switch the hose to the exhaust side and use it as a blower as well as a vacuum.

Is anyone familiar with regenerative blowers and what should I expect for water lift and cfm with the 11 horses?

Check with Spencer Turbine Company, www.spencerturbine.com which makes regenerative blowers driven by multi-horsepower electric motors. You can see their volume(cfm)/in.H2O performance curves on-line to give you an idea of how much vacuum you can achieve from the engine you plan to use.

What are you trying to build really a vacuum or a blower? If it is only the gutters that you want to be cleaned, I think it would be much cheaper to change your gutters into the open type gutters or another thing that you can do is take out the downspout and replace it with chains to direct the water down and you could put an old clay jar at the bottom and collect the rainwater and use for other purposes.