By Gary Ross Hoffman, KB0H
July 2015
![]() A question for the Shop-Vac: Can you handle this job? |
This is a story about cleaning my shack, interspersed with facts that I discovered.
It wasn't the notion of "spring cleaning" that got me to drag a vacuum cleaner down to my shack. I'd been quite willing to make an occasional swipe at my computer screen with a rag, or take a deep breath and then blow the less-entrenched dust off of my transceiver. No, what motivated me was after crawling around on the floor to plug in a cable, I got up and discovered that my pants had changed color.
Dust tends to blend-in when it settles on the concrete floor of my basement. And there was a lot of it.
Cleaning a shack (mine, at least) is not easy. In fact, I don't think it's even possible. If it were just a simple matter of vacuuming or wiping or dusting I think I could do it. Oh, it might take me a very long time to get motivated, but I could do it.
The real problem is that it sounds simple, "clean the shack", but in reality it is "clean everything in the shack", plural, as opposed to singular. If you happen to have a shack then you're no doubt aware that's an awful lot of plural.
I quickly realized that this was not a straightforward cleaning job. It was a major project. I had to sit down and think about this. But sitting down usually means that I wind up taking a nap, so the project got delayed a bit.
Later (after I woke up) I started making a list. I'm very good a making lists. Much more so than actually doing anything that's on them. But hey! It was a start.
![]() But which nozzle is the right one? |
The list, quite depressingly, got longer and longer. Worse, it started branching off in different directions. You see, there was no one way that I could clean the shack, such as using a rag and a can of Pledge, or just using a fire hose. This was going to require several techniques... dusting, vacuuming, carefully wiping with a static-free cloth...
Pretty soon my list had turned into something that was beginning to look like a wiring diagram. Unfortunately, I'm not very adept at following wiring diagrams. Surely there had to be an easier way.
Wanting to spend as little time as possible on this cleaning project, I wondered how much I could accomplish just by vacuuming. Well, certainly the floor. And if I changed the nozzle, perhaps some of the bulkier items.
And gosh, I almost forgot. My sister had given me a small vacuum cleaner designed for computers! Ha ha! This job had suddenly become a cinch!
Only, it wasn't. Even vacuuming the floor was a more intricate task than I'd foreseen. First, there were a great many objects on the floor, each of which had to be moved (or ignored). And second, there were... the cables. Oh, the cables. The endless, tangled, malignant cables.
There just ain't no way to clean cables, so don't even try. Don't even get near them. Let the dust and dirt accumulate and bury them, then they can't attack you.
My mini-vac didn't fare much better. It had about 700 nozzle attachments, but they boiled down to two main types: Those with brushes on the end and those without. The ones with brushes on the end were good for smearing dust around but not removing it. The ones without brushes tended to have pretty good suction, but could only pick up dust one centimeter at a time. (They were, however, great at cleaning computer keyboards.)
![]() None of them works! |
If you watch a lot of television you will see a variety of products that are so good at removing dust that you only have to make one gentle swipe and your entire house is suddenly clean.
Forget it. I have many of these products. I have yet to find one, a single one, that actually picks up dust. I have the micro-fiber ones. I have the electrostatic ones. I probably have the homeopathic one as well. All they do is spread the dust around. I've come to the conclusion that they use specially trained dust in those TV commercials. My dust doesn't respond at all.
Well, the shack cleaning did not go well. Not even being able to dust adequately was totally disheartening. Doing something even more difficult seemed like it would be an exercise in futility. I decided to give up, and perhaps look at that "wiring diagram" again.
Or better still, wait for a dusting product that actually works to be invented.