DIY Hoover construction

Another big concern was if we’re going to be travelling with over 1000 litres of granulated cork, how are we supposed to clean up at the end of each show? There were some suggestions to use an industrial hoover, but they were all exceptionally big (and expensive). Turns out that Cirque du Soleil has a show where they work with the same material and they’ve had to use a custom built machine to handle it all, we might need to go in a similar way.

The main concern was finding a hoover that can suck all the cork in and would hold more than 20-30 litres at a time. As we couldn’t find anything on the market, we’ve decided to build one ourselves! It is an adaptation of a standard hoover, but we’ve made an adaptor so that it can be fixed on the lid of a 200 litre barrel, the idea being that it would be filling in the barrels for us directly one at a time. Seems to be working ok, it is airtight, can’t wait to try it out!

Update 2.Jan 2023: We’ve come across electric leaf blowers that can also suck the leaves in, seems like it is exactly what we were looking for! Will buy it as soon as more funding arrives and report back