Last night I stumbled upon a really simple trick for cleaning the
insides of my racking hose, so I thought I'd share.

I was at an Arts & Crafts store the other day with my wife and kids,
and near the pipe cleaners they had little bags of tiny white acrylic
pom-poms. I've always been a bit annoyed that I haven't had a way to
scrub the insides of my hoses, as I'm generally pretty thorough about
cleaning equipment. So I picked up a bag of these suckers (something
like a couple hundred for $2) thinking perhaps I could somehow string
them on a piece of fishing line or something and pull them through the
tubing.

Like the way things usually go, I didn't have any fishing line or any
such stuff to continue the experiment, and was doing a lot of racking
and bottling. As I was rinsing out my hose by fitting it on the tip of
my Blast bottle/carboy washer, the thought came to me: why not just
stuff a couple of the pom-poms in the tube (they fit pretty snugly) and
see if the water pressure will force them through the tube?

It worked brilliantly! The Blast washer limits the water flow so that
they move steadily through the tube at about 1 foot per second, so it's
easily controlled (though one hand on your faucet would also work
fine). And it's very simple to let them travel the length of the hose
until nearly at the end, then just reverse the tube and send them back
(and repeat a few times). It's dead easy, fast, and seems to do an
excellent job of scrubbing the insides of the tube without any
noticeable scratching.

Cheers,
Richard