Have you ever heard of the Gallo  Gun? This thing is pretty simple – it’s a CO2 gun (compressed air) that blasts out your clogged condensate lines (on a fridge or A/C) without the nasty chemicals or mess. I’m pretty impressed with it – and I’m sad to report that I found out that it existed when the HVAC technician charged me $65/an hour to use it on my clogged condensate line. Why is that so sad? Cuz the dang thing only costs $50 to own.

Anyway, you’re supposed to clean out your air conditioner condensate line once a year. If you don’t, your a/c drip pan is going to be filled with slime sludge that creeps up into the condensate line to clog it. When your condensate line is clogged, one of two things will happen:

• Your air conditioner will stop working
• Your house will flood

For a truly bizarre (yet educational) video, check out HVAC (Condensate Drains).

“CONDENSATE! CONDENSATE! CONDENSATE!”

There are a couple ways to fix this without paying a pro. The best way is to use a wet/dry vac. Just go outside and find where the condensate drain is. Sometimes it’s out in your backyard near your air conditioner unit. It’ll look like a little white PVC pipe poking out of the house. It could also be poking out of the ground like a little periscope.

For some reason, mine is inside in my basement and just routes around my laundry room into the sink. Some people have the condensate pipe running out of their attic.

Once you locate it, hook up a wet/dry vac and suck all the gunk out into a bucket. Let it suck for a couple of minutes and get all that sludge out.

Oh, by the way, don’t use your old Dirt Devil for this job – get a REAL wet/dry vac. A 6-gallon Shop-Vac only costs $55 so there’s no reason to break your real vacuum to clean out your condensate line.

If you can’t figure out where you can hook up your wet/dry vacuum, you can post a video response of your air handler unit and you’re A/C unit and Dr. Zarkloff will help you figure out what to do. (This person really is strange and wonderful.)

Some people recommend putting bleach in the drain pan to prevent clogging – I really don’t recommend this. Chlorine will make it rust super fast and will eat away the aluminum fins on the coil. If you want to prevent condensate lines from being clogged, get some specially made tablets specifically for this purpose, such as ActabsTM Jr. Tablets.

Anyway, if you’re like me, your condensate line was so clogged that a wet/dry vac wouldn’t do the trick. If that’s the case, you need to blowout your condensate line with some compressed air. You can pick up a compressed air gun at your local A/C supply store – or you can pay some dude an arm and a leg to do it for you (nice guy, just EXPENSIVE!).

I got a Gallo Gun so I don’t have to call this guy anymore. It’s really easy to use – you just hook it up to your condensate drain line and blast it OUTWARDS. That is, shoot it from where it comes out of the A/C – not where it exits your home. Otherwise you’re blasting all the sludge into the A/C.

The Gallo Gun is better than other condensed air guns because it uses plain ol’ CO2 instead of propellants that are bad for the environment. You can get it at AZ Partsmaster.

Here’s a video on how to use a Gallo Gun.