Snagless Vacuum Hose Cover

Two of the little annoyances in the shop are these vacuum hoses.

They’re exceptionally good at being drawn to sharp corners, edges, and catching on them.

To fix the problem I bought this. It’s a braided plastic sleeve.

You slide it over a hose, and it creates a much smoother texture.

Once installed, the hose has no problem passing over the previously offending edges. Now I don’t claim to be the first person to do this – I’ve seen many people make similar hose covers – and because of that I even considered not making this video. But I figured if I can save just one person the frustration I experienced when trying to decipher what it is I need to buy to do this, then it will be worth it. So if you’re completely uninterested in sleeving your vacuum hose, then you can stop reading now. Otherwise let me share what I learned and hopefully it’ll help you.

When you set out to buy the stuff, you have to figure out three things. Color, sleeve diameter, and sleeve length. Color is pretty straightforward unless you’re really indecisive designer. I kept it simple and opted for black. Sleeve diameter tripped me up the most. The internet offered many mixed opinions.

I have two hoses with outside diameters of 34mm and 45mm. I expected I would need a different sleeve diameter for each.

Well it turns out that the sleeve really is so stretchy, that one size comfortably conforms to both of these hoses. Specifically, the 40mm braided sleeve was perfect for both cases. You might not have the same hose as me but generally my recommendation is that the 40mm sleeve will work for anything up to 50mm in diameter. When it comes to the length of the sleeve, you’d expect that’s as simple as measuring out the distance of hose you need to cover, and ordering the length you measure.

The catch is when you get a segment of this, that’s the flat rolled length. Once you put it over a hose, the diameter expands which shrinks the length.

On my larger hose, effective coverage is only about 60% of the flat length.

in total I ordered 5m of this material, cut it in two pieces, and snaked it over my hoses. It was enough to cover about a 180cm at the tool end of each hose. And it even fit a power cord inside. The last thing to do is protect the ends.

If they’re left bare, they’ll fray over time.

One solution is to apply shrink-wrap tubing over it, but I don’t have shrink wrap so I came up with an alternative using a combination of plastic wrap and electrical tape.

The tape holds everything together, while the plastic wrap prevents any sticky residue. High-tech stuff here, no doubt.

So there you go… homemade shrink wrap, and a hose that doesn’t snag.