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