Blower Repair and Service

Us Angora show people use blowers on a regular basis, a good blower is a must for successful grooming and showing.

In 2010 I bought a pink blower, the second of the same brand though my first one in 1989 was blue color as blue was the only color available at the time. 
 See:  Northern California Angora Guild: Pretty In Pink

This is what the brand new pink blower, the Mini-Circ, looked like after assembled in 2010.   Mini-Circ is the same model as the Mini K9, produced by the same manufacturer Electric Cleaner Company in Wisconsin.   When the Angora breeders discovered the blowing method to handle the wool in the late 1980s, this company was the only one that produced animal groom blowers, now there are hundreds of different brands. 

The entire unit is made of metal, you can unscrew and open the unit to view the interior of the blower.
The two orange strips shown in the picture are "machine brushes". In early 2025, this pink blower was intermittenly working and not working, so hubby opened it up to see what went wrong. 

When the blowing is going on, the machine brush causes sparks.  If you notice there are sparks toward the upper right of the left brush.    If the both machine brushes were in good shape, there should be sparks showing next to both brushes but in this case the brush on the right side was used up thus no more sparks.

These are the brushes that are used to the bare bone minimum, they need to be replaced.

These brand new machine brushes are purchased from Amazon, around $10-15 a pair.  
Instead of throwing away a blower that is not working, open it up and see whether it's the machine brushes that need replacements.    Another possibility of a blower not working is the switch.   When we turn the blower on and off over and over, that could cause the switch to malfunction, check it if your blower has issues with the on/off switch.    

Most of the metal blowers are made in the US, in addition to the Electric Cleaner Company's offerings, there is another US maker called MatroVac, short for The Metropolitan Vacuum Cleaner Comapany that is based in New Jersey.   Though there are many colors, their original color for the blowers was orange thus we usually called it the orange blower.    See:
Northern California Angora Guild: Pink vs Orange   Because these "Airforce" orange blowers are also made of metal, you can open up the unit to clean and to repair.     The metal blowers are usually priced over $200 and could go as high as into the $1,000 for large animals.    

If you go on the internet you can find blowers as little as $50.   These lower end ones are effective in blow grooming Angoras, but these are made of plastics.   The interior are molded into one plastic unit.   You can open it to change filter and clean but the mechnical elements are not visible thus it's next to impossible to make repairs.   If it stops working, it goes into the landfill!