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My 3 year old put some of his toys down the furnace duct (as one does) and I can't reach them. They are in the elbow pictured here:

furnace duct

I've never encountered this type of joinery before on duct work and I don't want to accidentally break something and not be able to get it back together.

The vent/outlet/register is embedded in spray foam (some of which you can see on the left of the duct pictured) so it's not feasible to remove the pieces from the floor.

Should I just cut a hole and seal it back up with aluminum tape?

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  • Nothing in the elbow disassembles. You need to get at it at the junction of the straight pipe and the elbow. Hope there are screws there. Maybe they glued them, so perhaps cutting in is an option. How about a flexible vacuum hose with a nylon over the sucking end?
    – Aloysius Defenestrate
    Commented Nov 10 at 0:47
  • As best I can tell there are no screws. You can see where the elbow joins with the vertical section in the photo. The other end of the elbow is joined the same way
    – nathanvy
    Commented Nov 10 at 0:50
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    Are the joints held together with pop rivets, maybe? Sometimes they're hard to see.
    – SteveSh
    Commented Nov 10 at 1:04
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    As @AloysiusDefenestrate suggests, a small-diameter shop vacuum hose is ideal for cleaning vent ducts, as well as fetching toys. They're available in lengths of up to 5 m, and can be placed in series. I feed 'em into our cloithes dryer duct and they reach around bends all the way to the dryer.
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Nov 10 at 3:08
  • If you blow up the picture to maximum size, you should be able to see three rivets. They're the brown round things. I see one in the piece that connects to the vertical and two more in the angled part.
    – mdfst13
    Commented Nov 10 at 4:57

2 Answers 2

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There are assembly/disassembly seams in these two highlighted areas in your picture:

duct elbow seams

These duct pieces slip-fit together, like vacuum cleaner hose attachments. There usually about an inch or a few cm of one pipe inside the other.

There are usually screws, sometimes other fasteners, poking through the duct at the slipped-in seam to hold the two ducts together. Once these screws or fasteners are removed, the ducts slide apart at the seams, provided there is sufficient flexibility in the whole duct system to allow the pieces to move apart.

Note that the edges of the duct metal and the places where the screws or fasteners penetrated can be sharp and will cut skin. Be careful when reaching in.

Don't try to pull apart the double-ridge angled parts of the elbow. If you do, you'll have to buy a new elbow: those double-ridges are "hinges" for allowing the elbow's angle and rotation to be adjusted.

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I dropped a putty knife down a sloped register duct like this a few months ago. I had access underneath and used a strong hard drive magnet to drag it back to the opening. It worked great after an hour of trying to use various grabbing tools from the top side.

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