Quarters Clogged in Round Safe

[MEP001]

That happened at an old wash I used to run. I rolled in one evening to find someone had carefully cut out a brick. They must have known quarters were in the column. I don't know how much they got, I got another $1500 out before I closed it up. I figured out a few years later how it happened, whoever installed the safes used a plastic funnel on top of the safe and ran PVC pipe down to it. A chunk of brick fell down and blocked the funnel.

I know another wash that may have many thousands of dollars in the walls. They had used steel tube from the boxes to the safes and the tube rusted through. I heard stories of another wash that was torn down and they found three 55-gallon barrels of quarters in the walls.

 

[David Rolf]

Ok so today I spent more time trying to understand the chute system

What are the coins hanging up on? What size tube do you have now?

Randy, It appears the tube size is 1 3/4. This is the best picture I could take with my cheap camera. It appears the coins are just getting hung up on rough surfaces. No breaks are found. The picture shown is from the top down before the Y joint which falls into the vault. The color of rust has me concerned but it appears to be PVC? Makes me believe just a good cleaning of the tube may work. Doesn't seem the velocity of the coins dropping is the same in both bays. Why this system has worked fine for 25 years and all of a sudden is acting up is beyond me.

 

[Randy]

It looks like there's a small lip on the tube that the one coin is hung up on. What you could try is cleaning the tube a strong cleaner. You could try spraying something like Pledge furniture cleaner in the tube and wiping it down the tube. Pledge makes everything slippery.

 

[MEP001]

This might be a bad idea, so don't blame me if you end up breaking something and have to open the wall. It's possible the PVC was never glued together and it's slipping apart to the point the angle isn't enough for the coins to slide down. You might try prying from inside the box to push the pipe tighter together and increasing the angle. I've plumbed safes for many washes and I always use 1 1/2" PVC and 45° fittings.

 

[Blanco]

I heard stories of another wash that was torn down and they found three 55-gallon barrels of quarters in the walls.

WOW! 100K in quarters! Not bad for a day of demo work. If its a true story!

 

[David Rolf]

So I wanted to follow up on what I found with my coin vault. It appears 25 years of dust and grime was the problem. I bought a 3-inch pellet stove pipe brush and cut the diameter to fit my coin pipe. After that used a snake with a rag dipped in Pledge to finish it off. Coins drop like a rock now. Thanks

 

[Randy]

Thanks for coming back and giving us a update. I'm glad it all turned out for the good.

 

[sjb]

I have a similar snafu on 2 of my bays, where they used a smaller pvc pipe to channel the coins into the safe. My issue began when we converted to only dispensing our $1 tokens, that are larger than the quarters that we still accept….

I will purge them out again, and try the pledge solution… if that does not correct the issue, I think my next step will be to make those 2 bays CC only…

Oy!

 

[designflaw]

So I wanted to follow up on what I found with my coin vault. It appears 25 years of dust and grime was the problem. I bought a 3-inch pellet stove pipe brush and cut the diameter to fit my coin pipe. After that used a snake with a rag dipped in Pledge to finish it off. Coins drop like a rock now. Thanks

I have a similar snake and I got this camera from amazon, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MYTHWK4/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

If I take too much time to take out the quarters, my shutes get clogged but between the snake/camera, I have gotten pretty good at getting them unblocked.