You open an old vault and know right away the job just got longer. Dirt, dust, cobwebs, and debris collect around loadbreak elbows and other equipment. Cable tags have disappeared under years of grime.

The buildup is more than an inconvenience. Crews need to identify equipment before switching, and properly clean contaminated surfaces to help reduce conditions that can contribute to tracking and flashover.

So What Do You Have to Clean It With?

You came to switch, not rig up a broom.

So you use whatever the crew has. A taped on brush. A household broom. Whatever homemade “hot broom” has been riding around in the truck.

The cleaning was already part of the job. The tool for it was still an afterthought.

After years of building, maintaining, and switching underground systems around the Seattle area, I kept running into the same problem.

Switching already had a process. Cleaning still depended on a workaround.

You’d hear, “Just make sure it has a wood handle.”

It was usually said with a laugh.

“Hot broom” had become a running joke, and that never sat right with me. We were doing serious work with tools that weren’t built for it.

When cleaning was needed, we grabbed whatever broom, brush, or homemade setup we could make work. That meant finding a broom, carrying another handle, taping something together, or relying on a homemade setup that was never really built for the job.

Every time, we were spending extra time making a tool work for the task instead of having a tool made for it.

Then the answer became obvious.

We already bring the stick.

When we go switching, the shotgun stick is already part of the setup. Instead of finding another broom or rigging something together, why not give the stick a cleaning attachment made for the job?

That became the Will Power Hot Broom™.

A purpose built, nonconductive cleaning attachment designed to secure to a shotgun stick and give crews a dedicated tool for cleaning underground equipment.

The handle we needed was already in our hands.

The same live-line tool we bring for switching can now serve as the handle for the cleaning tool we need.