I have an older style Camelbak hydration bladder with insulating bag. I got lazy on my last trip, and must have left water in the tube and not cleaned and fully dried it before forgetting about it.
After a month or so, I took it out of the pack it lives in, and find the inside of the tube all gross with mould and dark coloured gunk - I didn't take pics as I was sufficiently grossed out. Short of throwing it out and getting another tube, I set about cleaning the bag my normal way, some hot water, some vinegar and letting it dry out properly.
My hydration bladder is the older one where the tube is really hard to get take off from the bottom of the bladder, and didn't come with the quick release. I don't use the official Camelbak cleaning kit, just either use a vinegar or bleach solution and hot water to clean it out.
After running a few cleaning cycles - the tube looked ok, and after a good drying, and a taste test, it came up ok, or so I thought.
I recently bought a quick connect kit so I can take the bladder out and fill it quickly without having to fiddle with the hose and how it goes through my pack. I bought the Source quick connect kit which was a bit cheaper than the Camelbak one, and it fits ok. To fit it, you have to cut the original hose close to the connection to the bladder to fit the new valve in.
Once I did that, I thought, I should try to clean the hose properly. I took a cotton bud, wet it with some vinegar, and cleaned the inside of the tube as far as the bud would go, and the cotton bud head came out gross and quite dirty (dark brownish stains) - even though the tube looked clear.
I was looking for a way to clean it, having tried using the cotton bud and a piece of string to pull it through, but that proved difficult. I even put the wet cotton bud in and did a blowgun thing forcing it through the tube with reasonable results, and pulling the string to retrieve it. I was looking for some pipe cleaners but thought I'd come up with the same issue - it wouldn't fit through the whole hose.
I was considering succumbing and buying the Camelbak cleaning kit when I thought of straightening a coated wire hangar and putting a piece of cloth at one end. Then I came up with this idea I thought I'd share:
I had run some vinegar through the hose before I ran the knot through, and the knot cleaned up the gunk on the inside of the tube nicely. The first run, the brownish gunk came off an a tissue and I rinsed out the knot end. By the third go, there was no gunk on the knot.
So if you end up with a grungy tube, and don't have the Camelbak/source tube cleaning brush, this is a cheap alternative.
