Indeed the plastic bag trick works very very well in a lot of different use cases. I was able to pull twine over 500 feet with this technique while doing my driveway conduits.
I had about 50 feet and 270° of bends in some PVC conduits I'd buried under a section of yard. I'd gotten everything done and asked my wife to come help me get the poly string and then mule tape into the conduits. The poly line practically leapt into the conduit chasing the plastic bag. It was one of the greatest ratios between how hard I thought something might be and how hard it actually was.
Pulling a bit of twine through from my pool over to where I had installed my equipment pad went much the same way, and I was too dumb to think about using a plastic bag ;). Just stuffed a bit of twine in one and and left it loose, walked over to the other and and put a shop vac on it, and -whoosh- here came the string. Felt like cheating. It was only a small conduit, though, 3/4 inch, so it had pretty good airflow.
