does anybody out there know rails internals?

I haven't used sweepers, so I'm not much help; but it looks like this is a singleton. So you would need SomeSweeper.instance to get at the singleton object. Not sure what you would do with it though...

Sweepers are half AR Observer and half controller filter. This means they have to run from a controller. That's where the methods for expiring stuff lives. You're probably better off using an Observer then.