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An Affordable Air Purifier For Dusty Computer Labs?
Alcimedes writes "Our lab has a serious issue with dust. I've had a number of power supplies stop working because of dust clogging up the fans, and it's getting annoying. So I'm looking into some kind of small (under $500) air filtration system, and was wondering if anyone else out there has already gone down this road. If so, what did you buy and would you buy it again? I'd prefer something where I don't have to keep buying filters, but that may just be a pipe dream." Anyone with cats knows the feeling. Can you suggest a reasonably priced answer to dust-borne failure?
despite the hype, the sharper image "ionic breeze" actually collects a lot of dust, and doesn't require replacement filters. I have one near my computer at my house, and it definitely collects a lot of dust.
That's what you need. I work in a cleanroom making IV infusions and we have HEPA filters in the ceilings of the clean rooms. Of course we have HEPA filters else where as well, but it start with the room. That's the expensive option. The next best would be a Dyson vaccum cleaner with a HEPA filter to really suck up all the dust out of your lab.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
There are a few air purifier that might do the trick for not a lot of money. I'd say the few parts you should first look at is WHERE does the dust comes from.
If it's airborne, air purifier.
If it's more like cat hairs (like in my house) simply elevate your computer from the floor. 1ft high and you will get 1/8th the dust you used to have.
If it falls from everywhere, put your computer under something... and a good paint job can help too.
I know it's all common sense, but usually you can remove most of your problems with common sense.
Have a nice evening
Mike
http://www.radioshack.com/Content/Environizer.asp
Suprisingly, for a radioshack product, they really work, and are a lot cheaper and easier to clean than "The sharper image's" ionic breeze thing...
The $199 one should do a medium sized computer room.
My opinion may be nullified by the fact that I work for RS, but I speak now of my own free will.
Sponge!
Since a large portion of the dust that we encounter comes from dead skin cells that are shed from our bodies, a clear solution presents itself:
Convice some of those dirty bastards using your lab to wash once in a while.
Need for air filter: GONE.
The military's solution is called Preventive Maintenance (or PMs for short - yes, it's real). It basically boils down to wiping off the dust on a regular basis, just like you would with the rest of your house. It's not fun, but it works, and it's well under $500.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Clickable link here, sorry. :)
Sponge!
Also, see if you can talk to whoever in incharge of the heating/AC system in the building to see if there is anything they can do. Maybe Allergy Free has a filter that would work with the system or maybe you could get together the with the other groups of people in the building and buy an electrostatic air filtration system for the whole building. They work great on both dust and allergies. These are just wild ideas from brainstorming, they really aren't that realistic I guess. The first paragraph though will probably work well.
PS: We have electrostatic air filters installed in our house. We also had them installed in the house we had before this one. Our family has allergy problems and when we clean them, you'd be amazed the colors the water turns from what comes off them. They really do catch alot.
PPS: Or you could just watercool everything and run it all through one massive radiator. But this would be a bit more than $500. More pipedreaming.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
IIRC, Consumer Reports gave the Sharper Image Ionic Breeze a hefty thumbs-down.
You might look at air cleaners of the type used in woodworking shops... they'd be a bit louder than the Ionic Breeze (understatement), but they'd actually do something useful for the money spent.
Yes, the Environizer sold by Radio Shack(made by Honeywell) is a pretty good product. There are two huge differences between the two air purifiers sold by RS and Sharper Image: 1. The Honeywell Environizers have a silent fan built in; the SI product does not. Having a fan means you can clean a much larger volume of air. 2. Price. RS has much lower prices, at least $100 less than the competition for a comparable product.
I love my Environizer and recommend it to everyone who wants cleaner air.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Anyone with cats knows the feeling.
Yeah, can anyone suggest a cheap filter to remove cats?
Don't know exactly how your computer room is set up, but here's what I did. There are two basic types of "filters" - mechanical and electrostatic. The mechanical filters work by trapping the dirt onto the filter. Throw away the filter, throw away the dirt. The electrostatic filters work by placing a charge on the dust particle. The particle is then attracted onto a nearby surface. This nearby surface may be part of the filter element (like with a permenantly-charged electret filter or a powered electrostatic filter), or it may get stuck to a nearby wall, ceiling, or piece of furniture. This is what happens with a lot of the "ionic" filters. The dust is out of the air, but it's not really removed from the environment. What I have on my central AC unit is a disposable pre-filter (like a conventional AC filter), a high-capacity HEPA filter (a cartridge that looks like a bunch of folded-up paper towels), and a powered electrostatic filter. I change the pre-filters monthly (they're cheap), change the HEPA filters once a year, and wash out the electrostatic element every 3-6 months. This keeps my computer and other electronics fairly clean, even with multiple cats. One way to tell is by the amount of stuff that gets attracted to the TV screen; not much. The only disadvantage to a powered electrostatic filter is the possibility of the creation of ozone.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
You've stumbled across the solution yourself.
Obviously the dust is collecting in these machines. How do you 'remove' dust? You collect it.
So, all you have to do is build a bunch of redundant computers*, and design them with really bad air flow, so dust gets trapped everywhere in them. Once a month, open up these machines and turn them upside-down over a dustbin (outside). Voila.
*Imagine a Beowulf cluster.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I once watched a co-worker use a shop vac inside a very dusty PC. The shop vac sucked a chip out of its socket ....
-kgj
But back to the topic, how about building a plywood or MDF box for your computer, with weatherstriping on the door. Size it to take a standard furnace air filter (intake), and put a bathroom ceiling fan in it to blow the hot air out. Shouldn't be too hard to make, shouldn't cost too much, and you'll know when the filter needs changing just by looking at it.
Tip (and this applies to your furnace, too): Spray the filter with Endust. It'll pick up way more dust that way.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I'm not sure on your lab setup, but if the dust is *outside* the lab, try a pressurising fan setup.
Get a 2 inch outlet cyclonic type air filter, typically used in tractors, bobcats and small motorised machinery.
Hook it to the suction of a blower fan, outside your lab.
Duct the exhaust of the blower *into* your lab.
Try and close as many doors and windows as possible.
The blower will pressurise your lab with clean air, which will try to escape out all the nooks and crannies in your lab, keeping the dust outside.
Don't forget to check the filter every couple of weeks until you get a handle on the maintenance interval required, and don't get a cyclonic filter too big for your fan, as they need high airflow to spin out the dust particles effectively.
This works for a coal lab of ours that is located very close to a 100,000t stockpile of loose,dusty coal. The dust is bad enough that if a blank piece of paper with a pen on it is left outside the "clean room" (still inside the building) you get a "shadow" of the pen on the paper in about 6-8 hours.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
The way the ionic air purifiers work, you should move it *away* from the computer to get maximum effect. The way that you are doing it, when the device pulls dust back towards it, some (most?) of the dust will get diverted by the air flow of the fans. In fact, I would suspect that by putting the device *next* to the computer, you are actually increasing the dust flow to the computer.
An ionic air purifier has two parts. One sends out charged ions which collide with particles of dust and impart a charge to them. The other is an area on the unit itself that has the opposite type of charge. I've never used one, so I don't know how effective they are. However, given the way it works, it seems logical to me that the best place for it would be away from the computer. The desired effect of the device is to pull dust into its area. Instead, it might be better to have it so that it pulls dust away from the computer. Besides, I would think that throwing electric charges (which is the basis of the ionic effect) around near a computer would be undesireable.
Here is a link to purchase it: Friedrich C90A
Take the fans out of your computer, it wo
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Just because you have had some kind of psychosematic..
if you're gonna use big words at least learn how to spell them.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
We *do* work in a coal mine and we *are* aware of "miners lung", thanks very much :-)
:-)
Yes, we wear dust masks when outside collecting / grinding samples, and also have a 6 monthly respirable dust check, where we get to wear a minature version of what I've described above (battery air pump , cyclone, filter) around for a day to check on the amount of respirable dust we breathe in. Every 5 years you're required by law to have a chest x-ray to check for silicosis if you still work in the industry.
It's generally only particles below 10 microns that you have to worry about breathing in, as they're the ones that *never* come out again. Particles bigger than 10 micron get removed via mucus and cilia in your nose/airway/lungs without much hassle. Luckily, 10 micron particles and below generally don't stay suspended in the air too long, they drop out pretty quick.
And anyway, we try not to go outside the lab too much. (Ahhhh! the light! It burns, it burns!!)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
HEPA filters were originally developed during World War II to prevent discharge of radioactive particles from nuclear reactor facility exhausts. They have since become a vital technology in industrial, medical, and military clean rooms and have grown in popularity for use in portable residential air cleaners. A true HEPA filter is defined as having a minimum particle removal efficiency of 99.97% for all particles of 0.3 micron diameter. The HEPA rating is determined using a test smoke with particles of 0.3 micron average diameter. To qualify as a "true" HEPA, the filter must allow no more than 3 particles out of 10,000 to penetrate the filtration media.
Negative ion generators force high-voltage electricity to one or more needlepoints. Electricity is simply electrons in motion and since electrons repel one another, when they reach the needlepoint, they jump off and attach themselves to the molecules in the air forming negative ions. At that point the allergens and other particles are attracted to grounded surfaces where they can get rid of that extra electron, causing them to settle on , floors, furniture and other grounded surfaces, even on your bed. It's important to remember that a simple negative ion generator doesn't capture or collect the particles in the air, it simply causes them to precipitate out of the air.
Electrostatic precipitators are used to scrub the air coming out of factories, but the same technology has grown in popularity in home ventilation systems and some room air cleaners. They are ionizers designed to charge and then collect particles from the air once they have been charged. First, the air is passed through an ionizer where the particles gain a particular charge. Then that air is passed between plates with the opposite charge that attract the charged particles. Electrostatic precipitators have one major drawback though; they rapidly loose effectiveness as dust builds up on the plates.
They Ionic Breeze is essentially an electrostatic precipitator with no real means of circulating the air past the ionizer and then past the charged plates making it essentially useless.
I run an Austin Air Cleaner in my computer room and it does an excellent job keeping it dust-free. The cool thing about it is that the filter needs to be changed only every 5 years and the pre-filter is vacuumable instead of replacable. I've found it to be a very cost effective cleaner compared to most HEPA-filter based air cleaners where you must change the pre-filters every three months and the HEPA filters every year.
grep -v -w cats ?
sed 's/cats//g' ?
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
Can't you spell the word out? For Pete's sake, it's only 45 letters long:
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconio
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
One of the managers at a company ( which is no longer ) that I worked it looked at things like this.
I am an engineer. This is how I see it.
You lose a power supply. No big deal - but in the process of losing the power supply, you corrupt your system. Big deal. This could be very costly to recover from.
Now, even if you were lucky and the system suffered no damage from the failing power supply, you have the time to account for to take the system offline, obtain, and replace the supply. Time is expensive. You are now losing on two paths: You can not use the machine, and you are expending time finding parts and fixing the machine.
Personally, I find it much much more expedient to provide the infrastructure for trouble free operation than to let things fail and try to fix them. Yes, the power supply is cheap. So are engine bearings. But saving money by scrimping on oil changes is hardly a way to "keep companies running smoothly and profitably", rather, as an engineer, I see this the quickest way of running a company into the ground with soaring overhead maintenance costs.
Given my own knowledge of the costs involved and failure statistics, I would opt for prevention, but should the company see fit to make me subordinate to someone who sees fit to override my judgement, I would obey, but find somewhere else to work, for the higher-ups are apparently clueless about the mountain of maintainance costs heading their way - and have no idea how much the management skills they hired is really costing them.
I normally would not be so straighforward, truthful, and harsh in my reply, but you did post AC, so I feel you are fair game.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
A short description on filters: There is, roughly, how many particles they catch of different sizes and how much air they attempt to filter. (Back to the ionic breeze later) In general, the latter is actually the dominant force in really helping you.
The HEPA standard is irrelevant (and no longer current) in any case where you might be standing in the unfiltered air. It's designed to keep radioisotopes from escaping laboratories. That doesn't mean HEPA filters are bad - but the HEPA standard is tremendous overkill in terms of what's important to you. A small HEPA filter, for instance, might have filtered 99.97% of very small particles out of 10% of the room air in the time another filter would have filtered out 80% of 90% of the air. (Math: about 10% vs. 72%)
That said, traditional furnace filters still suck :) as they barely do any filtering at all. In fact, I have a box of 20x25 for sale at http://www.xig.net/sale/ near Chicago. Filtrete is a wonderful solution that doesn't cost very much - and while the parent post mentioned this, I'm not sure they put enough emphasis on it. I ended up replacing my furnace fairly soon after moving here for other reasons, and I have a Honeywell F50 electronic filter on my furnace. It's not even a very efficient filter compared to HEPA, but it uses the gigantic fan that's on my furnance, so in the end, it's better.
There is a basic difference between electronic and physical media filters that _in general_ means electronic filters work better on smaller particles and media works better on big ones. The ideal solution typically is to put a large media filter in front of the electronic air filter - which is exactly what my F50 does. (There's a washable metal mesh filter) I believe this is the nature of the Ionic Breeze controversy - that it is ineffective on industrial debris in the air, but effective at pulling out allergen-sized particles. (Yes, allergens come in many sizes. But they're all pretty small. And, you're probably not allergic to dust mites, but to dust mite FECES - just in case you weren't sure it was tiny) I certainly think a fan might help it, but in my bedroom, for instance, it probably wouldn't matter because there's a ceiling fan and quite a bit of airflow (partially from ~ 12 case fans so it varies depending on exactly where...) My supposition is that it was designed with some sort of "average" room air circulation in mind.
If your goal involves making it easier for someone to breathe, make sure you catch those pretty small particles - Filtrete at least, electronic ideally. If you have allergies, there are lots of other things that help tremendously - like (now NOT just plastic!) covers on your mattress, hardwood floors, washing bedding in hot water... (Perhaps I'll turn this page into a webpage. Heh. I'm happy to answer questions, though, in the meantime. If I do, it'll appear at http://www.xig.net/allergy
Disclaimers and notes: I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering, I don't have an Ionic Breeze (they cost HOW much?), nor have I read the relevant Consumer Reports articles. I do think CR usually does great work, and I purchased my washer, dryer, and dishwasher from their reviews, but anyone can make a mistake. I do have pervasive airborne allergies, and have made a great many modifications to my surroundings to improve them.
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