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Making Your PC Dust Free?
Kranfer asks: "Recently, I cleaned out my PC to find not only dust... but also feathers from my from rather large parrots. I have struggled with keeping my PC dust free for years, but I have yet to find a workable solution that will keep the dust from stacking up every few months, inside my PCs at home. I was hoping that my peers on Slashdot might have thought up some innovative solutions to this common problem with any PC. How does one cut down on the dust entering a PC and sticking around? I run an Antec File Server Case with each and every fan slot taken blowing out, and even one of those Harddrive coolers and PCI slot coolers. What have you done to rid yourself of the dust and pet dander inside your PCs?"
Put fan filters on all of your fans! They cost around $1 and do a good job.
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each and every fan slot taken blowing out
That is your first problem, you need as many fans sucking in that you have blowing out. You might have three sucking in on the front of the case, and three blowing out. This will mean less load on the fans, less dirt coming in through crevasses since it needs a place to get air, and better cooling
I think someone else said filters for your fans, and that would be a viable solution as long as you changed them out ever-so-often.
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you need to keep a positive pressure inside the PC (so blow the fans IN, more than out), and then you can filter the air on the intake and not have dust getting in anywhere else... as for what filter material you use, i don't know, hopefully others can suggest something cheap and easily available in large rolls (i'm thinking of aquarium filter, probably not fine enough though for air). you want some fine mat material that you can replace or blow out every few weeks. :)
i've been meaning to solve this problem myself because it cant be good for component life either.
you have parrots in the same room as the PC?!
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My current frankenstein-box, before I gave in and bought a non-stock cpu cooler, was cooled by a 20" galaxy fan (about $11 from WalMart) bolted onto the side of the case in place of an actual case cover. After a few months, the entire case was a christmas wonderland of gray gunk. I had to take the whole thing apart and peel off sheets of lint that reminded me of cleaning out the lint trap on a dryer. So I bought an air conditioner filter, and duct taped it onto the galaxy fan. Changed it every few months, and not one bit of dust.
Of course, this still works with normal 80mm fans. Go to Walmart and buy an aircondioner filter, and cut out 80mm diameter circles. Just screw through them with the same screws that hold your fans onto your case. Change whenever they look really bad, or when you notice your temps going up.
Yes. Stockings. From the significant other that you wish you had. They make excellent, cheap dust filters.
every fan slot taken blowing out
BAD IDEA
Then all the air coming into your case will be sucked from the edges and between hte drive bays, places where dust is likley to collect anyway.
Its better to run them at a 50/50 (40/60 can work too) mix of in/out fans, and the sugestion about the filters is on the mark as well.
The more I learn about Windows the more I am surprised it runs at all
Open-cell foam is what's commonly used in cases that have filters. It seems to work pretty well. You could also use a metal screen, like those used in windows. That way, it'd be reausable and easier to clean. Of course, dust filtering in my case is near impossible. I've got a Cooler Master Centurion 5; the whole damn thing is covered in ventilation holes.
You said each and every fan slot was blowing out. That is your problem. The air that is going in to the box is coming from whatever cracks, vents, etc there are. Most, if not all, of these will be unfiltered so you are sucking up environmental dust.
In order to keep dust out of your PC, you need to control the air going *in* to the box. That means having more fans blowing in than out so that the case has a net positive air pressure. This way, air is blowing out of the miscellaneous cracks in the case. Once you do this, you add filters to the fans that are blowing in. No more dust in box.
The most important thing to remember if you use filters on your fans is to clean them often. Clogged intake fans will heat your case up like crazy.
I would also note that you need a balance of fans blowing in and out so that you get the best airflow through the case. Don't have them all going the same direction as that will rarely provide the best cooling.
You can really reduce the amount of dust in a case just by getting it up off the floor. Higher is better. Dust tends to settle near the floor, and especially if you have carpet, walking by the desk will kick up small amounts of dust every time.
60/40 on the in/out for fans (don't waste money & time with slot fans) and you can get cheap filter material from a motherboard box. You know, the spongy stuff inside the box? Cut it into 80mm squares. Works like a champ. Mount between fan & case.
Don't use the Troll mod just because you disagree with me.
The biggest reason to remove dust is because it insulates heat. Chips are designed around the idea of operating exposed to air. Most chips generate some heat, and if they're in a thick blanket of dust, they'll run hotter than they otherwise would. The more recent the equipment, the more pronounced the effect, because newer stuff runs much hotter than older-generation equipment. Heat eventually causes failures.
That 486-33 in the corner, in other words, might continue to work fine for 20 years in three feet of dust. It generates so little heat to begin with that insulating it isn't that big a deal. That machine you're talking about that's eight years old probably isn't a lot faster than that.
But if you bought a brand new Athlon 64 4800+ and put it into the same environment, it could potentially die within months.... particularly if the motherboard is passively cooled. The CPU itself might be fine (the spinning fan prevents the worst of the dust from building up), but the hot Northbridge could easily overheat.
Train the parrots to clean the PC.
Heh, this question is not as difficult as it seems. All off the shelf stuff.
.... You gotta have a spoiler).
Sure, you need positive pressure in the case, but think Auto Shop!
They sell high volume paper/oil air filters. The oil traps the airborne dust particles quite effectively, and they are easy to replace.
So, just find an old turbo, install a brushless motor from a RC plane and controller with a servo activator PCB (many hobby places sell these) so you can adjust the speed - or even control it straight from the PC.
Use this as the impellor, with the Turbo attached to the case (mock up the back end, or even use it as the exhaust) and just attach an Auto Pod Filter...
Don't forget to add "Phulli Sik" stickers to the side of the case, and maybe a few logo's on the front.... AMD, Nvidia, etc. Attached to the drive bay door at a slight angle. (With an Intel sticker cut in half, upside down, on the spoiler
Bonus points if the Turbo spools when you use a pedal accelerator on driving games.
Oh, and wear your cap on backwards at Lan parties.
Well, it might sound funny, but this would actually work. Of course, you can buy car air filters as flat panels also, and the oil comes in a spray can, but that's just cheating now!.
GrpA
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That's a good point. Has anyone had any experience with those Ionic Breeze ones I see 20 times a day on TV? Placing one of those near your computer, and hence you'll benefit from it as well when you're using computer would be a good idea. A clean room will make for a clean computer.
Perfect solution!
I started working on computers back in the 80's when everybody had their own custom case, style, and philosophy. I worked for a well known mom-and-pop computer shop in our city that had a reputation for low prices so I was working on pretty much everything. Many of the higher-end PC's were built with the large-computer mentality of the mainframe / minicomputer era of over-engineering. Besides being overpriced, many included filters over the fan because "real computers" had them. Most of the time the filters were more trouble than they were worth.
The primary problem was that people were not cleaning the filters. Out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Putting filters over your fans means that somebody has to regularily check and change them. I've had PC's on shop floors that had the filters so clogged with oil and gunk that the fans they were covering burned out from overload. After I replaced them and explained everything to them I might have to go back 6 months later to do the exact same thing because "they hadn't got around to changing them". I've burned my fingers on parts inside some of those machines, and that was the days before heat sinks in the first place.
Filters are good as long as you're going to religiously inspect them every month or so and clean or replace them.
As a passing curiosity, does anybody know exactly how much heat the load resistor on one of the old original 63.5 watt PC's put out when you had it hooked up in place of the 2nd floppy drive? I remember one particular system that was in a dusty factory. Somebody had jury-rigged a filter across the front of the system using window screen and medical gauze. The gauze had gunked up so much the fan in the power supply was basically worthless. A coworker managed to get a second degree burn off the load-resistor and I never could figure out how that managed to happen with something that only had 63.5 watts in the first place.
I'm about a year from getting a BS in environmental sci, and here's my 2 cents on the topic of ionic breeze filtration systems.
/high concentration exposure to ozone is believed to cause cancer. Ozone in the air we breathe is important enough that there are standards on acceptable limits. http://www.epa.gov/air/criteria.html
mmmm...ozone. Can't live without it, but let's not live with it aroun us. When ozone is up in the stratosphere, it's blocking out the UV rays and saving our hides from skin cancer. But when it's "down here", it's harmful to us. These ionic filters create ozone. Long term
I don't think ionic breeze can generate high concentrations of ozone, but you'll be exposed to it 24/7 which isn't good either.
And here's my personal experience with ionic breeze filters.
Well, My uncle bought a few of these to put around his house while he was remodeling. He commented to me how wonderful they were b/c they would "pull" dust out of the air and onto the collection plates.
He loved them so much that he even stuck one in my parent's bedroom. My dad complained of breating problems soon after it was put there. I told him to turn it off, and turning it off solved his problems.
So, as another posted, get something with a real filter.
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Moving air brings dust. The obvious solution is to eliminate fans. Perhaps a move to water cooling is in order for you.