A Breath of Fresh Air
For the past few months, I've been generating quite a bit of dust in the workshop — to the point that I need some sort of ventilation (and dust collection) option. However, since a lot of the dust and fumes are due to painting and finishing, I wanted to tackle the air before the floors.
Commercial workshop air-cleaners appear quite effective but are expensive at nearly $400. However, in principle, an air filter should be a simple thing: pull air through a filter and exhaust filtered air back into the room… which shouldn't be that hard — or expensive.
I researched a few DIY options and figured that a 20X30in furnace filter would give be the best bang/buck filter size and that a 20in box fan could deliver enough CFMs to make a difference… a weekend later, I had a home-made filter that used up a bit of scrap wood and cost less than $25 ($18 for the fan, $4 for the filter and $3 for misc hardware… not counting the scrap wood and aluminum angle that were left over)…
After hanging the prototype, I made a few adjustments: re-routing the power cord to exit from the top and the creation of some steel cables for hanging (also leftover pieces), but the premise is the same. The fan is powered by the lighting circuit, so it comes on when the lights are on (not a bad option), but for $3 more, I added a simple on/off switch.
I also blocked off the rear of the fan a bit so that the fan would be more prone to pull air from the front-side rather than recirculate it on the back side. In the end, If I were to install filters on both sides, even that wouldn't matter.
I'll eventually run two channels down the long part of the box to hold the filter even tighter, but that's another project…
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