Apparently Greenville, CA is no more… mostly wiped off the map. 
It might be a sign it’s time to clean the garage, when while thinking about filters you suddenly remember that you have one, new in the box, that you bought when you lived in a different state.
…in 2015.
Anyway, I put this 400CFM 1 micron filter up in the shop.
It will only cycle the air volume of the building barely once an hour, but this isn’t a wood shop, so I’m not generating that sort of dust, just trying to cut down on the outside air pollution.
We’ll see what happens after it runs for a day or three. A PM2.5 meter totally killed my hypothesis on swamp coolers- that a wet membrane must be doing something to clean the intake air, even just a little. Uh, no, actually indoor readings were a little worse than outside. Go figure.
Oh, and I also tested a pack of these when putting in the new outlet:
Conclusion: don’t bother. They’re just as frustrating as wire nuts when dealing with stranded 12AWG.
I would unreservedly recommend the 3m half respirator masks and the 2297 P100 filters with “nuisance organic filters”. I actually have a pair of old 3m screw-on cartridges like 10-20 yrs old, and they still cut ALL smells out. But since they’re so old and I can’t get cartridges anymore, I’ve upgraded to the new bayonet style above. There’s a trapezoidal shaped style as well, which doesn’t cover quite as much of your face, but they’re heavier.
I still use the cartridge mask to clean the cat box, and it’s only about 90% effective against ammonia, but at least I’m not gagging and choking. Note that the ammonia can be bad enough to make my eyes water.
If you’re worried about fakes, buy them from Grainger, one of the largest industrial suppliers I know of.
I once swapped from the P100 + charcoal to a new set of P100’s, and I could still smell smoke through them. I swapped back!
Also the bayonet half respirator masks have a TON of 3d printed attachments.
The best part of the respirator masks is that the soft plastic actually seals to your face properly. no leaks. I don’t get fogged glasses in winter, as proof that they work extremely well.
Well I can confirm ‘recirculate’ works well in my car’s HVAC. I put a new cabin air filter in a few weeks ago. The air outside was a PM2.5 of ~40, it was a little under 20 just running the AC in the car. Turning on recirculate brought it down to around 7 after about 20 minutes.
It was 50 outside this morning, 32 in the shop when I came in, and after running that overhead filter for 3 hours, it’s down to 17. So it is, at least, better than nothing.
Excellent! Our recirc works decently enough, though the truck’s lack of an air filter means we can’t get better than about half the outside concentration. Car is far better.
Motorcycles… suffer somewhat in terms of filtration.
1 Like