I was wondering if any other DIY'ers or businesspeople have some knowledge on the various HEPA/AIR filters that are available. I've been making juice for a while now and I'd like to invest in a HEPA air purifier. I have no clue what I'm looking for though. Any advice?
hi,
Unless you have a clean room type setup, I am not sure I see the need for a HEPA filter. I have a rather large unit in my living room that was around 250.00 this is a pretty high end unit. It has a CAD (Clean air delivery) rating of something like 250 square feet. I belive this means it will turn over all the air in that 250 sq ft room 4 times per hour. I have cats, and a parrot, and use it to keep that room from smelling like a zoo. It does WONDERS for the smell, but its not like its filtering out much of anything from the room per se. Cat hair still sticks to the couches, I still have to dust the TV, etc.
Now, if you have a clean room type setup, you are going to want/need a forced air type setup that basically creates a gigantic vaccuum in the room to ensure all particulate matter is collected, but I dont see how you could do this on that small of a budget, this is more of a classic bunny suit/gloves, booties type setup, where you are actively trying to keep any particulates from entering the room first, and then filtering the room to catch anything that may have come in.
ISO standards have classes for cleanrooms, they range from 1-10. (10 being more like where computer chips are fabricated, I want to say for a good juice lab you want a class 6 room, but again, I am not an expert on the subject).
So, what are you trying to filter in your room?
I realize this sounds so trashy, but I have made it my practice to mix juice on my stove top (glass top stove) with the vent fan on high, to suck any fumes/smells up the hood and out of hte house. this seems to be working great for me. What is your setup like? where do you mix? any other things that could help give you better answers?
EDIT : looking at some of your other posts, it looks like you have a better grasp on this than I had thought. how big is your "lab"? if its a standard bedroom sized (under 200 sq ft) and you dont need a commercial unit, look at this: http://www.amazon.com/Winix-WAC9500-Ultimate-PlasmaWave-Technology/dp/B004VGIBZK/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1425328913&sr=8-6&keywords=winix+filter
I keep mine on high setting 24/7. I bump it to Turbo when the room smells at all. Turbo is a bit loud, like having a large fan on in the room, on high, you can barely hear it. I have it in a 14 X 24 room, and it seems to do wonders in there, in a bedroom sized room, I think it could be what you are after.
Basically, I mix in my apartment but have plans to create a full clean room soon that will be around 300-500 SQ ft. I would like to buy a HEPA filter that I can use in the mean time (even if there is no huge benefit) that would also be sufficient for when I setup the clean room.
That filter seems good, but would it be enough for say, a class 6 ISO clean room? I'm looking for something that could work in both situations.
EDIT: I will also say that I have a cat in my apartment (my friends who buy juice know that), so maybe something that would filter the cat hair decently as well?
ISO 6 is going to expect around 200 ACH (200 complete air changes per hour), which for a 300 sq.ft room with 7 foot tall walls (2100 cu ft.) would be around 7,000 cfm.
you cannot really do it for that price. for that type of clean room, you would need something with either turbulent, or laminar flow at a very high volume.
Laminar flow (probably the easier of the two), would be if you have fans at the top of the room pushing down (filtered air), and fans at the floor that suck the air out and push it outside of the room.. so you have a consistant downward flow, this pushes all contaminants down.
It is almost easier to build a clean room of this sort INSIDE of an existing room. I have heard of this being done with visquine to create the "room", and using fans and ductwork outside of the "room". to get the level 6 clean room, you may have to push around 100+ times the room volume of air PER HOUR. This would mean using like 7-10 of these winix filters in a bedroom. you would have to duct the output into a small room (inside of your room) in the ceiling, and likely have the air intakes ducted to the small rooms output at the floor level.
I did a lot of research before buying that filter... and it was one of the best ones for the money.. and honestly, unless i am sitting inches away from it, i cannot feel the air intake. it blows HARD on the output side, but not much on the intake due to how its designed to pull in air from 3 sides and uses the entire surface area of the filter for the intake (its like 18"X24" filter) so that makes sense, as the output is like a 6X12 area, that the output would push harder.. but really, I am stumped thinking about how you could filter even a small home built cleanTYPE room with under 500 bucks.
This is no cheap thing mind you, so thats why I initially asked why you want/need this type of filtration. I just dont see how you could do it that cheap. not trying to talk you out of it, just maybe you would have spend quite a bit more to get a realistic very filtered room.
Maybe You need a laminar flow hood? It allows to work in a sterile stream of air http://files.shroomery.org/files/04-38/565941206-3.jpg
hey moggd,
I was thinking about this a bit last night, and have an idea that you may or may not like, but thought I should share with you..
you have this space, you say around 400 Sq ft.. that is a HUGE area to be filtering... why not make a smaller space inside of your space. For example, you could devote and 8X8 area of the garage for a "mixing room" drop the ceiling down to 6 ft, and you have 2 foot above the room to build your filtration, and you only have 512 CUBIC feet of airspace to filter. You will cut your costs almost exponentially doing it this way.
I would devote the rest of the space to storage of supplies, stock, labeling, etc.. none of that work has to be done in a clean room! you can just take the supplies into the room wtih you.
i said to use a 6ft ceiling as i assume you will be sitting at a table to do the mixing.. you could have an "L" shaped desk in the room along 2 adjoining walls, that would give you 24 sq ft of desk space assuming a 2ft wide table.. this should be plenty of room for the actual mixing, and bottling if you are doing large batches.. but once you put the caps on the bottles you are good, so you dont need to filter the entire 400 sq. ft.
Hope that helps some?