BOX FAN AIR FILTER For About $40! (How To Build a DIY Box Fan Air Purifier With HVAC Filters!)

ultimately how do you cut down on that really fine dangerous dust that fills up a workshop shopbacks and dust collectors are part of the process but they don't handle everything and in a lot of cases they can actually contribute to the problem of airborne dust my shop build is winding down and the last thing i had to tackle was final phase dust collection that's why i built this thing it's more or less a homemade air scrubber and it's something that i think every shop should have so today i'm going to discuss how it works why you need it and i'll even give a few notes on how i built mine and that's coming up next on the honest carpenter show cutting down on dust and debris in a workshop is like warfare it's complicated messy and you almost never get a complete victory when i was first planning out this shop i wanted to get a shop fox dust collector a 1.5 horsepower this is a great tool from a great brand and i actually went so far as to order one but after i'd planned things out a little more i decided i had to send it back big single phase dust collectors like this are best for picking up large debris in high volume think wood chips coming off a planer or a jointer but they actually struggle with finer dust and smaller tools this is because they suck massive quantities of air at a very low pressure if you hook a huge tool like that up to a smaller miter saw or table saw it'll just stress its own motor out it's like a whale breathing it can't get the volume of air it needs from such small machine ports i ultimately didn't plan to have a big planer or joiner or anything like that just smaller contractor grade tools so the better option for me was a system of shop vacs shopbacks suck a smaller quantity of air at a much higher pressure so they're far better suited to hook up to these smaller ports and they'll actually pull dust through more effectively but both dust collectors and shopbacks still struggle with finer dust particles they'll catch everything up to a certain size but they'll just pump finer dust back out into the room so you have to implement various filter combinations to cut this down some large dust collectors have expensive pleated filters that catch smaller particles and for my shopvac i use a filter bag and pleated filter combo which gets me closer to a hepa level filtration i did a video on these filters and what hepa means so check that one out if you're curious but even with all these measures in place you'll still struggle to catch dust in a shop this is because cutting lumber is just a violent process dust explodes into the air at the point where blade meets wood and from there it can go anywhere to catch all these particles you have to bring your suction really close to the blade but you only see this effectively engineered on very expensive industrial cabinet saws which few people can afford so the rest of us have this super fine dust floating around the shop constantly and no matter how much vacuuming you do you'll never get it all especially since your vacuum outflow just stirs it up more as i said in my hepa video this super fine dust is what causes us to get sick it gets way down in your lungs causing problems both immediate and chronic you have to try to control it at full shot level and your best bet for doing this i think is a unit like this a box fan air purifier box fans actually circulate air very effectively and they keep us cool in the shop at the same time so their dual function people have been knocking these together on job sites and in houses for years you're basically just pairing up typical house hbac filters with a normal 20 inch box fan these pleated filters are designed to catch particles in that harmful sub point 10 micron category and the fan creates the draw to bring those particles towards the filters where they get trapped and the cool thing is your design for a unit like this can be almost anything box bands are almost always 20 inches by 20 inches so in a pinch you can literally just tape a 20 by 20 filter to the back of a fan but i wanted something a little more durable so i built this simple frame it's just half inch plywood designed to hold two 20 by 16 filters and a system of cradles and slides i started by shaping out a couple trapezoidal pieces including a bottom one with a lip for the fan to sit on then to create the interior space i just made sort of plywood stilts that would prop the two trapezoids about 20 inches apart i created flat surfaces for the fan to butt against at the front then a narrow wall at the back the slides for the filters are just built up plywood pieces i really didn't even plan this much i just roughly mapped out perimeters with a pencil then i started ripping gluing and shooting on plywood pieces that would cradle a one-inch filter what i wound up with were these diagonal slides in a pretty decent little frame but there were gaps around the filters that would let a lot of air through cutting down on filtration so i just covered these with duct tape pretty much the original intended use of duct tape this let the fan create a lot more draw and more fine particles got sucked into the pleats that's really all there is to it now i get a box fan to cool me off in a filtration method to catch more of the fine dust floating around in my shop just running the thing for 20 minutes or so will create multiple full cycles of all the air in the room it's still no replacement for a decent dust mask which i'll cover in a later video and it's not as effective as a true air scrubber which you may want for really hazardous projects but for roughly 40 bucks it's hard to beat and you can just cut out and replace filters as they get dirty over time i'm going to mount mine on this rolling cart so i can move it around the shop more freely what did you think of this video was it helpful do you have a different design for your shop let me hear about it down in the comments as always thanks for watching be sure to check back in for more videos coming up soon and please consider subscribing and hitting that little bell button to turn on notifications that way you'll know the moment we post something i'm ethan james with the honestcarpenter.com i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: The Honest Carpenter

Views: 57,854

Rating: 4.9707603 out of 5

Keywords: box fan, box fan air filter woodworking, box fan air filter diy, box fan air filter cube, box fan air filter test, box fan air filter plans, box fan air filter size, house air filter direction, air filter replacement, diy air filter, air cleaner, cheap air filter, box fan air purifier, box fan filter, diy air filter box fan, diy air filter woodworking, diy air purifier hepa, shop vac dust collection system, dust collector diy, the honest carpenter, dust collector

Id: 4kBWKFhOFOM

Length: 5min 34sec (334 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021