Do Gas Mask Filters Expire? Whats Inside and How do they Work?

hi folks Canadian prepper here so today I've bisected one of our gas mask filters or our protective mask filters as a subscriber had commented on the last video I've been calling them gas masks but they're actually called protective masks because they protect against more things than just gases so I'm gonna try to not use the word gas masks throughout this video but I probably will ten times so we've bisected one of these mesto multi-purpose filters this basically filters out everything this is NBC nuclear biological radiological chemical filters out everything we've bisected one of these we do sell these at Canadian preparedness comm so I thought I'd take the opportunity to learn a bit about what's inside these things myself and parlay that knowledge onto you and hopefully answer some of your questions so these have the standard 40 millimeter nato ports these are gonna fit most protective masks I didn't say gas masks there's also sixty millimeter which is another common one and you can actually find adapters for those that you can use that with 40 millimeter protective masks almost a gas masks again I'm learning here thank you whoever that subscriber was I can't remember your name but I appreciate the knowledge basically in a gas mask filter there's two main components there is a HEPA filter and there's activated carbon activated carbon can be made by anybody it's very simple to make you just have to make charcoal I've done a video on how to make charcoal basically you take woodchips you put it in a medical container which is not going to light on fire and you put that in a fire and you heat it up for a few hours and you're gonna be left with charcoal you crunch that charcoal down you mulch it up you mix it with sodium chloride and water and you're going to get a paste and then you let that paste dry out then you're gonna be left with activated carbon and then you want to break it up into these granules it's very important that you don't make it into a very fine powder because the only way air can pass through the filter is if it's in these decent-sized granules so not quite a fine powder but you want it to be broken up as much as possible because how it basically works all these little granules here the more granules you have the more surface area you have on the active carbon basically how it works it's a process called adsorption not absorption adsorption so as opposed to absorption adsorption is the process in which items stick to something so they're not absorbed into something they just adhere to it so this active carbon acts as a magnet for chemicals toxins gases just to go over some of the stuff that this thing blocks out here organic gases and vapors inorganic gases and vapors acid gases ammonia dust fumes and mists and of course the HEPA filter is going to provide protection of very very small particulates down to point zero zero one microns or something to that effect basically it's going to prevent bacterias and viruses bacterias bacteria and viruses from passing through the filter so basically that's all there is to it it's a HEPA filter and this thing is stocked with activated carbon now you're gonna know when your gas mask is depleted when air can no longer pass through and you're finding it very hard to breathe in your protective mask because this active carbon is going to adsorb so much junk that it's going to get clogged and air is not going to be able to pass through so typically these things are going to last between 12 and 24 hours depending on the the toxicity of the environment that you're in if you're surrounded by tear gas non-stop it's gonna last a lot less longer than if maybe you're you know surrounded by tear gas for an hour and then you know there's a bit of a break in between type things so it really does depend but you'll know for most filters when they expire they are just gonna you're not gonna be able to breathe through them anymore they're gonna have to replace them or else you're gonna suffocate and die now in terms of the expiration date of these things the only reason why this expires there's two reasons there's three reasons actually there's three reasons why these potentially expire usually manufacturers are gonna rate them for about five years and I would say that you definitely can get these are gonna be functional long long after five years if you store them properly the reason why they're going to degrade is because even though when we send them to you there's a cap on the end here you can see and then there's there's another cap on that side of the filter and so I'd say they're sealed probably to like 99% 99% of the oxygen can't get in but there's that 1% that can so if you're storing this around other chemicals or you know just everyday vapors that are in your household when you're cleaning or something like that it's slowly over time going to be absorbed by the active carbon in here it's gonna take a long time so we send them out to you they're sealed during these plastic bags what I would recommend to extend the longevity of your filters is to vacuum seal them or go a step further and to even vacuum seal them in mylar I'm not sure if an oxygen absorber would have any negative effect if you were to throw that in there I don't think it would as far as I know maybe somebody in the comment section knows whether or not putting an oxygen absorber in if you're gonna vacuum seal this would affect the the chemical reaction of this stuff and I think if you do that you're gonna these are gonna last a lot longer now the other two parts that could potentially degrade are the HEPA filter the paper but like I said so long as that is totally sealed I can't see this degrading too much over time this is the main thing that you're gonna be concerned about but again if you're talking about viruses bacteria things of that nature then you're gonna want this HEPA filter to be fully functioning there's also another component of this and that's the glue which attaches the HEPA filter to this metal housing now we also sell these in plastic I should add so in that case it would be glue adhering to plastic housing and that glue can also degrade over time now the thing with with gas masks unless you're talking about a really highly lethal poisonous gas or a virus if little bits get in it's not gonna mean you're gonna die it might mean you get a little bit sick but even a gas mask which is only functioning at 95 percent is still going to take you much further than no gas mask at all which is what I'm trying to say so I would never throw out a filter and I've just said gas masks like ten times without thinking about it I apologize for that I would never throw out a filter I would always store them in the way I just outlined and because if you need him you have them maybe they're gonna work but if it's all you have it's all you have right so of course you're gonna use it over having nothing at all and something which is less lethal like tear gas if you can block out the majority of that it's gonna allow you to function under those conditions better than not having anything at all so just because a filter is not 100 percent it doesn't mean it's not useful at all yes if you're talking about extremely poisonous gases a mustard gas or whatever kind of gas there is out there those things will probably kill you pretty quickly if lots of it gets into your mask just because it's not functioning at 100% doesn't mean it's a total loss cause so just to give you an overview of the layering of how this works this one still has everything intact here basically what you have new oxygen or new air dirty air is gonna be coming in this is where the clean air is coming out so you have this perforated metal here so that the air can escape and that acts as the first barrier between you and the activated charcoal or activated carbon and then you have this piece of paper which is just another particle filter and then you have this thing is full chock-full of this activated carbon I lost a lot when I cut this thing open with a sawzall I wanted to bisect it just so you could see exactly what's inside and then we go here the first thing we have is this another very thinner particulate filter and then we have a screen so this screen is gonna make sure that no granules go through there and then we have another perforated metal thing which separates this stuff the carbon from the HEPA filter and then there's just this plastic gasket or whatever you want to call it that's in between the HEPA filter and the metal housing or the plastic housing and there's a few holes in there and that's where the dirty air is gonna come in so it first meets the HEPA filter then it goes to the activated carbon and then your breathing fresh air so hopefully that sheds some light on the inner workings of a protective mask filter I got it right the last time in the video I got it right damn it let me know if you have any questions in the comment section if there's anything that I've missed feel free to add that there's a lot of knowledge out there so let's share the knowledge let's learn about these things together you can make your own filter using this process that's something you should be aware of also there's how-to videos online how to do that Survival Lily made a video where she uses a 2-liter bottle and she uses some charcoal in order to do that I'm not sure if she activated that charcoal using sodium chloride but that's going to increase the resilience of the filter if you use the sodium chloride process as far as I know I'm not an expert on that I'm still learning all of that you can get these gas masks filters and the sge 400 / 3 mass and the SG 150 mass at Canadian preparedness comm we currently have a door crashing sale going on because there's a lot of guys undercutting the market right now so I'm trying to price match you know anybody I can and we're selling them for 20 percent off so it's a good deal one week only it's the only way I can do this but if you want to support the channel get yourself a brand new gas mask and filters from Canadian preparedness comm thanks for watching Canadian prepper Oh the best way to support this youtube channel is to support yourself by gearing up through Canadian preparedness comm or bug out roll CA premium quality gear at the best possible price using the incredibly secure and easy-to-use Shopify platform we offer free shipping to the United States for orders over two hundred dollars USD and free shipping to Canada over $75 so support the channel by supporting yourself

Channel: Canadian Prepper

Views: 151,345

Rating: 4.8978868 out of 5

Keywords: doomsday preppers, bug out bag, WROL, doomsday, prepper, preppers, preparedness, collapse, survival, SHTF, grid down, zombie apocalypse, survivalism, survivor, post-apocalypse, gas mask filter, gas mask, nbc mask, surplus gas mask, cbrn mask, air filter, breathing filter, respirator filter, protective mask, survival gear, how to make gas mask, DIY gas mask, Do gas mask filters expire, filter expiration, gas mask filter expiration, gasmask, respirator mask, doomsday gas mask

Id: tqx7bFGQAyg

Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 22 2019