AmateurRadio.com

Mention Health and safety and its likely you think of some Muppet decides that children need a suit of armour to play conkers (for those not lucky enough to have tried to make a horse chestnut seed the hardest material known to man, have a look here). Back to the point. I’m talking about looking after yourself in your hobby.

Ham radio has some pretty high hazard activities. High voltages, antenna’s on towers, climbing on roofs etc. Recently I’ve been soldering a bit more. Whilst its not likely to be particularly harmful to occasionally sniff in some fumes its probably not going to do me much good either. So I might benefit from a solder fume extractor.

I understand that the technical terms (and we all love a technical term) is local exhaust ventilation or LEV. Still doesn’t sound too complex and thankfully it doesn’t need to be. A fan that sucks and a filter is pretty much all you need, it seems. So do I really need an industrial scale extractor? probably not. So as an experiment I’ve bought a £5 extractor from eBay.

Its an mdf laser cut body with a 12v (computer?) fan. It takes 5 minutes assemble and may or may not need some PVA to hold it all together. I say might as mine was a good tight fit so probably won’t need it in the short term but as it gets bashed about on the workbench it might need some help to stay together.

The extractor is basic (what do you expect for £5) and didn’t come with any filter media. So a suitably sized filter will be needed. Perhaps the same activated carbon you get for cooker hoods would suffice, will need to be sourced. I dare say just sucking it from one place to blow to another isn’t really helping matters.

I could measure flow, compare against standards, determine filter abatement. I say could, because clearly this hasn’t been designed with that in mind and how would that really help? The video below shows you how effective it actually is.

So the conclusion. The hazard associated with occasional solder fumes is probably quite low and the risk is also probably quite low. But a simple device, like this, has the opportunity to remove the fumes from the workbench and at the very least stop them going in your eyes. That can’t be bad.

Here it is in action. Distance between tip and fan is approximately 10cm.

p.s. If you’re really lucky you can hear my daughter homebrewing in the background (what she is homebrewing is anyone’s guess)