Ok, so I am a teacher in a three year old building and a colleague and I were granted a chemistry lab to convert into a STEM lab. We have a roughly $20,000 dollar fume/vent hood and for the past two months we have been using the exhaust hood to vent the glowforge, I am pulling roughly 400 feet per minute inside of the vent hood. It seems to work rather well.
I have a question, though, the Glowforge is quite loud, and I noticed that our second Glowforge, which is hooked up to the filter and cartridge is much much quieter. I was wondering if I adjusted the print to say I was hooked up to the filter, if I could keep the machine quieter and save on filter costs.
Has anyone tried to use an exhaust hood for their glowforge?
Lucky you! Haven’t tried the exhaust hood but it definitely seems to outdo a common setup: inline fan + vent outside + turn off the internal fan, so if I were you I’d be very confident that telling the GF “filter attached” would be totally viable. The noise reduction is no small thing.
That setting turns off the Glowforge’s internal fan and assumes that an external unit is pulling the air out. If you’re doing what our maker space used to do and just sticking the hose up in the hood, I don’t think that would work, since there would be no suction on the Glowforge. If you have it connected it so that it is actually extracting air from the GF and not just pulling it up after it exits the hose, it might work.
You could try a small test. If it doesn’t work, the smoke will back up inside the Glowforge and leak out.
The Glowforge needs 200CFM being pulled through the Glowforge to work properly. Pulled from outside will save you the smell but not the Glowforge that needs the airflow inside to work properly,
You could save the couple hundred dollars spent on an 800 CFM fan and jury-rig a “Y” tied to the exhaust so it pulled the exhaust from both Glowforges, or you could use the external fan and save the exhaust hood for other nasty chemicals like the ones needed to clean the Glowforge fan when the gunk from using it has been built up. Or any of the various chemicals used in other aspects of finishing,
Another aspect of course is if the hood just vents outside or attempts to clean the air before leaving. If the latter the chemistry stuff would not produce much in the way of particles while cutting MDF for instance produces enough to jam up that regular filter in a few hours.
For 20k$ I would expect a filter which means avoid both MDF and any ply that has MDF in the middle for either one.