In article .com,
gtslabs wrote:
I am remodeling part of my business space and would like to get some
opinions on heating and air cleaners.
I run a soils laboratory and have dust in the air constantly. I am
posting to this group because of the similarity to the dusty
environment with woodworking tools. I have a 800 sf cement slab with
block walls that I want to finish with insulation, drywall and vinyl
tile floor.

The way I see it I have 2 options:

I was considering going with a suspended slab PEX radiant floor heat
system and having a constant exhaust system to remove any dust from the
air. If I went with forced air heat then all my hot air would be
evacuated. I assume the exhaust would not remove the heat in the room
generated from the floor.

If you exhaust the warmed air, *REGARDLESS* of how it gets warm, you
are guaranteed to have a heat-loss problem.

Or

Use forced air and commercial duty air cleaners to recycle the internal
air. But I don't want a high dB cleaner running constantly.


Use a "low dB cleaner" and let it run. grin

Any opinions or experience with this combination of heating and air
cleaning?
Thanks in advance


Use an air cleaning system that recirculates the 'cleaned' air back into
the work-space. This eliminates the heat loss problem that is inherent
with 'external' exhaust systems.

All you need as some sort of fan/blower that moves enough air to 'change'
the air in your workspace several times ("how many" depends on the rate
at which you generate airborne 'stuff') an hour. Then you stick enough
square feet of filter materiel a ways in front (or behind it), to trap the
'stuff'. the last part of the design is to add barricades around the fan
going up to the filters, so that all the air through the fan also goes
through the filters.

A 36" 'barn fan' (or 'whole house attic fan') has a free-flow rate of
around 5000 cu. ft. _per_minute_. This equates to about one air exchange
every 2 minutes for your space, assuming 10' ceilings.

If you put a 6' wide by 8' high filter 'wall' (a 3x4 grid of 20"x24"
furnace filters) about 4 ft in front of the barn fan, and use another
3-4' foot depth behind the fan (with some baffles to 'spread' the air),
you can 'do everything' in less than 50 sq. ft of floor space.

Something like 8 sheets of plywood and a couple of dozen 2x4s is all that's
called for, for construction materials.

Noise level is probably in the 70dBA range.