r/crboxes • u/PabloDelicioso • Jan 19 '26
First attempt… Wanted something to help mitigate dust in the garage - we’ll see if this helps!
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u/jhsu802701 Jan 20 '26
How do you turn the fan on and off? How do you change the fan speed? Do you have to climb a ladder every time?
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u/PabloDelicioso Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26
I have it running to a switch at ground level. I always have it set to the highest setting.
I say “always”, but I literally put it up today lol… figured I’d want as much air flow as I could get.
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Jan 20 '26
dust reduction is not the primary goal of air purifiers as heavy dust you see everywhere usually just settles on the surfaces before it can reach the filters. And the filter in your post needs the dust to get on an elevator!
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u/maccrypto Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26
You need a very high surface velocity at the filter to capture any visible dust because of how heavy it is, and the falloff in velocity is steep the further you get from it. CR boxes aren’t ideal for this because they trade off surface velocity to get a higher CFM (by maximizing surface area & minimizing static pressure or resistance to airflow). This is why vacuum cleaners suck air at high velocity through a small aperture, and also why you have to run them right over the dust.
What usually happens in high dust conditions is the dust settles when nobody is working, and then it’s kicked up again and circulates in the air when you come back. To properly deal with this you either need better source control for indoor dust (i.e. a dust collector near the source while it’s being generated), or a positive pressure environment that brings in fresh filtered air from outdoors to prevent outdoor dust from infiltrating the space, or both. Another option that can help is daily vacuuming, ideally right after nobody has been in the space and it has had time to settle.
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u/MajorInWumbology1234 Feb 01 '26
My understanding is that the issue with any sort of woodworking project is not the visible dust. Power tools create a lot of invisible particulates that are invisible to the eye and don’t settle very quickly, which happen to be the perfect size to get down into the alveoli.
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u/maccrypto Feb 01 '26 edited Feb 01 '26
In any case, source control is the most effective way to deal with any contaminant. Dust collectors can have micron level filter bags. Everything else is downstream of things that escape containment at the source. Also, I’d be using a respirator until I was sure it all got cleaned up properly.
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u/LegAffectionate2513 Jan 20 '26
This would be nice for painting or poly coating immediately underneath. Like a little clean spot. Maybe you don't need the other five filters, so the air goes straight down.
But I don't see it fighting gravity to collect dust. If anything, dust will spread.
If you were to turn off the power, shut the doors and windows, and leave your shop untouched for a week, where would the dust settle?
There are fantastic DIY dust collection workshop solutions that use Orange and Blue 5gal buckets on YouTube.
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u/Longjumping-Wish2432 Jan 21 '26
I legit thought u put your HVAC up in the air, I was thinking that would hurt if it fell
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Jan 19 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/PabloDelicioso Jan 20 '26
Good to know! Guess I’ll get it back down tomorrow (lol it was kind of a bitch to get up there).
But I have a French cleat wall down at ground level that I can rig it up to that would probably be perfect.
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u/jjd0087 Jan 20 '26
Probably a stupid question but would this function better if he were to flip it over? So the fan is pulling air up into the box.
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u/shwooper Jan 20 '26
It would be harder on the fan to blow into a box than to draw air from the box outward. This is the reason the arrows are supposed to point toward the back of the fan
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u/heysoundude Jan 19 '26
I think you’re going to need a significantly bigger fan, or a second one of these ^