This is a placeholder topic for “Hakko FA-400 Portable Solder Smoke Absorber” comments.
Soldering is great, but the fumes not so much. This is a small benchtop fume extractor designing to compliment your soldering setup by incorporating a replaceable, activated carbon filter with a powerful fun to draw smoke into it.
Read moreI solder in a reasonably sized but windowless room.
I’m aware that I’m breathing in the direct fumes while I solder.
This fume extractor will solve that issue.
The filter will remove the heavy particles, but my guess is the exhaust isn’t “breathable air”. That’s exhaust will disperse in my space, and I’ll still breath in some of that.
Should I be considering any further steps, or alternative solutions to keep myself ‘as safe as possible’ while soldering.
How worried should I really be about exhaust?
Hi
Some “casual” soldering as experienced with a bit of home construction is usually OK BUT still should be carried out in a ventilated space. You seem to have nothing going for you in that regard. I would do my soldering somewhere else or ventilate your work space especially if you are doing a fair amount of it.
A manufacturing situation in a production line environment is vastly different. Here the soldering is pretty continuous and even these filters are not good enough. The extraction system is usually a complete vacuum arrangement where the contaminated air is completely removed to the outside atmosphere.
Cheers Bob
What would that look like? 
Like an aircon?
I could install a window I guess?
Hi Pix
However you wanted it to look
As long as it used outside air
And a small fan would help. It does not have to blow a gale, just move a bit of air. Not much good having just one window, If air is going out it also has to come in. Changing the air I think is the ultimate goal. Unless you are doing a lot of continuous soldering nothing has to be too exotic.
Cheers Bob
Ok, I’ll have a think about it.
Maybe I should consider a window or even a small air ventilation system.
On the other hand there is holes all through my floor boards and gaps in my walls, so there is probably a surprising amount of air circulation simply because the house is heritage and definitely lacks isolation 
Maybe I should do some science and buy an air quality tester…
This is a fun one!
We have one of these Hakko filters set up in workshop so I ran some tests using a PiicoDev Air Quality Sensor ENS160 in front of and behind the filter.
I got a baseline reading of about 33.21 ppb (average over 5 minutes). The average air quality in Australia is 30 ppb so my reading sounds alright given I was testing in an active product environment.
When melting solder onto a protoboard, I was getting an average reading of 245.56 ppb from the sensor directly between the melting solder and the face of the filter and an average reading of 35.6 ppb from the sensor mounted on the back of the filter.
This filter is definitely doing a lot to reduce the nasty materials thrown out by my soldering job but it does still raise the air quality noticeably higher than my baseline.
looking into what in considered safe in a workplace environment, I found a few different safety organisations that consider exposure of 0.05 mg/m³ for 8 hour periods to be the highest amount considered acceptable. With the solder I used (and this is not very accurate) I think the sensor on the filter output is detecting about 0.036 mg/m³. For hobbyist soldering, assuming you are only soldering for an hour or two at a time this should be more than acceptable.
Having said all this I think Bob’s advice is best. Making sure the room you are soldering in has good ventilation is the best way to minimise any problems caused by exposure to these fumes but the filter sure does help.
Ideally, you would be operating in a well-ventilated room using this filter and having some kind of pipe venting the filters output directly out of the room.
Thanks Sam for doing that for me.
Great research.
My next step will be to build a simple air quality monitor with that piicodev thing and do some tests in my space to see what further actions, if any, are required.
No worries @Pixmusix!
Air quality sensors are a lot of fun to play with. It’s an interesting thing to have passively displayed in the background. I have one set up at my desk at home, and it’s amazing what a difference simply opening a window can make.
It’s also worth noting that the filter and extractor I tested with are both a few years old and heavily used, so a fresh setup would probably do an even better job.
What do you have for your home setup. Is this something I could buy off the shelf?
I have a Pi 4B sitting on the back of a Pi display with a few HATs stacked on the back for various functions. One of these hats is the PiicoDev Adapter for Raspberry Pi from which I have a PiicoDev Air Quality Sensor ENS160 connected.
It’s one of those ‘good enough’ setups, so I wouldn’t recommend you follow in my footsteps on this one. My colleague uses one of these Air Quality Monitors, which does basically the same thing my setup does, but in a much cleaner package.
While this will depend on your actual setup and ability to modify things. I have seen people who simply pipe the back ot the “removal fan” direct to the outside (same are built to allow that). e.g. Get some conduit/pipe/flex pipe and run it direct to an outside space (roof space may be good enough depending on your view, but I like to go to the actual outside). So you still need to make a hole for it, but its still smaller then a window and helps maintain your ideal inside temperature (e.g. not allowing too much inside/outside air exchange, only need to replace what you vented to the outside).
I now run 3 different work bench’s. One in the shed (lots of air flow) and the exhaust fan to pull the solder smoke away from me. this is were I do all my “dirty” work, but tends to get hot in summer and cold in winter.
I then have my full electronics workbench inside where I can build (post solder), test and code etc. all in the nice air con space. The last work place is my main computer station, ie. research and coding… all of these have some overlap, but it would be a very rare day that I would solder inside the house now. (Yes I know, Im lucky enough to have the space and room for the above).
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