Homemade Carbon Filter Club

Purp, The silver wire shaped in to a cylinder is hardware cloth (I know, weird name). You can usually find it in the gardening section of home Depot. Most people use it as fence. I've even seen it at Ace Hardware. Ask for hardware cloth, and if they don't know what it is, ask for fencing. What is shown in my pics is the half inch, in that pic is the quarter inch.

itsmy, I don't want to redo the thing again, and making it a circle isn't as easy as it sounds. You have the problem of attaching square grids to a round circle to make the top. I guess if no one has any other suggestions, I will just fill it and see how much comes through. Or perhaps I can just find better carbon.

ha damn is that ever an akwardly named item..hardware cloth eh..alright ill have to go check that out...and also i see where you say your carbon is fallin through your screen..might wanna check out wal mart in the aquarium section they carry activated carbon that might be a little bit bigger??

I'm building a new cabinet project now. I was going to use my giant, bulky-assed CAN33 filter to do the grow cabinet but you people are inspirational. I can't see those little computer fans working for me, I'll have 20 cu.ft. of space and need to suck air from one section over to the next and out, so I was thinking of venting my duct booster fan - it has 325 cfm flow, but going through a carbon filter is probably going to knock it down by at least 90%, so I was going to use that. These designs are a big leap forward for me because I don't think about this as much as I should have. The rest of the design is done, but now this gives me what I need to finish out this part without taking up all the space the CAN33 was going to take up. The space saved could be the third mum. Great stuff...

Joey56789 said:

Staple the screen door material, one on each side pulling tight.


Then staple around the rest of it.



To keep the sides of the screen material together, I sewed it up with some extra strong thread. I just kind of weaved it through. Then I cut off the extra screen so it wouldn’t get in the way of the carbon.



Repeat everything for the outer cube, but I just folded the extra screen over instead of cutting it off to make the seams stronger.



The 120mm fan just attaches to the back of it with 4 screws.

The good thing about this design is, first, it is all surface area. All five sides allow surface area for carbon filtration, unlike the can types which have solid bottoms. Second, the micro grower grows in a square world. The can types are great for hooking up to duct work, but cabinets are square. PCs are square. Rubbermaids are square (kinda). The interior of this scrubber is 6x6” on all 5 sides. That’s 180 square inches of surface area for carbon. That’s the equivalent of a can filter with a 4” core with a carbon area that is over 14” long. When you add ~1” for the end cap and ~5” for the reducer, a can type with this much carbon area is 20 inches. Even if you create a cylindrical filter that filters on all sides, you won't get as much surface area in the same amount of space as you would with a square filter (assuming you have a square space to work with).

Third, you have complete control over the size and thickness of the filter. You could make it as small as an 80mm PC fan. I'm sure you can make it too big, but you could go bigger then I did. Too big and I think the hardware cloth would bow out a bit. I made mine with .a half inch thickness of carbon. You could make it an inch or more by varying the size of interior cube compared to the exterior cube. It gives you a lot of flexibility, and you just aren't limited to the sizes of ducts and PVC pipes (or whatever) you can find in Home depot.

Edit: I forgot to add price list

Hardware cloth $10
fiberglass screen material $6
smallest zip ties $2
carbon ? (I haven't filled it yet and don't know how much it's going to need)

I already had:
Scrap plywood
Staple gun and staples

Click to expand...

I now have the filter up and running. I decided to just try and fill it up to see if the carbon would come through again. Very little did. I guess I was just too worried the first time. I filled it up and packed it very well. I then closed off the hole with gorilla tape, and taped around the bottom of the filter to reinforce the edges.

Next I wired up a 12v 600mah AC/DC converter. I wired it to the female plug that is on the wire extension that comes with the PC fan (so I could switch out fans or just unplug it easier). The PC fan is a Scythe 120x120x38mm 3000 RPM fan which blows 133CFM at 12v. I can't recommend Scythe enough. Go to some place like [H]ard OCP, and you will see that 9 out of 10 hardware geek overclocking freaks will tell you they are the best. Great longevity, quality materials, and their CFM and db ratings are not exaggerated, unlike brands like SilentX. Scythe's 120x38mm fans are even listed on their website as being good for higher static pressure applications.

I decided to go with a fan controller, and bought the inexpensive Zalman Fan Mate 2 ($4 at new egg). It is as simple as plugging the fan and converter into it, and it controls voltage from 5-11v with a turn of the dial. It is only 2.5x1x1" as well.

Next I tried spinning the fan up and then putting it against the carbon filter. I could not hear the fan struggle in the least bit. With so much surface area, this filter does not restrict it much, if at all. I also tried blowing smoke into it. It sucked it up easily, even with the fan turned down all the way. I then attached the fan to the filter. I had to use some .75x.75' boards to lift the fan because of a design error on my part (to get it out of the way of some screws). I attached the fan and used a 120mm fan guard ($2). I then mounted it in a Rubbermaid setup. Two big Rubbermaids for the chamber, then a third smaller one as a utility room on top (where the scrubber goes). The setup is silent on low, and you just hear a slight wooshing sound on high (which should be way more CFM then necessary for a Rubbermaid). I run it at about a third from lowest setting and it cools 4x 27w CFLs well.

Here it is finished and ready to mount:





and here it is mounted:

Here's the final version of my small-cab-sized filter/fan combo. It will be used in conjunction with an air cooled light hood, so the low CFM should be okay. Flows great, sucks the smoke off the end of my J without a problem from about a foot. At least 20CFM filtered, haven't tested it.

Oops, dimensions are as follows:

Just under 9" tall with the fan, 4" outer diameter, 3" inner diameter, 3" screw top for easy installation/mounting/fan access, etc. The bottom comes off for re-fills, a good 3/8" of carbon surrounds the pencil cup. Shoe Goo seals everything up tight, cotton balls and pantyhose keep the carbon where it should be.

The fan is rated at 40db but does not whine like a small axial fan with the same rating. It's nice and quiet, and will blend right in. I'll have a 120mm axial fan, 100cfm unrestricted for the lights.

Ismysabaru.. couple questions if I could:
1) was the fan sufficient with filter or did it eventually die?
2) what size area did you use? micro grow?
3) do you have a step by step on howto make, part list?

still slightly confused at assembly. I think I want something that size for my rubbermaid grow (if it won't kill the fan I'm looking for, its similar to your post - http://cgi.ebay.ca/Dell-N1240-Repla...emQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item4ceb9baab6)

Joey, that's such an awesome idea. Well done.

Here's the gutter trash, plywood Apollo...

Thanks dtoker!!!

Thanks dtoker!!!