Hi one of the age-old problems in electronics is soldering that smoke. Check it out. Oh look at this beautiful put air in your chest. oh my god.

like yeah, it's not good. And by the way, those fumes. There are not lead fumes. I'm the doesn't matter if you use LED or lead-free soldering, you get those fumes.

It comes from the rosin flux which is rosin is actually a tree sap type stuff. There's actually multiple cores inside you so like that. Or you can get separate flux as well. ever like a gel or a liquid type flux.

and that's where the fumes come from. anyway. I've been a myth-busting there, but anyway, it's all the smoke, one of the solder fumes, one of the age old problems and usually you can either well suck it up Buttercup, put hair on your chest or you might have say like a little fan on your bench that just you know blows air across so it just gets it out of your face. which might be an OK solution if you've got like ventilation if you've like got an open door or an open a roller door and your garage or something like that.

but if like me, you're in a lab, it can find lab environment like this. In fact in at the moment you might hear a little bit of an echo. I'm actually in a like a little confined a cubicle here. there's glass walls here and you know there's no ventilation at all.

So you need a fume extractor which at least attempts to filter the smoke. and you've got traditional ones here. I've got to pace a fume extractor in like this square sized one. you might be more familiar with these ones.

you can pick these up for you know, 10 bucks on eBay or something like that. these are pretty crappy. I don't recommend it. they're actually I think I've done a second channel video with David to about like you get a real dodgy one.

and yeah, they can like the motors can burn out. they're not rated especially for 240 or to 45 volts that I've got here in the lab. Anyway, these things are. well, they're better than nothing.

but if I turn this on hey well, this one's actually not to loud noises one thing. and if I start soldiering to show you our clothes there and hopefully you can see that a good lot of the fumes are going in there and being captured, but some of them are coming right over the top like this because you've got a distance gap. I mean if you go any further I go right to the edge of the board. These things have just gone straight up in the air, right in my face.

So you know you have to be reasonably close to these things in order to get most of the fumes actually sucked under there like that. So yeah, they have a problem with these. These are feet. They try to stop them falling over and well, just spaces.

Everything else you're going to be really close. Same thing for these ones as well for turn this one on. This one's really loud. I've got two of these.

I've done a second channel video where actually I modified the fan in this to be much lower noise for when I'm shooting videos and stuff like that. But you've got, you know, a similar sort of problem here. Okay, this one is sucking in, sucking in the fumes, doing okay. There you go.

a bit further back, bit further back and Oh weird. Now it's starting to miss some. now they're starting to come up. So you've got to be like really close to these things.

And the other thing with these is is that the carbon filters in these. they're not that terrific. If you actually stick your nose on the back of these things, you can actually smell the crap coming out of here. They're actually very poor.

you can get really poor ones and you can get ok ones, but they're still not very good filters. There's certainly not HEPA quality. and the reason both of these are actually quite poor filters is that all they got. It's just one of these.

like they call them like a charcoal filter. It's like there's some of them like aren't even charcoal. They're just like, like almost like any static phone. Just crap quality phone kind of thing.

And I don't know what particulate size these things have take out but like they're very porous. Look at that. Yeah, you can just see like through these things. You hold them up to the light and know these things are just hopeless.

We need something better. We need a better Hepa quality filter and I've done a video on what makes a good lab it HEPA air filter. so I'll link that one down below at the end if you haven't seen it. So I thought that I'd finally get a proper air filter for the lab one that's not only a HEPA filter ie.

it filters down to like 0.3 microns like 99.97% down to 0.3 microns but has a nice big flexible arm and tada. Here it is like this: Check this out. Isn't this beautiful? Yes, it is actually coming out from under my bench. I'll show you the unit in a minute, but if I switch this bad boy on, not only is it potentially lower noise, this one's actually rated 255.

DB so you get the motor noise down and the bottom, but that's potentially hidden under your bench, but also you do get a bit of noise coming from like the the suction of the air into this sort of thing. But let's give it a bell, shall we? Let's have a look. Oh there we go. Look at that Beautiful! And the good thing is is that this is not on high.

This is on its lowest setting by the way. Good thing is is that you can just bring it over your work like this and so you've got. you know you can work over the full length of the board without being hamstrung by one of these silly things. Let's see if we can get a close-up on that.

So look, look look at that. Hopefully you can see the the fumes just Bend Like that it's as being sucked in Whoo! Look at that. Fantastic and that's on low. I haven't got high suction or anything and if you go off to one side it's still gonna suck it in.

Fantastic! Whoa. So yeah, these things are very cool. Let me show you the unit that I actually got. so as you can see it's absolutely gigantic.

Well the actual fume extractor box itself is quite small. but it comes with like this thing which now I'm about a width of a paper under five nine and these things you know about six foot tall so you can really snake this and that come up over your bench like this. You know a typical bench might be like 900 PI or something like that. Yeah, I'm mixing up my feet in my millimetres would ever Anyway, yeah it could reach right over the bench and then over my bench is a 900 mil.

Deeper can reach up and over and into the product. and the fact that it's on wheels like this, you can just wheel it around the leg because I have that requirement I'm you know sometimes in Seoul doing over here where I'm shooting my video, sometimes I'm shooting up my Seoul during bench or shooting it some R and I was working on my arcade machine I had to take a soldering iron over to the arcade machine and stuff like that. so being able to will this thing around like that and like it's just really handy I like it I'll show you up close now I Got this one from a company called King Sommore Shenzhen that King some and as it turns out I believe this is the company that actually manufactured the unit for Pace Now Pace cell and almost identical weight unit - this one's not as fancy. it's only got the single control but you can get other ones with like like the ten speeds and infrared remote control keypad.

and I believe that the Pace one is identical to this, it's just rebranded Pace and the Pace one, whilst it looks very nice, is like 870 Yankee bucks I Got this one for 225 Yankee bucks. Unfortunately just because of the size of it doesn't weigh a huge amount but like but because of the size and the two boxes and everything it cost me another couple of hundred Yankee bucks to get at DHL Careered here I could have actually got it cheaper but it would have took forever. but yeah so but even with the DHL courier it was to ship it to Australia Here was less than half the cost of the same pace unit. Now you can get ones that have both a double and single output.

I Didn't need a double output so I just went with a small single one and the reason they got this one is because this was rated for a lower noise. It's rated for like 55 DB a whereas the bigger ones were rated at at 60 DBA and that could make a huge are different especially for someone like me who's are shooting videos. So yeah it's just a box like that. and this is the KSR 180 model rated for 80 watts nominal but that might go up with the higher speeds.

and yeah you can just get different models I believe. Like though there's the 150 model which is the pace and the and the other like Kingson sell a similar one I think it is like slightly modified or something like that for pace but it's basically the same unit. and of course they come with these flex arms like this either one and you can get like different style our nozzle attachments. they just pop off like that and these are like really quite nice.

You can know they're really quite flexible. you can sneak them around and this is just a friction fit into there. It's a bit hard for me to take out, so this particular lower end model I've got is only got the single button, but you just press it multiple times and the lead comes up different colors and it's got three different speeds. but the one I was using there was the lowest one.

And yes, you get increased noise at the higher speed. So the noise on this was it was more than I was kind of expecting, but it's acceptable. Certainly less than the exam, much less than the existing Pace one I've got on the bench and as I said, a lot of that noise is actually confined under the bench, so you could actually isolate that in some way if you wanted to. So let's have a look inside this thing.

There's just two catches on here, like this just lifts off very simple and underneath the bottom there we've got some spongy material of course that just helps seal it around there so the air has to go is forced down into the seals. Now this one actually uses round ones as opposed to the bigger model and the Pace one which uses square ones I believe. But yes, I If anyone's got any internal photos of those, please share them. But it's basically a three-stage filter what it is, so there's something like squarish, but it all basically comes down in the middle.

Alright, you've got this felt material here which is the first stage filter and this is the 50 micron stuff so that'll take out just like you know your larger smoky type things. Then you've got your HEPA filter around here, which is you're not 0.3 micron HEPA 12 I believe it is HEPA 12 filter so it will take out not only 99.97% of particles down to 0.3 microns so that's very nice. and then after that they've got this third stage. Like is it like an activated carbon filter? Something like that.

Anyway, so yeah, it's three stage filter. So there you go. It's absolutely like that really built and braces approach, so the air has to be sucked down through the center like that and through all three stages of this filter before it actually gets down into the bottom here, which then just makes its way inside the case and ultimately down there. some like gaps around the outside of that, so there's a Fed in there.

I might actually take the screws off there and have a look at the fan for those playing along at home and that's what the bottom looks like. Your exhaust is just out the bottom like that and there it is. That's what we've got inside just to control the board and a nice little squirrel cage. Here you go.

For all you motor aficionados, check it out. Oh, you can tell me about the quality of that I don't know it's unmarked. Whatever does the job, can suck a golf ball through 40 40 God knows and there's a piece of B down in there I'm not going to bother to take it apart I can't see the brand on that big cap there. Anyway, we've got all the requisite stuff here with a mains input fuse over there.

We've got a common mode choke and you're reckless that filtering and stuff like that as our bridge rectifier. So that's a full wave. That's a 400 volt cap full wave bridge rectifier. G Somebody had fun on the hot snot there.

Look at that silastic that whole body o' connector. They really didn't want that to our vibrate out, so they weren't relying on the little catch there the little clip on there to hold that in. but you know Matt that is what it is. There's a little Tintin turned trimmer on there, so maybe we could get our tongue out the right angle and tweak that will that actually adjust our min max fan because I'd actually like possibly a bit less suction on this thing.

a lower mode where it will actually give less noise. I'm actually happy to trade off our noise for suction, especially with the big arm on this thing. you can put it directly almost directly over your work, so you really don't need much suction at all. But anyway, that's all that's in there anyway.

that's all she wrote: I'm not sure where the mains cable just goes over to here. Yeah, yeah, I Suspect they're using one of the studs there to actually connect the mains through to the chassis, but I'll measure it. No. I Check this out.

Look, connect to our mains plug over here and it's not connected through the mains earth over there, but it is connected through to the motor via the wire over to the motor there. So yeah, so it's got to connect via those four screws through to the chassis. So no I don't know? Well, your regulation out experts out there comment down below and they've got a bit of sound damping a foam in there I Don't know why they would. Didn't put all all around, but obviously when it shoots out here, it's you know it's just been baffled by the foam internally there, so that's okay.

Maybe they could have got the sound down a bit better, but you know, like it's only 220 bucks. So there you go. That's a look at the King some HEPA flexible arm soldering fume extractor when they sell them. they advertise under four like nail salons and you know as stuff like that as well.

You'll probably see that I've never had my nails done but you go in there and they're you know, wearing their masks as you do these days and they're you know? I've got their fume extractors cuz they're you know, grinding away nails or doing whatever they do I don't know so you might find them like cheaply advertised under that. but yeah, I think these things great. like 220 bucks us. it's actually really affordable.

so normal like the postage cost the same amount or more. You can't get it cheap. It depends how fast you want it, so if you get the slow boat from China you can probably get it delivered really cheap. so well worth it.

I Know you can actually cobble together. People do cobble together their own like flexible arm air filters like this. and if you know where to buy this sort of stuff art, please link it in down below this flexible tubing. It's got to be specific ones designed that are, of course, you know, fairly airtight.

These ones feel tight as a nun's nasty, right? and I all the joints in there and stuff like that feels you know, feels really good. It's got a nice wide nozzle I Like that because boards are typically like long and wide ish and things like that, so if it covers the whole area. The only downside is that it's probably not as quiet as I Was hoping for an hour to get there. 80 55 dB I'm not going to bother to measure.

Certainly quieter than the pace one. I've got not as quiet as my modified pace one, but the suction is vastly better with this thing. I Don't think I'd ever use it on the second or third setting. I was using it on the lowest setting and that's just absolutely like plenty.

As I said, it could have probably had a lower setting as well. would have been nice. But anyway, yeah, I think this is a winner for 220 us box. So if you take your health seriously and you should, it's well worth spending the coin for one of these things and not that expensive.

I'm pretty impressed by these I'm at the value for money winner winner chicken dinner. So I'll put in links down below I got this one from Alibaba Aliexpress have a couple but they didn't have the King 'some brown but I'll put in some links down below. You can also buy these on eBay but they'll more expensive on eBay at least for Australia anyway including the shipping. So I think I saved like one hundred hundred and fifty bucks buying it directly from King 'some Shenzhen Kingston on Alibaba up with their pace down below if you've got an ally Barbour account.

So yeah, these things are great. Anyway, leave your comments down below: What a fume extraction methods are you using at home? Do you just have a fan That just blows a deal? Bother you? just suck it up and do it all my life. No problem with me and of course I'm not sure how often you'd actually replace the filters on these. I don't do a huge amount of soldering on to do production solder in in the lab have done in the past and things like that where I'm just solder in all day.

but yeah I don't know I put in the price if I can find the price for the replacement air fielder's for these. but anyway, it's much cheaper than the pastes solution which I believe is exactly the same brand. this I believe this is the company who actually manufacture it. It's an identical looking model.

All the buttons, all controls, everything's the same. The catches are the same. It's yeah, please put the piece brand on it and sell it for twice as much. but you know you don't blame and maybe it's they've got a few little tweaks in there one perhaps.

but um, yeah, you get the same model for much less bargain anyway if you enjoyed that. if you did, please give it a big thumbs up. As always, discuss down below or over on the Eevblog forum and my Library channel as well. Catch you next time you.