PSU to Fume Extractor

Well I suppose the first thing to say is I've not managed to blow myself up and am still very much alive and kicking and well hopefully blogging some more too.

So what is this project about? Well I have brought out the ol' soldering iron again and started looking at what I want to start making. I began to make an 4x4x4 LED light cube but found whilst doing it I was slowly suffocating myself with the fumes even with my window open.

This lead me to start hunting for a good idea for a fume extractor.

A few months ago I built a PC for my other half's Brother which likely the other day blew out its PSU (don't ask it had something to do with dust). So after replacing it I have had one spare sitting asking for me to do something with it.


Here is the somewhat finished article, a nice neat and wireless unit that can be plonked anywhere quickly and turned on.

Step 1
Well firstly I ripped out all the insides, well used a phillips screwdriver really. I could of used the AC to DC converter already in the PSU but that is a lot of fiddling and messing about for really somethign quite simple and besides I wanted this to be very portable.

Step 2
Once all the insides are out that left the big 6" fan the power switch and a whole lot of nothing much else inside. Luckily the fan already draws air in fromt eh 6" fan so I didn't need to swap it around. Also it might be worth a note that even though you can just invert the polarity of the wires to make the fan go in reverse I wouldn't bother as the fins on the fan are designed to move air efficiently in one direction not two. So for the sake of 4 screws just swap the fan around if you need to.



Step 3
So as you will see above I added to small 8cm fans which I had laying aroudn to help direct the air flow in the direction I wanted it to go which was out of the grilled part of the case. This is obviously not really required but I was going all out. I considered LEDs at one point but then decided I couldn't be bothered to drill any holes in the unit.



Step 4
When cutting away the main component board from the power switch I left the full length of cable on the two terminals as I will use that switch to power the unit on and off.

Step 5
I took a small bit of strip board, cleaned it up with some wire wool and set to soldering in the component leads. Firstly I had my two 4xAA battery holders wired up in series with each other to give me 12V and soldered them at eaither end of the stripboard at the top. Then I just wired the fans in paralell with each other so they were drawing equally. Make sure that you also wire in the switch, I chose to do this from the positive wire of the battery pack, otherwise your fans will be on all the time!



Step 6
Now I jsut secured the battery packs with a cable tie or two the wall of the PSU. I didn't bother fixing the stripboard to anything as it seems to be sitting there quite happelly between everything.

Conculsion
Well that is it all done. A small prject that took me about 2 hours in total to put together and tinker with. There are loads of amendments you could make to it by adding a variable resistor to the main fan for speed control or LEDs for pure coolness. The possibilities are endless.