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| Posted on 3/26/08 at 07:09 AM | |
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Please be very careful how you use charcoal masks. They can lull you into a false sense. having built quite a few charcoal filtration systems for graphics shops I can tell you a couple things from experience. Charcoal does very well on vapors that are heavy organic vapors. These ar basic solvents like what you might use for a press wash or ink degradent etc. What they DO NOT work very well (if at all) is on finer lower flash point solvents like Benzene, hexane, heptane, methyl-ethyl-ketone, methylene chloride etc. These solvents are highly toxic and a high percentage will GO RIGHT THROUGH charcoal masks. They do this by simply overwhelming teh ability of the charcoal to carry/absorb any more. The scary part is that they knock back a great deal of the smell of these solvents....so you think that the charcoal is working great...but its not. These bad solvents are found in almost anything aerosol, graphic screen wash solvent blends, gasoline, screen opener sprays and some spot cleaning gun solvents. By the way, the proper material to use along with charcoal for filtering solvent vapors is Potassium permangenate crystals. they can absorb about 20 times their own weight in solvent. Just be careful out there. I would read the cautions in the MSDS sheets for these type of masks. 3M makes charcoal masks and the MSDS sheet for those are available on line. Ray | ||
 
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