ABS/PLA Printing during pregnancy (Page 2 of 2)

Bump.... I'm in the same boat now.

If you have the money buy a carbon filter. There are a ton of them for sale on ebay, for people who for some reason like weeding their garden so much that they grow some sort of 'weeds' inside their house. IDK much.

If you have the time, make a carbon filter. . You can source good affordable carbon medium from ebay as well.  That's what I ultimately did to cut down on any fumes, but I haven't actually gotten around to installing it.

I cant remember the source now, but I read that carbon filters are useless in this situation, not filtering any of the things you'd want filtered anyway.

As for PLA, it's often organic compounds that are the nastiest, easier for them to form bonds with organic molecules in your body. I'm not saying PLA is bad, but if ABS is a known quantity and PLA isn't then I'm sticking with ABS.

What do you think about the basement. She never goes down there. Maybe I will only print T-glase and Nylon.

^^ Just need to point out, smell is actually useless to detect noxious substances.

Cyanide, on a good day, can smell like bitter almonds, or nothing at all.... and many can't even smell the bitter almond when its there....
Sarin Gas... also has no odor
Mustard Gas, in a weaponised form, Smells like Garlic....
Carbon Monoxide is also odorless... (and a mere 400ppm is enough to kill 50% of a control group of animals)

As has been pointed out in this thread, in fact, some of most dangerous substances are entirely organic

The 'chemical smell' is purely that - a smell you are identifying as 'not natural in origin', but don't confuse that to mean 'oh my god that must be bad'....

Our sense of 'smell' is geared toward nature, not chemistry, hence almost any 'chemical' smells 'wrong' simply because we dont have a few 1000 years of living with it yet (as an isolated entity - since all chemistry is inherently 'natural' just often in unaturally occurring isolation or combination).... Meanwhile, things we have lived with for 1000s of years will happily kill you in the blink of an eye without you smelling diddly

So just because you smell something 'not usual that my olfactory senses are having to struggle to identify' doesn't mean its bad, and likewise - some of the most dangerous gases and substances will wave merrily at your olfactory senses, not trigger a thing, and go straight past and start eating your central nervous system.

I genuinely tip my hat to your noble efforts and applaud the methodology - in this particularly subject area (keeping the SO happy) I encourage anything that improves the 'perception' of whats happening as a good thing for marital harmony... however.. don't ever try to classify a substance as noxious or not based on how it smells - you have a high chance of being wrong, and in the examples I provided above (some being 'natural') - you would be long dead before you smelt anything.... Better to just read the MSDS related to *anything* you plan to use/work with/have around and be armed with facts I can list many many more things that you wont smell or see or otherwise sense that are more than capable of killing you in time spans between a heartbeat to slowly over many years.... Many of which you are experiencing everyday if you live in Modern Society

Incidentally - I'm not aware of any conjecture about the facts of ABS and its toxicity. I am aware of people forming opinions and restating it as fact based on 'perception' (i reckon it must be bad, so it must be....) - These are often the same people that trumpet the 'safety' of PLA whilst ignoring the fact PLA contains 'secret sauce'.... Given a choice between transparency (ABS MSDS) and 'reassurance' (PLA is natural you know! Just like Marshmallows are 99% fat free! And its MSDS is very light on...) I'll take transparency any day... particularly given how much else is killing me every day of my life living in modern society - from my Toaster that pumps out more EMF than a mobile ever can, the preservatives in my food, living in a large city through to the 'kinder to the environment but deadlier to people' switch from Leaded to Unleaded fuel....

</soapbox>

This may be a bit ridiculous but if anyone is really concerned for their health, throwing an exhaust fan and carbon filter on your enclosure would be an end all solution.

http://www.htgsupply.com/Category-Carbo … ccessories

Not true!  The smell/particles don't "build up" inside and then all come out when you open it.  Most of it settles somehow and when you open it after a long print, only a small amount of smell comes out.

Perhaps the best solution would be to do the airtight thing AND put a carbon filter on the inside of the machine (not exhausted, so it just filters the internal air), and only turn on the carbon filter fan at the end of a print for a few minutes.  It could even be Gcode controlled to go on automatically at the end of every print!

Btw, "airtight" as I'm describing it is not really airtight.  I just greatly reduced the total area of openings enough that the escape is minimal.

The benefits of this method over exhausting are:
1. No requirement to keep machine near a window to exhaust
2. Keeps internal ambient temperature high, whereas exhausting will lower it
3. If using a carbon filter, the filter will last MUCH longer between replacements since it only needs to scrub the leftover air at the end.
4. If done using weather-stripping (as shown in the attached photos), all enclosure panels come off just as easily as if there was nothing there.
5. It's cheap!

I haven't installed a carbon filter inside yet, and honestly, I'm in no hurry to do so since the weather stripping has done such a great job.  Seriously, it might sound crazy, but someone else should try this and back me up on how well it works.

How do you exhaust it out of the building?  Do you have to drill a hole in the wall?  Do you leave the window open a crack and run the PVC through?  I can't do that since it gets very cold where I live, unless I build something to seal the rest of the crack.  Exhausting just seems unnecessarily complicated.  Also, doesn't it make the printer less mobile (requirement of connecting/disconnecting)?