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Tales from a Ventilation Lunatic
#1
First off, A fantastik fan, or a Maxxxair fan on the roof exhausting hot air from the ceiling  and an open window to allow for fresh air entry is awesome.  Pretty hard to beat.

I did not choose this path back in 2001 when i got my Van. I chose a 4 inch mushroom type of vent made for boats.  It had its own tiny  solar panel, and a C size 1.2v Nicad battery to run at night.  It moved an Unimpressive  1000 cubic feet per hour. At the time it was adequate for keeping the traction wax from melting off the surfboards strapped to my ceiling, but not much more.

 I really liked how rain was not a factor with this vent, stubbornly did not want to upgrade to a 14 inch square roof vent like fantstik or Maxairr, and decided instead to increase airflow through this small mushroom vent

Now that mushroom vent's fan motor and battery have been gutted to reduce restriction, and two counter rotating adjustable speed 120Mm computer fans force a fairly good volume of air out my roof through this vent at a maximum draw of 0.55 amps, and as low as 0.09 amps. 

These exhaust fans are assisted by upto 3 intake fans I have mounted in a shroud on a  screened/ chickenwired conversion van sliding window.

Two of the fans I now have in this intake shroud are basically Why I am starting this thread, as they are new products I wish to share with you all, as they have dramatically increased my ability to exchange the air in my van, while also lowering the amp draw required to do so.

Noctua pretty much make the top quality computer fans, and they are known for being quiet and efficient at their job, but none of them were particularly powerful fans, until fairly recently.

Noctua has come out with industrial versions of their best fans, and these can spin as high as 3000 rpm.  These fans are IP52 rated, ingress protection, against water and dust.  The higher the numbers the better the protection. Some of their 24v fans are IP67 rated, basically waterproof.  I've had a lot of intake fan failures due to corrosion/ moisture over the years.

Anyway, I just got two of these fans:

http://noctua.at/en/products/product-lin...c-3000-pwm

About 25$ each on Amazon.  At 3000 rpm they are loud, they are powerful, and they only draw 0.3 amps at 3000 rpm.  Many other fans that can move this much air, draw 2 to 3 times as much electricity and make more noise doing so, and can only do so when there is no restrictions to airflow present infront of or behind the fan.

So they are loud at top speed, but  Noctua now also makes a speed controller for about 20 $. this speed controller:

http://noctua.at/en/products/accessories/na-fc1

This controller comes with splitter cables, some extension cables.  it is designed to plug into a SATA connection on a computer motherboard, but this connector just has a yellow and a black wire running to it. Yellow is + black is -

Hook the yellow wire to your fuse block, the black wire to your battery - buss bar or similar, and one can plug 3 fans easily into this small speed controller via the provided cabling, and the rpm range of the 3000 rpm fans is now somewhere about 300 rpm (and basically completely silent) to 3000 rpm and quite loud.

This controller will properly control just about any 4 wire PWM fan, and many of them at the same time.  PWM is pulse width modulation and PWM fans have a fourth wire so that the computer motherboard can control the speed of the fan according to need. This controller allows us van dwellers to simply control a very powerful efficient fan to just about any speed desired/required at the spin of a dial.

I bought two of these fans expecting to put one on my ceiling, with the counter rotating pusher fan to assist it, and one on  my 3 fan intake shroud.  An experiment revealed the Noctua fan DID NOT like the pusher fan trying to help it, so both of these fans wound up on my intake shroud next to a 180MM Silverstone Fm181 fan and suck air through a screen on one of those sliding window conversion van windows.  Each of the three fans is individually switched, the SS FM181 comes with its own speed controller( 0.09 to 0.29 amps) upto 165 CFM, the Noctua fans are rated at 110CFM at 3000 rpm, but one computer nerd site measured them at 135CFM( cubic feet per minute)

So all three intake fans at top speed, draw less than 0.9 amps, and if there were not restrictions to airflow caused by the screen behind them, would push 385 cubic feet per minute into the van.  My roof exhaust can basically only do about 150 CFM, so if I have a door cracked and all my fans on high, there is air forcefully flowing out the cracked door.  A rough calculation of my vans interior volume is 550 cubic feet so these 3 fans on high, on their own, should be able to replace the entire volume of air in the van about once in less than 2 minutes.

I do not know if the computer fan is a possible solution/ air movement aide for the reader here, but these Noctua fans are pretty awesome.  now that they have these industrial 3000 rpm versions and a Easy peazy PWM speed controller hook up it makes them even more awesome.

No they are not cheap, The Newb looking for a roof vent would be better off with a 14 inch MAxair or fantastick fan from the get go.

My intake fan shroud basically resides by my head when in bed. I can turn all three of these fans on slow speed and basically not hear them.  If I sleep late I can spin a dial and increase their airflow as it warms up.

What had been really surprising with these Noctua fans, is when i put black carbon filter on the exterior of the window, this filter restriction with previous fans reduced airflow by at least 2/3, but these noctua's flow  is reduced by less than 1/4.  The Filter is nice but also blocks light from getting in or out. iT sticks nicely to velcro and stays put at highway speeds.

Here is a link to the Noctua fans.  they need to be the PWM version ( NOt the FLX version) to work with the Noctua speed controller:

https://www.amazon.com/Focused-NF-F12-iP...a+3000+rpm

Here is the Noctua speed controller:

https://www.amazon.com/Noctua-NA-FC1-4-p...ctua+a+fc1

Here is the Silverstone 180MM fm181 fan that comes with its own speed controller:
https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-perfo...tone+FM181

These 3 fans on my intake shroud make me happy, I've had theSS  Fm181 there for a while and two other 120MM fans, but the Industrial Noctua fans on speed control are so so  much better.  

One can also wire up their own PWM signal generator and feed the 4th blue wire a pwm signal and control fan speed this way.  I have done this, sucessfully, but honestly the Noctua speed controller is many fold superior and easier and basically notany more expensive than the components for making ones own PWM signal generator.

I'll come back with some pics in a later post in this thread showing my intake shroud, and my counter rotating roof vent, and the disgustingly powerful fan I Use for interior air circulation mounted on a gooseneck and how I speed control this fan.

The Homemade PWM signal generator requires a voltage bucker to feed the PWM generator 5 volts, and these together are basically 3x as big as the noctua Speed controller and much less efficient.  The PWm generator has a tiny potentiometer requiring  jewleers screwdriver  that controls the PWM signal which controls fan speed. While it is not that difficult to remove this tiny potentiometer from teh circuit board  and wire up a more ergonomic larger fingertwist potentiometer, well the Noctua controller is basically plug and play, but I will, in a later post in this thread show what I know about rigging up a homemade PWM signal generator to control these computer PWM fan speeds, but I recommend against bothering in favor of Noctua's speed controller, which will control just about any PWM computer fan, and many of them at the same time.
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#2
(09-24-2017, 01:04 AM)sternwake Wrote: First off, A fantastik fan, or a Maxxxair fan on the roof exhausting hot air from the ceiling  and an open window to allow for fresh air entry is awesome.  Pretty hard to beat.

Thanks for all the info on good fans. I have a FF to blow air out of the cabin roof, and have a "taco truck" window on my step van for incoming air. No plans for an AC. I plan to build a swamp cooler like this one to deliver a bit of chill. I had been planning to put the fans on the outlet of the cooler into the van, but your comments have me thinking I should put the fans on the inlet side to blow into the cooler so they don't have to suck against the resistance. Saves them from living in the humid outlet of the swamp cooler as well.

The thing I'm wondering is whether I need a fan in the swamp cooler at all. If the cabin is relatively sealed, the FF in the roof might be able to suck air through the cooler in the window all by itself. Cabin is about 500 cubic feet as well. Probably all relies on what "relatively sealed" really means, but what's your edumacated guess?
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#3
Great info as I posted before and Damn you( Big Grin said with love and respect) Heart  for making me think around the other side of the box again. I had something "solved" and this just gave me another idea that should work better. I like better. But better is always more damn work. Now to the drawing board..."out of my way Pinky, I am off to take over...." Cool Cool
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#4
Sounds like those Noctua fans are the chit for pushing air through restricted vents. Thanks for starting this thread. Smile
 The Captain and Crew Finally got their stuff together. 
 Now if they can only remember where they put it.   Rolleyes
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#5
Yes, pictures please!!
viajes seguros
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#6
There you go again,,,,sharing your experiments with us .
Well done  !
stay tuned 
popeye


 Weirdo Overlord : FMS Fleet Ops , Awards , Badges ,  aka Tamerlane the Impaler Mod.
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  • Gunny (09-24-2017)
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#7
Pics of my intake fans will come.


This post will be about my Interior circulation fan

I  had been using a Vantec 92Mm tornado fan on a ciggy plug multivoltage universal adapter, 3v, 4.5v, 6v,9v,12v.
Very powerful fan, the multivoltage adapter would fit into a Ciggy plug, each voltage was a separate speed.  the fan would run on 3v but had to be started on 4.5v or above.

The fan was mounted to a goosneck from an old clip on incandescent light.  I had attached this to a 2 Inch spring clamp.  Clamp it anywhere, Plug it in to a dreaded 12v powerport, choose 5 different speeds via the voltage selector switch, and as it only drew 1 amp max, no issues with the dreaded ciggy plug, other than they fucking suck.

All was well.  The fan had some steering vanes to concentrate the flow in a dense column of air right across the van. It would send a dense column of air whereever I pointed the fan at one of those 5 speeds.

Then the fan burnt out after about 4 years.  Not sure why. An Autopsy reveladed  A trace on the circuit board had burnt out like a fuse, no fixing it at that point though.

So I mounted a different older fan to it for a bit, a 120MM, 0.62 amp ugly ass heavy fan, but it was not as powerful or compact and its airflow spread far and wide rather than narrow and concentrated but way way better than no fan.


So fan research, earn some money.......  The Vantec tornado fan had the same specs as one Delta fan, then I saw Delta made a more powerful version.  I thought I could control it by my PWM generator, but I could not.

But my PWM generator required a voltage buck converter.  I had previously controlled the other fan speed to nice quiet tolerable low amperage levels via voltage, so I removed the PWM generator and hooked the fan to my voltage bucker regulator which is rated at 3 amps max, the fan is rated at 2.35 amps.  My older voltage regulator in the ciggy plug adapter was rated for only 2 amps

BLow and lehold the fan responded beautifullly to the LM2596 voltage controller, but it required a jewelers screwdriver to twist the voltage adjustment potentiometer to change speed.

So I determine that the potentiometer is 10K ohms and order 5 of a single turn finger twist potentiometer.

While the main transistor( magical microchip) is rated at 3 amps, it was getting warm enough to almost hurt my finger when the fan is at high speed for a few minutes.

Here are the components, minus the goosneck and spring clamp.

https://www.amazon.com/Delta-PFB0912UHE-...delta+92mm

[Image: 81IsAAkP0sL._SL1500_.jpg]

Here is the voltage regulator. Do note that this link is an example, i ordered 6 of basically the same product from a different seller for 9 or 11 dollars.  Smoked one of them being a shipdit too when I went to check voltage with my digital multimeter still set up to measure amps, direct short, POP goes LM2596 magic transistor.

https://www.amazon.com/RioRand-3-01-0076...+regulator

[Image: 61RQ2tjmbDL._SL1000_.jpg]

Here are the cheapass 10K ohm potentiometers I ordered.  Not too impressed with their quality but....
 
https://www.amazon.com/Uxcell-a15032000u...entiometer

[Image: 61NDzfyBL5L._SL1100_.jpg]

That little magic LM2596 transistor chip that gets hot, I added this peel and stick copper heatsink to the top of it:

[Image: 411JuYwpBxL.jpg]

https://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Copper-Coo...r+heatsink

The heatsink is likely not required, but is should increase longevity if run often at insane fingertip removing  speeds.

The voltage bucker if fed 12v can output 10.8v max, but this fan is so powerful that even 10.8v is still ridiculously powerful and loud.

I have not really finished this fan yet, though I do have it fully functional.  I am still deciding where i want to mount the speed dial, for now it is Zip tied to the gooseneck.

Soldering is required.    Soldering the + and - in and out is pretty easy, removing the 10K ohm potentiometer and soldering in wires to reach a remote potentiometer is a bit more complicated.

The fan at max speed, is ridiculously loud and powerful, but can be tamed to a whisper quiet  practically inaudible slight breeze at 0.08 amps.

I wanted a loud ass adjustable speed fan as white noise to drown out barking dogs and screaming children.  This fan fits that bill nicely, and when i need ridiculous airflow aimed at my chest, or elsewhere, well, see fingerguard warning below.

This fan does not come with a 92MM fingerguard.  It can chop off a finger tip. Finger guard....optional. Smile

I actually misplaced mine( came with previous failed 92mm fan) for about a week, and still have all my fingertips but it was a fearfilled week(not really).

The three wire ribbon cable I Used for the remote mounted potentiometer came from some some other electronic gizmo

After a few days, when the new POTs arrived, I installed the new pot, was all happy using the fan when it quit.

Tool throwing curse fest averted when I saw my one of my solder joints had failed. Likely helped along by vibration and perhaps not enough heat applied for long enough.

I redid them and used Amazing Goop to cover the wires and solder joints to elininate the wires vibrating in realtion to circuit board.


All hail the speed controlled 92mm Delta fan, and beer.

All hail beer.

[Image: 20170925_221935.jpg]

[Image: 20170925_222106.jpg]



One neat thing, is the potentiometer turned all the way, down, turns off the voltaqge regulator and thus the fan, I do not have to unplug the fan to turn it off. If there is a parasitic draw, it is less than 0.01 amps.

Very happy with this fan.

My gooseneck goes not really hold a position nearly as well as desired though. I have a much better gooseneck made for microphones, but employed on a different fan that i use in my workshop.

Perhaps an Old roadie would know of a good budget microphone gooseneck that one could use to attach to a fan and a spring clamp or other mounting system.  This fan on high on a flat surface will pull itself across the table so it must be restrained/mounted.

I am too tired to find which gooseneck i used on that other fan, this gooseneck was recycled from an ancient 120Vac incandescent light.

This is a pretty easy project to wire up, the hardest part is desoldering the original potentiometer  and feeding tiny wires into the receptacles, all hail the tiny drill bit.

And while one can buy one of those cheapass recripocating chinese walmart 12v fans, this one is just as if not more powerful, a bit louder but can be tamed to very slow speeds noise and amp draw levels.

The Voltage bucker I bought has a bright blue LED which I despise and will soon cover with liquid Electrical tape, but I have some other V buckers that came without the light.

Some here might remember my tales of the 120MM screaming banshee Delta fan (252CFM) from the forum where you will be censored and insulted.  It too is a PWm fan,. I was hoping to tame the SB to tolerable levels via PWM, and failed.  The SB fan can draw over 3 amps so I cannot use the V bucker linked to above to tame it.

I spent 20 dollars on a more capable voltage regulator, and the SB fan, will not run below 6.12 volts, and at 6.12 volts draws 1 amp and is still way too powerful and loud, but is slower than the PWM motor speed controller which could not get the fan below 2 amps and even more ridiculous airflow.

So the screaming banshee 120Mm Delta fan is still untamed, so far.  Not sure why I cant get these Delta fans to properly respond to a PWM signal but at least the 92Mm responds beautifully to voltage, and even though one loses a little top speed airflow, this is kind of like saying 'Gee I am pissed off I can only drive 185Mph when 200 is possible.

All hail beer.
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#8
This is one of the most entertaining posts I've read! You remind me of my electronics professor at DeVry!! Many times we tried to get him to go out for a beer after class but he never did... a smart man in more ways than one! :-)
viajes seguros
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#9
I just replaced my bathroom vent fan with a nice and loud muffin fan. It only has one speed, but I am very happy with the outcome. It kicks ass, was only $16, and makes me happy. The problem with the fantastic fan is its fantastic price......

Anyhow, four eye bolts and some Zip ties and a bit of rewiring and I have lots of moving air now.

[Image: d9603bef59ce34eadf97fe24a7ef92ce.jpg]

I like your modifications SternWake. Thanks for sharing! It is good to see you and your knowledge here.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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#10
OK the OSM-TWO gets the hint.......
1 click away is a

Gooseneck Source
stay tuned 
popeye


 Weirdo Overlord : FMS Fleet Ops , Awards , Badges ,  aka Tamerlane the Impaler Mod.
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