The floors are sanded and sealed and we're just waiting for them to harden up a bit. Meanwhile I'm tackling the short flight of 4 stairs between the kitchen and family room. The floor sanding man wanted much more to do these than I was prepared to pay so I said I would do these myself.
Now that I have rough sanded two of the 4 steps I can see why he wanted so much. It's taken me about 3 hours to setup and and rough sand 2 of the steps and now I am pretty stuffed so am taking a break. Admittedly the sanding man has much HD sanders than I have (6" Festool ROS and a Ryobi mouse sander to get into the corners) but I can see this is going to take all day - not that I have anything else to do of course :) The hardest part is doing the vertical faces, and the edges and corners where the previous finish seems to have pooled thicker than elsewhere and of course not worn away.
Anyway with plenty of dust detectors to play with I have swung 2 into action to see what is going on.
Here you can see the setup at the stairs with a Dust detector over at the side.
I have just about finished the rough sanding of the top step.
The rough sanding is being done with 80grit paper.
The sanders are connected to a Ryobi W&D Vac out in the laundry by about 4m of hose.
The Ryobi's outlet (the benefit of a W&D vac ) is then vented by a 5m hose outside through a doggy door.
When sanding with the sanders the dust sensor detect no more than about 6 ppb (nominal OHS is 500 ppb) of dust.
Hand sanding with 60 grit paper with the running vac hose nearby produces about 10 ppb of dust at the sensor.
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Here you can see how far it is to the Ryobi in the Laundry.
One hour later have now rough sanded 2 steps - might have to get the Makita belt sander out!
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In the laundry a 2" hose from the vac outlet snakes through to the back door and out a doggie door.
There is also a running bathroom type extraction fan in there as well.
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I placed a second dust sensor in the laundry to see what is escaping from the vac and also coming from the Vac motor cooling loop.
the highest I've seen this go is to 24 ppb - it could have gone higher but that's all I have seen - its being recorded so I can check back later to see if it has gone higher.
Some of this is dust from the fabrics etc in a laundry but more than 3/4 of the 24 ppb is coming from the vac.
With no sanding dust being collected the amount of dust coming direct out of a clean (blown out with compressed air) Vac motor cooling loop is around 40 ppb.
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