*Air pump Air Filter*
When you hit a certain age, something in your mind screams "DUMB@$$! Don't sleep on the ground!" So you trot down to Wal-Mart and buy a queen-sized air mattress.. this is especially important to do if you EVER want your wife to go camping with you again ;)
Most of us end up with one of those cheap hand pumps to blow up said mattress, which takes forever... plus you look pretty silly doing it.. let's face it, there's no Manly way to operate those pumps.
Some enterprising individual came up with an electric air-pump just for these air-mattresses... They're called the "QuickPump" and made by Coleman, you can get em at WallyWorld for about 20-25 bux. They'll blow up an air mattress in no time flat! (No pun intended)
While looking ours over at the camping area, I turned it on and the breeze it makes cooled me off pretty quick... "HEY!" says I, "this makes a really decent fan". The Engineer's mind is always at work ya see :)
But then my eye caught something else.. the size of the pump's removable nozzle... It looked almost EXACTLY the right size to fit a NATO standard gas mask filter! I couldn't wait to get home to our spare training filters to find out...
BINGO! The nozzle fits snugly into a NATO standard filter! With the filter attached this baby still chunks out a LOT of air...
This unit runs on 4 D-cell batteries for a few hours, and it puts out a LOT of air! If you're any good at electronics it can be rigged to run off of a 6V gelcell battery for longer run times. It'll keep a medium sized safe room pressurized with clean, filtered air as long as the filter is outside of the room, and the nozzle is inside the room...
Some folks have said they plan to use these on "pressurized baby cribs" for children... While the thought of wrapping a crib in plastic scares the bejesus out of me, I guess it could be done in a bio-emergency, although I don't recommend it.
If the air inside a pressurized safe room is good, that should be good enough for the little ones too. I just have those bad images from TV news about the Israeli kids suffocating to death when their parents forgot to pull the tab off their gasmask filter for them, or wrapped them in plastic during the Scud Missile attacks.
I don't consider this as a long term solution for pressurizing a safe room with filtered air, but it should work Short time during an emergency.
If you've been looking for a short-term pressurization fan/pump for your safe room, this just might be the ticket. It can be stored with your air mattress and used to blow that big baby up, it can be used as a fan to cool off, or to make fires hotter, Or it could be used in your safe room to keep clean air in, and bio-materials out!
Update: 03 May 2005
Kwll just experimented with these using the newest models.. he said the new models didn't last 10 minutes before smoking the motor. He also had to use a connecting tube to go between the NATO Filter and Air-pump unit.. so If your NATO flter doesn't fit snugly without extra tubing, you have a new model that may not work very long.
Warlord
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