using gas dusters indoor safe?

do you guys use it indoors in bad ventillation areas?

 

Are you talking about compressed air? Ventilation shouldn't be hard, just leave the door open.

 

Canned air is just air. So if blowing into your computer is safe, then canned air is safe.

 

As long as you don't turn it upside-down when you use it or blow it into your nose, you should be fine.

 

Unless your heatsink fans and vents are clogged with radioactive material, you'll be just fine.

 

Actually "canned air" is usually a refrigerant called HFC-134a (1,1,1,2 tetrafluoroethane). It's a lot easier to compress into cans than actual air. It's why you can freeze things with it when it's turned upside down (which gives a risk of frostbite, so be careful!). It's also dryer than air, and thus is safer for your computer.

On it's own, HFC134a isn't really toxic. However, the main danger is it displacing air. That is to say, it is heavier than air, and thusly, if there is too much, you will be breathing the HFC134a instead of the air that your body needs, leading to asphyxiation and death. However, given the amounts in a duster can, I don't think that it would present a safety issue, unless you were abusing it.

 

You mean like inhaling it?

 

Yep, people actually get high on that stuff, it's pretty nasty. They deliberately make the chemicals extremely bitter for a reason, but I guess that doesn't stop some people:


<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/e4qU57xPh5E&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width='425'>

 

Yeah. There have even been deaths from people doing so. The cans that I buy from Walmart even brag about how their bittering agent works the best, and how it's unique to their product only. That kind of attitude disgusts me... If they really believed that their product was so effective at preventing abuse, they should make it an option for ALL air dusters, so that they would accomplish the true advertished goal of preventing abuse. Instead, they market it as some kind of "exclusive feature", with profits in mind. But that discussion is for some other day.

And quite ironically enough, it's the same exact one in your video.

 

:/
10 char

 

Yeah, it's pretty sad. But there's absolutely zero risk of accidentally getting high on that chemical gas just by using the can to blow out your laptop, even indoors in a small room with no ventilation. At that point, the dust and stuff that you blow out of the vents will have more of a direct and obvious effect on you than the propellant gas.

 

It's punks like her that's making it harder for the rest of us by driving up the cost of duster.

 

The only real issue is the cloud of dust that'll emanate from your PC.

Unless you have habits like impromptu lighting of your farts, in which case it might be a whole different story.

 

QFT. I have choked on a number of dust clouds coming out of my PC Keep a vacuum running nearby to suck the newly airborne dust into containment. Do NOT let the tip get too close to any circuit bits though... very easy to bang it into the boards and break something or suck up a screw of whatever. But don't worry about the ventilation... as long as you're not doing it in a hermetically sealed room, the normal ventilation of a house is more than enough to deal with the oxygen displacement of the can. It is not poisonous.