Adding wall mounted fans, an exhaust fan, finishing up insulation and now ready for sheetrock! I went with some cool and different ideas for ventilation in the shop that might be worth checking out. Read on for more!

How to Install Shop Exhaust Fan

I knew I wanted/needed an exhaust fan. While planning out the shop, I determined that this area on the west wall would be my fabrication area. The CNC plasma table gets quite smoky so I wanted to make sure I had a way to vent that without sucking all of the conditioned air out of the shop. My plan here is to use some industrial curtains to create a ‘dirty room’ where I can open the window and turn on the fan so that contained area can have it’s own ventilation.

Clear as mud? I promise it will make more sense after a couple more posts.

This fan does ~3,300 CFM so in theory at this amount of flow it can exchange all of the air in the shop roughly once every 5 minutes. Once I get my ‘dirty room’ set up it should very easily be able to clear that room out quickly.

This fan is a little bit on the louder side, but I expected it to be. I bought a cheap fan controller to slow it down a bit if needed though I haven’t tried it yet. The fan has straight blades and really moves a lot of air for its size. I didn’t want to go too much bigger because I would have had to cut out some of the structural framing on the pole barn itself. This one fit right in between the stringer boards.

In other news

Installing Oscillating fans

Why did I pick oscillating fans and not ceiling fans?

Good question. My ceiling is 13ft high and my scaffold is ~12ft high (maybe a littler taller, I didn’t measure it but it is less than a foot from the rafters). I wanted to keep my lights up close to the ceiling so the scaffold and eventually a 2 post lift would clear them without issue. Because of this I didn’t want ceiling fans because the lights would have been above the fans causing the light to flicker as the fan blades spun around (which would absolutely drive me crazy). Also, I would have had to work around ceiling fans when I had the scaffolding out.

Instead I found and ordered these oscillating fans from Amazon and they are AWESOME!
They have 6 speeds, oscillating or fixed, and a little wired remote that hangs down a couple of feet to control it all (I like the wired because the remote can’t get lost). These things are pretty quiet even at higher speeds, at lower speeds they are practically silent. They also take up no floorspace. As a bonus, these two are on the East wall facing West and the exhaust fan is on the West wall blowing out. In theory if I had it really nasty smoky in there, I could use these to push it out in a single direction. I would suggest these 100%.

Link to the fans I used:

Filling in the insulation

Getting the sheetrock

Lesson learned / things to watch out for. Since I had a utility trailer they couldn’t load it with the forklift so the guys peeled the strips off the end and loaded them one at a time. That royally screwed us down the road though because sheetrock is packaged in 2 packs face in and when they loaded one sheet at a time they ended up mixed and they scratched a bunch of the panels which created more mud/sealing work later. Just make sure if they load by hand they do it 2 sheets at a time without taking off the strips.

Now YOU, go outside and work on something!