Carpet?

Wed Oct 28 19:01:37 UTC 1998

At 08:44 AM 10/28/98 -0600, Phil Howard wrote:
>Charles Sprickman wrote:
>
>> Just to formally close out the carpet thread, there appears to be a single
>> source for the stuff.  3M makes tiles and treatments, and many carpet
>> companies have carpet that has a special anti-static backing, but only one
>> seems to have "certified" static-free carpet.  
>
>...
>
>> We're going with this solution.  Our machine room is very small, and the
>> surrounding build/test/repair/work area isn't that much larger and could
>> use some static reduction.
>
>There's another reason for NOT using carpet in a machine room.  Dust.
>
>Carpet in general is an actual source of dust of the fine fiber kind.
>We just got done moving our machine room from one room with carpet

>as that carpet were coming out of the UPSes, I then knew there was yet
>another reason to make the move.
>
>Is there any carpet specifically designed to reduce the level of dust
>emissions?

Carpet, by definition, creates dust. It also traps and recirulates dust,
the vacume-cleaners redistribute this dust (the bags are too porous unless
it is a wet-vac). Any equipment with a fan in it will inhale this dust in
huge quantities. The electrical nature of the equipment will make this dust
coat the most heat-sensitive components in that equipment (variation on
murphy's law). Thereby, promoting early heat-death <grin>. For those that
don't believe me, peel open any equipment that has been running for over a
few months. Unless its a positive-pressure ventilation system (they are
usually filtered) you will find more dust than you ever imagined. Dust has
lousy thermal characteristics and the electrical properties aren't real
good either. We don't allow carpet in our machine room, nor the
assembly-test area. White anti-static tile works (dust-mopped daily, waxed
weekly). Even in such an environment, there will still be dust, just an
order of magnitude less of it.
___________________________________________________ 
Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) 
e-mail: <mailto:rmeyer at mhsc.com>rmeyer at mhsc.com
Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com
Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer
Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/
___________________________________________ 
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