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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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In Reply to: Re: Rock wool or fiberglass (for absorbing panels) ? posted by Wlad on October 31, 2005 at 15:13:00:
I'm retired and don't have access to a lot of stuff anymore. You can easily do a search on the web at sites like the US Occupational Safety and Health site or Australia's (I'm in Australia) Worksafe Australia site for info. There must be a site for a similar European body as well. Also, the manufacturers of these products are usually required by law - at least in countries like the US/Australia/EU to provide safety data on request.The health issues really boil down to probably 3 things:
1- skin contact and dermatological issues: both fibreglass and rockwool are 'itchy' materials to work with and can cause problems that are unpleasant and uncomfortable so you don't want them, but not overly dangerous. Allergies may be involved as well with some materials. You can avoid these issues by covering up, wearing long sleeves and trousers, gloves etc and be careful when it comes to washing clothes. Work in an area with good air flow and where you won't scatter dust inside (for this and other reasons).
2- there's always problems with dust inhalation into the lungs where you can get thick deposits building up within the lungs, reducing lung capacity and causing breathing problems like emphysema and the various pneumoconioses over time - they're basically diseases like the old coal miner's 'black lung' disease. Highly unpleasant and very restrictive, but they tend to take a long time to develop and they require a fair amount of dust buildup in the lungs. It's very unlikely you would ever get one of these diseases making an acoustic treatment unless you did if for a living and failed to use breathing protection, and even then it would take some years for this sort of disease to develop.
3- cancer. I don't think the mechanisms are clearly understood (they weren't a few years ago) but fibres can encyst in the walls of the lung - actually get embedded in the walls as opposed to dust and fibres depositing and building up within the lung capacity - and cancers can start from that. The general view is that while the diseases mentioned above require large buildups of deposits in the lung, it only takes one fibre to encyst and go cancerous to start a cancer . That may be the first fibre that encysts or it may be the millionth - no way to predict so it's possible that a hobbyist making a few bass traps or acoustic panels could be unlucky and end up developing lung cancer of some kind as a result, though that would be a rare occurrence (not a reassuring bit of knowledge if you're unlucky enough to develop a cancer). Development of cancer is very slow - 15 to 25 years for disease to show in many cases, so you won't know about it for a long time if you're unlucky. The best way to prevent this sort of cancer arising is simply not to inhale any fibres at all but that's often impossible. You definitely need to wear breathing protection when working with materials like this and breathing protection does not mean the normal cheap dust masks you buy in a hardware store - it means a proper particle filter rated to prevent inhalation of this sort of fibre. They're not cheap but they aren't expensive either, and you bag and throw away the filter after each work session so you can go through a pile of filters if you're working with the stuff on a regular basis.
With all of these materials you don't want to work with them inside the house. You can't avoid some fibre breakup during handling and there will be some fibres deposited around the area, even if you clean up well. Your face is usually close to the material when you're working with it and that ensures that the highest fibre concentration is going to be in your breathing zone. You may wear protection while you're working with the stuff but you won't when you walk around the area afterwards and others will walk and play there as well so they may end up inhaling some dust/fibres or get skin problems, especially if they're allergic. They wouldn't get enough dust inhalation to end up with a respiratory disease but cancer doesn't require that level of exposure - just bad luck with a fibre encysting in the lung wall. A lot of wives of asbestos miners got mesothelioma which is a form of lung cancer specifically associated with asbestos simply from inhaling fibres released from their partner's clothes while doing the washing, so household exposure is a messy issue.There are probably no perfectly safe substances of any kind - anything at all can cause problems under the right circumstances. One of my lecturers once said that there are no toxic substances, only toxic effects, and everything has toxic effects at a high enough level - even water. The whole issue is always one of exposure - how much and what kind.
Your best bet is to simply use the safest material for the application and follow any recommended safety precautions scrupulously. People will say the precautions are overkill and there's definitely a bit of safety margin built into some safety recommendations but for the hobbyist like us, we have no way of monitoring exposure levels so the only sensible thing for us to do is to follow the recommended precautions because they are intended to keep exposure within acceptably safe limits but you need to realise that that does not guarantee safety. Workplace standards are designed to minimise risk to an 'acceptable level' but disease can and will still occur at those exposure levels, just not very often. That's good for the people who don't get the disease and bad for the very few who do. There's no way of guaranteeing who falls into each group.
My preference for DIY acoustic treatments is stuff like polyester and/or wool insulation materials. Unfortunately they tend to be loose and not available in 'boards' like rockwool and fibreglass so you have to compress them and work with thicker layers, and they happen to be more expensive than rockwool and fibreglass but they work well and they don't have the same health problems. I think commercial products like the various bass traps and panels that are made using fibreglass are quite safe to use since the end user isn't going to be exposed to dust/fibres in normal use - the main exposure is during construction and other people are doing that in a workspace set up to handle that kind of dust a lot more safely than anywhere in your home. Construction is where you really need to take precautions when you make your own treatments using these materials, plus ensure that the wrapping is adequate afterwards. I'd also vacuum the completed products thoroughly before moving them into the house, as well as the work area, and use a vacuum cleaner designed for hazardous dust wastes if at all possible. Bag and seal the vacuum cleaner bag before disposing of it and dispose of it through an appropriate industrial waste process if possible. Some will say that's overkill but the dust waste is the most dangerous stuff you're handling and you don't want to expose others to it unknowingly.
David Aiken
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Follow Ups
- Re: Rock wool or fiberglass (for absorbing panels) ? - David Aiken 16:37:04 10/31/05 (1)
- Re: Rock wool or fiberglass (for absorbing panels) ? - Wlad 11:26:38 11/01/05 (0)
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