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Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

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Re: Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

#151

Post by patcheudor »

allenrabinovich wrote: post #101

Hi folks. Val and Roger were dear friends, and I am on the ground here, and I'd like to respectfully ask that you refrain from speculation. The press is rushing to print sensational items, and they don't know the actual facts. I've been talking to the police directly, and nothing is conclusive yet. Nothing has actually been ruled out, nor determined to be the cause. They don't even have full toxicology reports yet, t…

Condolences for sure. Do you happen to know the size of their place by chance? CO becomes deadly at about 400 PPM or 0.04%. Doing the calculations I can't for the life of me figure out how a small laser cutter could produce enough CO under any condition to become deadly. Even with the smallest of places, lets say 24x20x7 studio, that's 3,360 cubic feet of air & at 0.0807 pounds per cubic feet of air, that means roughly 271 pounds of air. To become toxic, that would mean the laser cutter would need to output 0.1084 pounds of CO or roughly 1.7 ounces of CO in that area and then not get dissipated through air leaks, opening and closing the exterior door, etc. That seems exceedingly high given a laser is going to cut very little actual material and even getting to the point where it has cut 1.7 ounces of material, let alone produced 1.7 ounces of CO would seem to me to take weeks, months, or years.

Re: Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

#152

Post by [deleted] »

gnu8 wrote: post #134
greglindahl wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the context is "CEO attempts damage control after being falsely accused of killing 2 people with an unsafe product", maybe this isn't the time?

Is it fair to call the product unsafe? It's industrial production equipment. I think if a person chooses to operate one in their own dwelling, it's on them to take increased safety measures.

[deleted]

Re: Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

#153

Post by cma »

jcoffland wrote: post #36
stcredzero wrote: post #18

CO poisoning is cumulative. It takes a long time for CO to get unstuck from hemoglobin. (About 2 weeks, IIRC.) It could have snuck up on them slowly, then one evening with the cats "napping" they felt particularly tired and thought to themselves, "We must be in hibernation mode from the chilly weather," then they went to sleep then never woke up. CO is odorless. You might get a headache, or you might only feel tired.…

If this was indeed a LASER cutter then you would definitely be able to smell all the other gases emitted with the CO. I've got a small LASER cutter and even with the hose going outside the smell very strong.

One post up above says some of the newer cutters targeted at consumers have carbon filters and exhaust the air directly back into the room. The carbon doesn't capture CO but may capture the odors from other compounds.

Re: Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

#154

Post by tomaskafka »

dmix wrote: post #125
Animats wrote: post #44

"3D laser printer" probably means a Glowforge. Nobody else calls them that. Their documentation says "Lasers normally require some ventilation via a small tube out a nearby window. Our optional Air Filter that sits under Glowforge and ventilates using HEPA filters and charcoal, meaning no outside ventilation is required." That won't do much if you cut something that emits carbon monoxide when heated. That includes so…

The air filter costs an additional $750 extra when you buy the $3000 Glowforge, I could see students skimping on that and no realizing the implications. https://glowforge.com/order That said I watched the video for this product and I'm really looking forward to when these are widespread. It's a very exciting industry. I'd definitely buy one of these when it gets to around $1k.

The order page definitely doesn't have any warning about the basic - even I would go 'Nah, what's the $720 for? Upsell?'

How about:

Glowforge Pro + Air Filter: $5,995.00

Glowforge Basic + Air Filter: $3,745.00

Glowforge Basic: $2,995.00 Warning: You may die when using Glowforge inside without Air filter (link). You may also die when cuting these materials (link) inside even with air filter.

Re: Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

#155

Post by tomaskafka »

cma wrote: post #153
jcoffland wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was indeed a LASER cutter then you would definitely be able to smell all the other gases emitted with the CO. I've got a small LASER cutter and even with the hose going outside the smell very strong.

One post up above says some of the newer cutters targeted at consumers have carbon filters and exhaust the air directly back into the room. The carbon doesn't capture CO but may capture the odors from other compounds.

So, a bad design that sells well, but hides the important signal.

In case of natural gas, we have long long time ago started mandating odorization (after a lot of silent deaths): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odorizer

This time, we basically allow laser cutter manufacturers to ignore these lessons (learned with a losses of thousands of lives).

Re: Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

#156

Post by tomaskafka »

chris_st wrote: post #11
oasisbob wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glowforge marketed their laser cutter as a 3D laser printer, didn't they? As someone waiting for their Glowforge to ship, I really hope their device wasn't involved in all this.

From Glowforge's website, for their base model: > It needs ventilation via the provided 4″ diameter (10.2cm) hose. We recommend putting the hose out a window.

... while all their marketing materials and videos show Glowforge sitting happily in the middle of a living room with absolutely no exhaust pipe.

Re: Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

#157

Post by cma »

tomaskafka wrote: post #155
cma wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One post up above says some of the newer cutters targeted at consumers have carbon filters and exhaust the air directly back into the room. The carbon doesn't capture CO but may capture the odors from other compounds.

So, a bad design that sells well, but hides the important signal. In case of natural gas, we have long long time ago started mandating odorization (after a lot of silent deaths): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odorizer This time, we basically allow laser cutter manufacturers to ignore these lessons (learned with a losses of thousands of lives).

Well we don't know for sure that that was the cause yet.

Re: Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

#158

Post by tropo »

Having tried one, I wouldn't trust a detector. That was money not well spent. I could generate lots of CO, and nothing would register. Maybe flawed units are super-rare, but I'm more than tempted to assume the industry is a fraud.

Why even bother? The device has one job, and it fails. All you get is a false sense of safety.

Re: Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

#159

Post by fma »

verelo wrote: post #119
stcredzero wrote: post #18

CO poisoning is cumulative. It takes a long time for CO to get unstuck from hemoglobin. (About 2 weeks, IIRC.) It could have snuck up on them slowly, then one evening with the cats "napping" they felt particularly tired and thought to themselves, "We must be in hibernation mode from the chilly weather," then they went to sleep then never woke up. CO is odorless. You might get a headache, or you might only feel tired.…

I recently started getting very interested in air quality in my house. I decided to take a similar approach to air quality that I do with the stock market: lots of small, well distribute bets whenever possible. For context, our house is 3 levels with a furnace in the basement (cold climate; Canada) I ended up with 3 different brand of CO detectors, 2 different brands of smoke detectors and 1 radon detector. By far th…

Which VOC detector do you have?

After I purchased my new house (USA, Georgia) I put in the detectors. My wife is from China where people are rightfully paranoid about formaldehyde - due to low quality building material. It's basically the same in the USA, except people are a lot less knowledgeable and informed about it. My cabinets, drywall, paint all had high level of formaldehyde. Had to always had the windows open...otherwise it would rise above OSHA approved levels.

In the USA, there's no regulated levels for residence..but there is for office. Funny, isn't it.

Re: Carbon monoxide poisoning from 3D laser printer may have killed Berkeley couple

#160

Post by kneel »

Animats wrote: post #44

"3D laser printer" probably means a Glowforge. Nobody else calls them that. Their documentation says "Lasers normally require some ventilation via a small tube out a nearby window. Our optional Air Filter that sits under Glowforge and ventilates using HEPA filters and charcoal, meaning no outside ventilation is required." That won't do much if you cut something that emits carbon monoxide when heated. That includes so…

Their laser printer was stored/run in their closet. They may have been doing this for a while with no problems because Berkeley is so nice and everyone leaves their windows open.

Berkeley has been unusually cold/rainy this last week and I'm guessing they sealed up their apt and didn't realize how dangerous that was.

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