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Hi TIMAR, At the school where I work all individual welding stations are equipped with 6" flexible hoses which connect to a central exhaust system. The suction is powerful enough to keep the immediate area smoke free around the flame or arc. The trick is to remember to move the hose as you change locations on the work piece. This is no problem for the students who are running practice beads for eventual certification tests. They weld in straight lines about 12" long, over, and over, and over, etc. The problem is remembering to move the hose when you're welding up something which is too big to be trying to weld in a booth in the first place. Shop building heat loss from a high capacity exhaust system might be substantial, even if limited to a single hose. Filtration and recirculation might or might not be feasible but your first concern ought to be about your lungs, not about your walls or your heating bill. At the first welding class I attended I asked about hazardous fumes as a safety issue. The instructor answered, more or less, "What do you think? Almost everything we work with is poison to some extent." You're vaporizing metals of unknown composition which are often covered with dirt and contaminants of unknown composition, while generating shielding gases of largely unknown composition (with stick, or flux core, or metal core, or dual shield.) If you ever take the time to read the MSDS (material safety data sheet) that comes with a package of stick electrodes, you'd definitely not want to have your kids breathing that smoke. My guess is that zinc fume fever is a poisoning condition that most people know about only because it is strong enough to affect you all at once, but I'll bet that you experience a certain amount of poisoning every time you weld without adequate ventilation. The effects might not be immediate and profound, but they're there. All the best, Stan
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