greenyone Posted August 15, 2019 Share Posted August 15, 2019 After wearing my bucket a few times in the summer heat & humidity I'm having the dreaded lens fog issue. I do have a gap where the lower portion of the lens meets the face plate, but that's not working in this weather. I tried some anti-fog that I use with my motorcycle helmet. That works pretty good, but after awhile the condensation builds up to the point there are actual water droplets on the lens. So no fogging, but water. It's almost like the lens is being sprayed with a mist, then once the droplets become large enough they run down the lens. I eventually have to take off the helmet and wipe the lens. Not a big deal, but every time you wipe the lens you are probably also wiping off some of the anti-fog spray coating. So re-application is necessary for the best performance. I see that there are some nice ready to use squirrel cage fan options (harry's for example), but in looking at the dimensions of those fans and battery pack I worry that I won't have room in my resin MC bucket to accommodate that system. I picked up a pair of these little 5v fans on Amazon to do some testing combined with a single 3.7 18650 Li battery. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RMGVBKL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 My thoughts were that they are small enough to fit a couple on either side of the inside of my snout/faceplate with some simple velcro attachment. The velcro is nice in that I could move them around to find the best position for anti-fog performance. So after fiddling with these things in different positions here is my conclusions. Mind you I have not tested this while trooping yet...just around the house. 1. A single fan seems to perform just as well as running two separately powered fans. 2. Positioning the fans with the air flow direction pointing up toward the lens clears the fog better than down and out of the bucket. (surprised me too) 3. The lens does still tend to fog for a split second on exhale, (especially when talking or breathing through the mouth) but clears almost instantly on inhale. 4. You can hear the fan running inside the helmet but it's virtually unnoticeable to the ears from the outside. (my wife said she couldn't hear it sitting 2 feet away) With all this in mind I think I'll go with this setup for now. 1 fan mounted in front of my mouth/nose powered by a single 18650 cell mounted in the back of the helmet with a small on/off switch. We'll see how long the battery lasts. Although I'm anticipating needing to carry a spare charged cell in one of my belly pouches. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greenyone Posted August 18, 2019 Author Share Posted August 18, 2019 Still sorting this out. Experimenting a bit more with these little blower fans. At first I was going to try and use the very common 18650 cells. The length and height of the cylindrical cells are proving to be difficult to fit inside the helmet without interfering with my welding helmet liner and head. I've turned my attention to these flat profile 704070 cells. I believe these are used in things like video game controllers, drones, cordless phones etc.. Like the 18650 cells, these are 3.7v (actually a bit over 4v fully charged) however they boast a 3000mah capacity which is a slight upgrade over the 2500mah rating on the 18650's. I found a cheap little USB charging device that should work for these batteries too. Unfortunately the style of connectors on the battery and charger are not a match. Some snipping, splicing and soldering will need to be performed so these become plug and play. Links to the parts I'm playing with: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L2P5ZJB/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0798C4712/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TF8CTZL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076JFFDWN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RMGVBKL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greenyone Posted August 19, 2019 Author Share Posted August 19, 2019 Soldered up matching connectors to the batteries and charger leads. I think I'll postpone fitting all of this into the helmet until I determine if these cheapo batteries and charger actually take a charge. Similar to a lot of the very low priced Asian no-name ebay/amazon stuff, this charger came with zero documentation. The amazon listing simply said the lights go out when the battery is fully charged. Now we wait. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greenyone Posted August 19, 2019 Author Share Posted August 19, 2019 Just to give you an idea on the run-time. The fans (load )are .2A and the batteries are 3000mAh. The math says that these blowers should run for 15 hours if each fan is run by it's own battery. (7.5 hrs if running them both from the same battery) Obviously I've done zero testing, but if I get through a 2-3 hour troop without fogging up and having a little breeze on my face with a full charge I'll be more than satisfied. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greenyone Posted August 20, 2019 Author Share Posted August 20, 2019 Like i said in a previous post. I don't see much difference in the air flow with only running one fan over two at the same time. That being said, I wired both of these fans up individually. So I have one on either side of the snout with the wires running up toward the top of the visor. I had to leave a little slack in the wires for the face to open/close. From there I split the ground wire up to a little push button switch. The switch is sitting in a recessed area behind the ear hole so it does not interfere with my face/head. I can slip a thumb up there with the helmet on to cycle the switch. The batteries are mounted in the recessed tube shaped area of the back of the helmet. I opted to use sticky velcro keep the wires in place. Some sticky hooks on the inside of the helmet small pieces of loops (non-adhesive) cut to go over the wires. Again, I mounted 2 fans so the other side of the helmet would be a mirror image of the one in the picture below. I'll probably only run 1 fan at a time. If one fan depletes it's battery mid-troop I can simply cycle it off and turn on the other one without having to take off the helmet for a battery swap. I'm really liking this little setup. Even when you are not dealing with a fogging lens, the gentle breeze it blows across your face is surprisingly pleasant. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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