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Dust-Off, oh Dust-Off...how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
OK, so maybe it feels a little weird writing a review for a can of compressed gas! It sure felt strange the first time I spent $9 on a can of it. But I've come to rely heavily on this product, so much so that I thought it was worth writing about.
For years, I refused to use Dust-Off because it contained CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) which deplete the ozone and contribute to greenhouse gasses. When HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons) were introduced as a safer alternative to CFCs, and the Dust-Off cans started advertising the product as "100% Safe for the Ozone," I started buying it. And soon I was wondering how I ever lived without it.
Compressed air or gas is great to use for blowing dust out of your keyboard, from the cooling fan vents of your PC, printer and monitor, inside your fax machine...you name it. You can vacuum some of this dust, but not in hard-to-reach places or in places where you could damage components. The biggest threat to your machinery comes from dust build-up on the inside of your machines. Cooling fans (or convection cooling systems) draw air across components to cool them down. This also draws in particles that can form a blanket of dust, raising the components' temperature and potentially shortening their life. I blow out my machines every month or two (and I'm always amazed at how much dust is in them when I do).
Dust-Off is the perfect solution, albeit a slightly expensive one. Not so cheap, but oh so handy. It comes in several different sizes. The XL size, at 10 oz/312 ml, is the most economical.It has a trigger-type nozzel that you can use by itself (for a broad dusting) and a long plastic extension tube you can attach for precision blasts. Being as expensive as it is (you can go through an XL can every couple of months if you have a lot of gear and use it as compulsively as I do), it would be nice to have a cheaper alternative. You could use an air compressor. I have a small one but it's heavy, noisy and vibrates on its little rubber feet like a nitro funny car on the starting line. It's definitely not something I'd want to lug around the house to dust stuff off with, and I assume most people don't have such an option. Dust-Off is not an alternative to vacuuming. It doesn't do much good to blow the dust out of your machines if you just blown it into the room where it'll be sucked up into the machines again. I wish I could say I was this compulsive, but I'm not. I at least try to blow the dust as far away as possible. I do have a portable Datavac, but I'm always too lazy or too rushed to break it out. But that can of Dust-Off is always close by. If you use Dust-Off on your removable disk drives (floppy, Zip, CD-ROM, etc.), make sure to blow at an oblique angle to the drive opening. There's a lot of dust that builds up just inside these drives, and you can easily blow it back into the mechanism and make big trouble for yourself. I learned this one the hard way. If you're wondering about the HCFCs used in Dust-Off, you're not alone. This piece was originally written with a very different slant. I read on a website selling Dust-Off that it used HCFC-22. After doing some research on HCFC-22, I discovered that, while being far less destructive to the ozone than CFCs, it's still a small threat. HCFC-22 has an ODP (ozone-depleting potential) of 0.05. ODP is a measure of the destructive potential of a chemical on the ozone layer, measured against CFC-11 which is designated as ODP 1.0. HCFCs are being phased out and are slated to be completely replaced by more benign alternatives by 2030. I was peeved that Falcon Safety would say "100% Safe for the Ozone" if it wasn't. Turns out, this was more of a story about not believing what you read online. Dust-Off actually uses HCFC-134a, which has an ODP of 0. It does still contribute greenhouse gasses (which is different than ODP). So, the moral of the story is keep it clean...and don't believe everything you read, on the Net or anywhere else. Now I'm off to vacuum the joint. All this talk about blowing dust around has made me feel so...dirty. - Gareth Branwyn [10/13/97] |
