Talk:2952: Routine Maintenance

Ooooh, if this were only true... All the "Nobody tells me what to do" stubborn people would have died out years ago, and Covid would have been a LOT shorter! :) Added an initial explanation, all I found here was a basic transcript.

The vent off of Alaska is poking out, is there a volcano around there? Feels a little north to be Mount Fuji, but I have a suspicion most if not all are supposed to be actually volcanos... NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:12, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula (the long "teardrop" hanging below the Siberian Peninsula) is very volcanically active. The others look like reasonable places to expect volcanoes - I've added a couple of lines. 172.68.64.207 05:25, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Is the image SUPPOSED to be that tiny? It's not even 800 pixels! 141.101.109.166 05:46, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Should the direction of up/down actually being away/towards the planet due to gravity and not the panel's up/down direction be addressed in the explanation? 172.71.31.150 13:34, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

The current explanation says that cans of compressed air are pressurized with a propellant gas. This seems unlikely to me, but it's not impossible... it's just that I'd expect a can of compressed air to be only that, without needing a propellant. What I'm seeing in a quick search on-line supports that. Do cans of air/propellant exist? BunsenH (talk) 16:09, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

It would be impractical to have just normal air, compressed. A typical spray can cannot hold the pressures needed to have significant (i.e. useful) amounts of compressed 'normal air' (still gas, but a lot of it... think, basically, of a cylinder of Nitrogen gas, because air is mostly that anyway). And 'typical air' doesn't readily liquify (the way of concentrating it without necessarily extreme pressure), not without applying/maintaining extremely low temperatures.

On the whole, regular mostly nitrogen plus significant oxygen plus some CO₂ and a host of trace gases would never practically fit in a handy spray can such as you could hold (and, probably, afford to use) as an alternative to any pumped compressed (or fan-blown) air in 'trivial' tasks such as just blowing a tiny bit of dust off of a mobo.

What the 'air' is, in such cans, is probably (mostly) whatever handy liquid-adjacent gas is usable as an actual propellant. As you only need the 'general gas', you might as well just put propellant in the thing (one that works well) and nothing else. (Unlike things like air-fresheners/bug-spray, which need the 'freshener'/insecticide as well. There's no advantage to reducing the propellant to fit 'air' in, which would soon be so diluted by gasified propellant that you'd basically have no 'air' left).

The listed possible gases in a gas duster are the likes of butane, propane, 1,1-difluoroethane, 1,1,1-trifluoroethane or 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane, with the first two being flammable (so would be problematic in some circumstances) and the rest being more inert but still not being 'safe' if improperly used. Or abused.

I don't actually have a can, at hand, or I'd check its stated ingredients (and warnings). I probably am more likely to (carefully) blow dust away with my own breath, or get the vacuum cleaner out with a suitable attachment. In fact, I've used very few, ever, though I probably first did back in the early '80s (which means it might even have been basically an example (or mix) of a CFC gas, before the problems with that became 'a thing'), as part of a cleaning kit sold to service my BBC Micro. 172.70.86.35 17:44, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

The popular 'can dusters' are NOT compressed air (oxygen/nitrogen mix) despite the label -- air cannot stay liquid at room temperature, it is high above the critical points of both nitrogen and oxygen. Many of such dusters don't display ingredients, but have a prominent FLAMMABLE warning sign! It is a propane/butane mix most of the time, maybe some CFCs in old ones. You could make a flame torch out of them! so be careful, turn off your device and provide very good ventilation. Best use it outdoors or on a patio, etc. -- 172.68.159.20 18:04, 1 July 2024 (UTC)