Quote:
' "Must be the early morning "ehs??".'
Could be.
I'm often burning past the midnight oil when I'm posting, too. Sometime I read my previous posts and cringe at the typos and whatnot.
I'd look at commercially made 'bators (such as LG, or whatever) of a similar size, and make vent holes about like those. Maybe a of couple extra ones, just little ones. Doesn't matter whether it's wood, styrofoam, or whatever, the need for ventilation would be the same. The fan inside the 'bator won't affect air pressure, it just keeps it mixed well so you don't have hot and cold spots, and the humdity throughout the box is more even than it would be w/o a fan.
I'm at sea level, or close to it, so this is more of a mental exercise for me, but I'd also be happy if something I came up with turned out to be helpful to others i adifferent situation.
If I were at a high altitude, and wanted to try increasing air pressure in a room, here's how I would do it:
Get a fan, such as a squirrel cage fan, and install in one window, in such a way the there is no open space around the frame of the fan. In other words, air would not be blowing right back out of the room around the fan, because the surrounding space would be blocked off. Like you do when you put in a window unit air conditioner, but with a fan instead of an AC unit. Keep the room closed. Don't open other windows. When the fan is running, the air pressure in the room would increase. The room would not be air-tight, (and you don't want it air tight, air must circulate) air would still flow
out of the room as well, (through the crack around the door, if nothing else) but the exits would be smaller than the inlet, allowing pressure to build up, at least to some degree, owing to the force of the air entering the room from the fan.
Here's how you could test this to see if it was working: Take an empty jar, and a piece of plastic wrap, big enough to cover the mouth of the jar. Place the plastic wrap over the mouth of the jar, and use a strong, fat rubber band to secure it to the jar. The plastic wrap should be smoothed over the mouth of the jar, but not pulled tight. Look at the way the wrap is flat over the mouth of the jar. The air pressure inside the jar is the same as the air outside the jar. Take it into the room with the fan, close the door, turn on the fan. (Do not have the fan blowing directly onto the jar, just have the jar in the room.) Watch the plastic wrap on the jar. If the air pressure is increased in the room, the plastic wrap will become concave over the mouth of the jar, because the pressure in the room would be greater than the pressure in the jar. The air pressure would press the plastic wrap down into the jar.
This would probably not be enough to make a lot of difference to a person who has severe respiratory problems and requires O2. But it should increase available oxygen in the room, so that hatching eggs from other altitudes might have a better chance of hatching. I wouldn't advise it during very cold weather, but it could be a good thing to try out during milder seasons.
I worked in hospitals for years, and one of the thing hospitals have, for immuno-compromised patients, (such as chemo patients) is positive pressure rooms. They have filtered air pumped in at slightly higher than normal room-air pressure. This causes air to flow out in one direction only, so that airborne bacteria and contaminants cannot enter the room.
One of the labs I once worked in sometimes had a high air pressure system that would come on, to flush air out of the lab, (for what reason, I don't remember, it's been a long time, maybe it was just a periodic thing to flush out the old air and send in fresh, none of the windows could be opened) and when that system was on, it was harder to open and close doors into the corridors, because the air pressure in the corridors was so much higher than the other areas. I know it was just a high pressure fan ventilation system, but I don't know any details about how it was set up.
