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I have an internal room in my apartment with a window that faces an air shaft between buildings, so I'd like to block the light from that window and make a darkroom. I am trying to figure out what kind of fan to get, it would be great if I could mount it into the window and then just block the light for the rest of the window, but I don't know if it's feasible to mount a darkroom fan in a window.

I'm looking at this combination: http://www.adorama.com/DKF1212.html http://www.adorama.com/DKL8.html

Is that reasonable? Is this going to work? Is there a different fan setup I should buy?

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  • Ideally the louvers would be on one end of the room and the fan on the other. Or the louvers up high near the ceiling and the fan down low near the floor, rather than being side-by-side in the same window. You'll probably get a lot of airflow in from the louver and then right back out through the fan, but not much flow out the exhaust fan from the rest of the room. – Michael C Jan 18 '14 at 8:19
  • In that case, I could add other fans in the room to help circulate the room air, could that work? – Leif Walsh Jan 19 '14 at 4:12
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    You need to do it in such a way that as the fresh air is drawn in it replaces the chemical fumes that are drawn out. If your intake and exhaust points are next to each other you might want to consider ducting the fresh air to the other side of the room so that it it introduced on the other side from where the fumes are being drawn out by the fan. – Michael C Jan 19 '14 at 8:16
  • Where's the door in that room? Perhaps you could put the louver in the door and the fan in the window. – Esa Paulasto Feb 9 '14 at 7:50
  • The door leads to the rest of the apartment where there are cats that we don't want breathing these fumes. We could potentially duct this across the room to another window but that would be extremely intrusive. – Leif Walsh Feb 9 '14 at 15:40
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I would put louvres high in the door and a take-out fan in the window. This draws air from the house through the darkroom and out of the window. The cats would be safe, since the chemically laden air would go straight out, not back into the house.

Also I would put a slightly more powerful fan in the door, so as to blow in more air than the window-fan would take out. This creates an overpressure inside the darkroom that might help keeping dust out (not sure if that would make that much difference, but I'm planning it for my darkroom anyway... if I ever get around to building it)

Also, make sure you don't suck up cats hair that end up all over your negatives... ;-)

Useful information might be found here (scroll down to see more articles)

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/category/blog-tags/darkroom

EDIT: the above link is problably not as useful as I though. The next link might provide more detailed information:

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/support/techPubs/ak3/ak3.pdf

Also, I would look into using DIY materials like fans and ducting designed for removing moist air from bathrooms and such, they should also be suitable for darkrooms and might be less expensive overall.

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