Dust Control

[Ouch77]

Anyone got any tips?

I've been using a small angle-grinder to help chase out cinderblock walls, and as you can probably imagine the mess is pretty extreme.

Shovelling and sweeping gets the larger fragments out of the way, and running around with the vacuum helps a bit, but there's always a thin patina of dust on everything.

The rooms in questions are completely bare, though we are trying to live in the other rooms of the house, so walking dust from one room to the other is a big issue.

Would mopping/wiping down with a damp cloth help? or simply move the dust around and turn it into some kinda slurry?

 

[PrenticeBoyofDerry]

Cinder bloke walls are a nightmare to cut in to, I have a special attachment for a SDS drill that helps me rake chases out. (groving/gauge chisel)
But if you grinding them your going to get dust, you need to confined it to area where your working so dust sheets, move everything you can from the room, then sheet everything left up, that includes a barrier over the door, you could consider using a zip wall, but if it's a one off job, covering the door will be just as good.
Also a missed spray will help bring the dust out of the air to the ground quicker, if your grinder was an attachment on, could also hose that up to a vac.

 

[JohnD]

one method is to get a powerful wet and dry or workshop vac, put it outside the houser with the vac tupe coming through a small hole in a ploy sheet across the window. This will create underpressure in the room. Preferably have an assistant hold the hose close to where you are cutting to suck away the light dust. You may need an extension hose, these are quite cheap.

if your tool has facility to attach a vac hose this is even better.

take your bin, bin bags, soft broom, dustpan and brush into the room before you start. Be sure to wear mask, goggles and hat.

but the dust is so awful that personally I would not want to do it in an occupied house, even with the room emptied and the door taped shut. I once cut along pencil marks on a wall and when I had finished found one of my cuts was up a join in the wallpaper because vision was so poor.

 

[^woody^]

Using a grinder inside? You must be mad

If these blocks are cinder, then they will be soft and so can be easily chased with a hammer and chisel

 

[WabbitPoo]

You'll note that no-one has answered the question! LOL.

I guess you have no choice now but to keep vacuuming until its all gone. I have a dehumidifier that has an air filter on it, so I leave it running for a few hours when I have made a lot of dust.

 

[jabuzzard]

Really quite small amounts of water basically eliminate the dust issue with a grinder. Why nobody does a cordless grinder (for safety) with built in water pump and reservoir beats me. I had to make an attachment myself to try it out. Sure you end up with a wet slurry that can splatter but that is easy to control with a some dust sheets or even a some cut up cardboard boxes and it is a hell of a site better than dust everywhere. From experience you could use such a system without issue in a furnished room. Obviously the area immediately adjacent to the cutting still needs dust sheets though. Given the health and safety issues with dust and cutting stuff using grinders you would have thought that wet cutting would be the normal by now.

The second option I guess is to do what the nuclear and other high containment industries do, though I confess not to having tried this one myself. Basically you get a massive high throughput fan and suck the air out of the room and dump it outside say through a window. You would need to seal the window up except where the exhaust pipe goes out with some thick plastic sheeting. The idea is to lower the air pressure in the room compared to the rest of the building. That way fresh air "leaks" into the room (you need to make sure the room is not too air tight) and the dusty air in the room is vented outside. This stops the dust from escaping the room in question and making a mess of the rest of the house.