My experience tells me ANY resistance added to the circuit is going to impact the sensitivity of the machine to respond.-SWS wrote:Restrictive as in a bona fine impedance concern? Based on Roberto's input above I don't think so.snoredog wrote: More specifically the safety grate which places a restrictive obsticle in circuit of flow."
The grating may have significant transient surface-deflective issues. Right about now I'm very seriously doubting that. Like you, Snoredog, I don't have one of these diffusers in my posession to make accurate physical assessments. Roberto's physical assessment sounds pretty fair to me right about now.
No ifs ans or butts about it. Granted my experience comes from greater velocity pressures than what we are dealing with here as the smallest ID I ever tested was 4" diameter with up to 10" wc.
But the law of physics remains the same only scaled down. The biggest problem will be finding instruments sensitive enough to test it. Oh yeah, many blowers have a safety grate installed right at the blower inlet, we would cut those out as they were found way too restrictive.
Hey, I'm no expert, but I've done a bit of testing on my own, here's some I did in my garage and speak from experience not reading it in some book somewhere.
Here's my bench test platform, you won't have any apnea's with this one. What you see taped to the black pipe near the inlet to the blower (inside the pipe) is a precisely calibrated pitot tube made by Dwyer instruments specifically for this purpose.
The blue funnel on the end is a control valve, it opens up air flow to a specific static pressure for determining flow. The airflow passes by the facing pitot tube where velocity pressure can be measured. This pitot tube is very similar to those used on airplanes to measure velocity air speed. With it I can test from zero flow to maximum flow rate in 1" increments by simpy dialing it in, flipping the valve on the magnehelic and taking the reading.
