Most of us have been soldering since the early years and have never thought inhaling of solder fumes could be dangerous. Fume extraction system also known as solder fume extractor is an indispensable product particularly when you are in the business of reworking and repair. When you perform leaded soldering using solder flux then you are bound to produce harmful solder fumes. These solder fumes if inhaled for a prolonged duration of time maybe harmful to the health of a technician. These solder fumes are not only harmful to the health, they also reduces the overall productivity of a technician. It just intoxicates them leading to reduced output.

Fresh clean air is absolutely essential for increased productivity. For a service center to be clean of solder fumes you need a reliable fume extraction system that could suck out dangerous particles from the air continuously for a long duration of hours. A fume extraction system should have a motor that could run for hours and hours without heating up. The suction power of a fume extraction system plays an integral part in the selection criteria. The greater the suction power of a fume extraction system, the better.

Google will give you about a million ideas of how to make fume extractors. They are just crude ideas and should be avoided. A professional branded solder fume extraction system should be opted instead of a homemade crap.

Depending on the area and the number of people in your service center, you can streamline your requirement for a professional soldering station. 

What should you look for while selecting a solder fume extractor? 

Users: 
Number of service workstations that you wish to address. If you have more than one technician on the bench then you may opt for two or multi operator type solder fume extraction system. 

Filters: 
Another point that you should look for is the multi-stage filtering capacity. Multi-stage filter can clean the air from minutest of particles. Ideally a 3-stage filter has the following type of filters: 

o  Pre-filter: This filter will remove the visible particles from the air.
o  Middle-filter: This filters coarse size fume particles. 
o  Third-filter: HEPA/Charcoal filter can absorb the finest of particles from the air. 

Noise: 
Technicians do not like to be disturbed by unnecessary sound around them. A fume extraction system with a brushless more and less than 60dBA can be a good option to select. It is nearly soundless. 

Size: 
A compact size fume extractor should be an ideal choice as you would not want to waste too much space on the fume extractor on your workbench. 

Some of the best solder fume extraction system options in India are: 

• 2-Operators powerful fume extraction system FES2-75ESDLC 
  
• 2-Operators powerful fume extraction system FES2-75ESDTC
• 2-Operators powerful fume extraction system FES2-50ESD
• 2-Operators powerful fume extraction system FumePro201-75LC

These solder fume extraction systems are used by various government institutions and aerospace research institutes of India.

This article was intended to give you a broader idea about the best available solder fume extraction systems. Further, it touched the concept that people are using to make their own crude fume extractors, how and why they should be discouraged.