Ceiling Mounted Exhaust Snorkels for a University Chemistry Lab | Northern Illinois University

The Solution

Labs USA supplied twelve ceiling mounted exhaust snorkels for the lab, each one a three inch diameter, forty three inch articulated extraction arm with a matching ceiling bracket kit and an aluminum, white powder coated capture hood. Mounting the arms from the ceiling instead of the bench or the wall was the key decision on this project. It keeps the bench tops completely clear, keeps the floor clear for student traffic, and lets each arm swing over the exact spot where a reaction is running.

Each arm holds its position where the student leaves it. That matters more than it sounds. An arm that drifts or sags gets ignored, and an ignored arm captures nothing. The white powder coated hoods were chosen so the arms read as part of the room rather than as industrial equipment hanging over a classroom, and so any residue or damage is easy to see during a routine walk through.

Source capture works on a simple rule: the hood has to sit close to where the vapor is made. Capture velocity falls off very quickly with distance, so an arm parked a foot away from a beaker does far more than the same arm parked three feet away. An articulated arm lets the student close that gap in a second, then swing the hood out of the way when the bench needs to be cleared.

Twelve arms let the department cover multiple bench stations at once, so a full class section can run the same procedure at the same time. The order also included the ceiling bracket kits needed to tie each arm into the structure above, which kept the installing contractor from having to source mounting hardware separately.

Advantage

A teaching lab can be ventilated three ways: more fume hoods, a general exhaust system that moves the whole room’s air, or ceiling mounted exhaust snorkels at each station. Each has a place, and on this project the arms won for practical reasons.

Adding fume hoods means construction: floor space, casework changes, ductwork, and a room that is out of service while the work happens. Turning up general room exhaust moves a large volume of conditioned air to dilute a small volume of vapor, which costs money every hour the building runs and still leaves the student breathing the vapor before it dilutes. A source capture arm pulls the contaminant at the point it is generated, using a fraction of the airflow, and it can be added to an existing room without touching the casework.

There is also a teaching argument. When a student has to position the hood before starting a step, the habit of thinking about ventilation becomes part of the procedure rather than something the building does invisibly. That habit carries into the next lab they work in.

Labs USA specifies exhaust snorkels alongside fume hoods and laboratory casework for university teaching labs, so the recommendation is based on what the room actually needs rather than on the one product a supplier happens to carry.

Return on Investment

The measurable savings on a project like this come from air volume. A source capture arm pulls a small, targeted airflow. A fume hood or an increase in general room exhaust moves a much larger volume of tempered air out of a building that has already paid to heat or cool it, every hour the system runs. In an Illinois climate with real winters and humid summers, that conditioning cost is not a rounding error over the life of a lab.

The second saving is the project cost that never happened. Twelve capture points were added to a working lab without new casework, without relocating benches, and without taking the room out of service for a construction schedule. For a university that has to fit lab work into semester breaks, avoiding that downtime is worth as much as the equipment line item.

The third is service life. Articulated arms are mechanical, and the parts that wear are the hood, the joints, and the damper. Those are replaceable individually, which means the department maintains the system a piece at a time instead of budgeting for a full replacement.

Serving Labs Across DeKalb and Northern Illinois

Northern Illinois University’s campus sits in DeKalb, Illinois, about an hour west of Chicago. Labs USA supplies laboratory ventilation and furniture to schools, community colleges, and testing labs across northern Illinois, including Sycamore, Rockford, Aurora, Naperville, Elgin, and the western Chicago suburbs, and works nationwide on projects like this one.

The pattern repeats across the region. A department has a lab built for a smaller class than the one it now teaches, and the ventilation is the part that did not scale. Adding source capture at each station is usually the fastest way to close that gap, because it works inside the room that already exists.