SRHuston Dot Net

I’m going, I’m going
Where the water tastes like wine
I’m going where the water tastes like wine
We can jump in the water
Stay drunk all the time

–Canned Heat, “Going Up The Country”

I don’t remember the last time I bought canned air dusters, or canned air (not to be confused with Perri-Air), but I do remember when I took out the last unused one it felt half empty. And that one just about ran out, so I needed to get more. I don’t use it often, obviously, but part of that was self-fulfilling – if I use it up, I don’t have any, so I tend to not use it unless I don’t have other options. I do have an electronics safe vacuum as well, which is wonderful, but sometimes you just need to blast the crap out of somewhere.

So I went on a search to see if there was a good alternative yet; years ago I bought this small can with a valve on the bottom and a bundled air compressor that was obnoxiously noisy, with the promise I could just refill it when I needed to. In practice, it worked for a few seconds and quickly lost useful pressure, and then you had to endure the noise of refilling it. That was, in my mind, not a viable option.

I then found that quite a few companies make electric (really battery) powered handheld devices for this purpose, and after enduring a few videos on the topic (and deleting them from my history, because otherwise every freaking video is a review of another one of these things), I found one from Wolfbox which had the highest recommendations from various places, good specs, and a decent price. But before buying it, I found there’s a newer version, the MF200, which is about the same price when I placed the order but has the ability to get additional batteries for a longer run time and swap them around. While I don’t anticipate needing that functionality, it does sound interesting, plus the unit was a little beefier than the original (and can set flat on its base, so I kinda preferred the ergonomics too). Add to cart, place order, research complete!

Last night I tested it, and from across the room I just gave it a quick burst and about two seconds later the youngest reeled back in his chair from the blast of air he got hit with. Definitely has the power that a can of air would have, and my hand doesn’t start to freeze when using it either which makes it more useful since I don’t have to stop and wait for the can to warm up and the liquid inside to boil off and pressurize things again. This afternoon when he finished vacuuming and took the canister out to dump it, I grabbed the filter from under the canister and took it to the porch. Maybe a minute later I had a perfectly clean filter to put back in.

Now I’m looking forward to using it more, because there’s a lot of times I would have used a can of air to clean things off but thought “no, if I do that, I’ll run out of it and not have it for the things that really need it.” Just have to remember that some times it would be better to use the vacuum and trap the dust…