I’m changing up my dust collection and figured I’d check my flows while I’m at it to see if my changes make measurable differences. I went to buy one of the vane anemometers on Amazon and the geek in me convinced me to look for something that may be semi-accurate.
I see measurements with these posted a lot but I also know it’s very inaccurate.
I know there’s not much that can be trusted on Amazon with instrumentation. But some things are both cheap and reasonably accurate.
The pitot tube devices seem like they should work and one could map a duct to get a decent average (given a straight run long enough for fully developed flow). I’ve never tried any of the Amazon digital manometers. One could check it with a homemade water nanometer. Has anyone used these?
I see you can get some hot wire anemometers. Those seem like they’d have some chance of being reasonable. But would likely need checking against the above mentioned pitot setup or such.
I’m hoping to get some decent advice to learn if it is worth getting something cheap from Amazon for my shop use without going through the cost and effort of trial and error.
In the end the vane anemometer probably would give a reasonable comparison of the effect of the changes. But I’d like to have a somewhat trustworthy flow measurement just because of that geek side of me.