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Building a Darkroom: Structural Design
- Draw the walls on your floor plan, they'll be 4 1/2" thick, each, and need to overlap in the corners, this may mess up your measurements for the dimensions of the room, so be sure to double check the actual area, and be precise.
- Mark the door opening. Before you decide how big to make the opening, go down to the lumber yard, Home Depot, Home Base, Oleys, or wherever you intend to buy your pre-hung door. You want a pre-hung door, unless you are a carpenter, because they are about 1,000 times easier to install, and only cost about $10 more than the raw materials. The door will have instructions that say how wide to make the opening.
- Mark on the floor plan walls where you are going to put the plumbing, electrical outlets, ventilation fan, air conditioner, lights, safe lights, etc.
- I chose to put the electrical all on one wall, to use less cable, and simplify the process.
- I used an overhead cord attached to a pull type light socket for switching room lights and safe lights on and off. I've been extremely happy with that arrangement and I suggest you do the same. You don't have to put the lights in those sockets, get a socket adapter and plug the cord for the light fixture into that adapter.
- Don't skimp on ventilation. You want to cycle the air in the room 10 times per hour, at least. The formula for this is room length x width x height / 6. For example, a 4' by 6' by 8' tall room requires a fan that produces 4x6x8/6 or 32 cubic feet per minute (cfm), round up to the next fastest fan.
- If you have an air-conditioner (it makes it easy to maintain temperatures in the summers) you can use it to force semi-filtered air into the room, in addition to a ventilation fan to pull air out.
- Where you put these fans depends on many different things. You could put the input on one side of the room, and output on the other, or the air-conditioner at the top of the wall, and the fan at the bottom (cold air descends). I don't think it really matters, if you have the right amount of air flow, you will cycle the air enough.
- I like to put my safelight facing up at the ceiling (I paint the inside of the room white), but if you do, be careful how powerful a bulb you use, I melted the plastic holder on one. By putting it so it points up, and reflects off of the ceiling, the room seems to light up better.
- Take into account where you will be getting your power from.
- Don't forget that at the enlarger you'll want extra outlets for timers, etc. If you're real ambitious, try to get the enlarger circuit separated from the rest of the room (I haven't had that much ambition).
Visitor Comments
The comments stated below are not necessarily the opinions of Andy Hughes or DarkroomSourceI'm not sure how this ventilation thing works. I'm looking at different places where I could set up a dark room, and some don't have ventilation. I need to know how to set up some kind of ventilation system in a cost-effective way. Thanks!Contributed by on 2002-05-28 00:00:00
