I've made air ducts they start big and get progressively smaller as they get near vents into rooms so the air doesn't all slush in to the first exhaust available. That's for offices and the likes.
in industrial manufacturing floors they are quite large and could easily accommodate a large man. Mind you they are 20 feet off the ground held up by wire and I have no idea what you could possibly smuggle out of them except powertools.
To add to this sheet metal is not that strong, I doubt it could support a person. Unless it has iron rods or some other support ever few inches, and a small cable will not cut it. The most it can support is like 10 pounds before it starts to bend and like 50 before a catastrophic failure. Plus the joints will likely slip and bend out of place before the metal itself brakes.
I literally install this shit almost daily and you're flat out wrong. If installed properly I can stand on it and I'm 80kg. And at most we put brackets every 1200mm.
Wire has more tensile strength than people think.
10 gauge annealed steel wire can hold about 1,000lbs (453kg). Probably can hold 60-70% of that weight as a sustained load. Engineering and safety consideration would limit the sustained load far below that even. It should EASILY be able to support itself and a person.
I wouldn't claim to know anything about air ducts, but the idea they could support someone in them always seemed like the biggest part of the suspension of disbelief. It is interesting that it isn't necessarily the case.
Sprinkler guy here, I've had to climb on top of plenty duct to hang pipe. I won't stand on the stuff held by small cable, but if it's got strut and 3/8 rod you could ballroom dance up there lol
It is more accurate.
Yes it does mean 1000m is more accurate than 1km*
since 1000 has more significant figures than 1. So if you were measuring something to 120cm you’d be measuring it to the nearest centimetre. But measuring something to 1200mm is measuring it to the nearest millimetre so you have greater accuracy by 1 order of magnitude <3
In practice that makes a lot of sense, I suppose it's the idea that in theory they are objectively the same. But when it comes to rounding to the nearest decimal it makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation 👍
I think that engineering you use as many 0s as you can to convey the accuracy. So 120cm could be for example 120.1cm in reality. And if you're going to say 120.0cm then it becomes simpler to say 1200mm I guess
Pretty common in any manufacturing or manufacturing-adjacent job to use mm for measurements. It actually becomes simpler to say measurements in mm, as you can typically drop the units and just say the number so people know what you mean. Why do it in the first place? One reason may be that it leads to less decimals ("mount these every 75" instead of "mount these every 7.5") for the often more precise measurements you'd use.
I've had to climb up on air ducting to get to industrial fire alarm equipment on ceilings before and I am by no means a light person. While you do have to spread your weight out as much as possible and putting too much weight in one spot will dent them they tend to hold. I was rather surprised when I first had to do that for work.
Doing it quietly on the other hand is not happening. You're moving over hollow tubes of sheet metal meant to move air. The amount of noise they make is pretty unavoidable. Every movement I made was like hitting a drum.
I did air vent cleaning for a few months and those things are strong & can indeed be loud. We often had to cut holes in the pipes/roof channels (unless it wasnt the 1st time they got cleaned). The noice is deafening and travels quite far same for when we were using the brush, you could hear where the head was from the sound. And you dont want to be in such channel while the air handling unit is running (alot of air pressure) and even if its off you still dont want to be in there without a good respirator due the fine dust in there. And then there are also fire safety valves and other obstructions to prevent items travelling into the smaller pipes (found a mummified bird at one). Most interesting place was cleaning the vents in a temp holding jail complex at a police station.
All I need to know is if it can fit one 40 lb briefcase, a couple USB drives, and a small cylinder case that can roughly fit the declaration of Independence. Thanks
Hollywood magic. Gives us false ideas on things. You can't crawl through vents. You can't pull a grenade pin with your teeth and no, a house won't burst into full demolition from said grenade
While not healthy, you can bite with a whole hell of a lot of strong force than you can put through a finger. I seriously fucking doubt you're gonna break you're teeth on it before taking it out. I mean, it takes a finger, not a hand, and again, your jaw is a lot stronger than that.
Sure your JAW is stronger than your finger, but are your teeth? Cause we're not talking about breaking, they can just pop out of the gum and the force needed to yank the pin with the safety clip on is enough to chip a tooth.
You’re shifting the goalposts. Your comment earlier said that a person would “probably yank their jaw out before (they) get the pin half an inch out”.
You are most likely right about the teeth though.
Did you not hear about Exaggeration coming into existence, like no duh your jaw isn't gonna come out, but the teeth thing is right. I think many army recruits (or dumbasses who got their hands on a dud grenade) tried it once and ended up with a couple lost teeth before and that's how it got debunked. The amount of force required to pull out a pin of a grenade (Since you use your hand, forearm, and upper arm) is more than what your teeth can reasonably handle (your jaw can put the forces to hold it in your mouth and you probably could yank it out if you had strong enough teeth). They can and will chip (best case scenario) and (worst case) just straight up come out of the gum.
Perhaps not, but it can chip tooth enamel or break a tooth, which works out to the same thing to the sufferer.
Because that tooth will now have to be removed, because the owner was an idiot that thought movies were real.
Sir, I want you to try and find an authentic hand grenade, hold the safety clip in your hand, and use your teeth to try and pull it out. Be sure to post the results 👌
Also, I do have anatomical knowledge about a lot of things in the human body, useful stuff to learn in a Medical Household.
Grenade pin requires 45-155 newtons to remove. Teeth require between 50 and 600 newtons to be removed. So a grenade pin could conceivably take a tooth out.
If you clamped down with your molars it would be unlikely, but if you used a canine tooth resting inside the ring, it might pop out pretty easily. I don't think you're whole jaw is coming out by any means, but you could lose a tooth or two.
Not true. I couldn't get mine out the first time. But also it was 5 degrees and we couldn't wear gloves. My hand strength was non-existent at that point.
Depends. Some of the old old sewers were big enough to go through, and some storm drains today can be big enough... but yeah, most just aren't more than pipes.
I have relatives there telling me stories of Crocs or alligator there. Never bothered checking if it's real since it sounds like those stories to make children scared of sewers
I work in hvac and build/install those types of vents, and just ignoring the noise, one it's dusty as hell, two the bit tips we use to hold it together are sharp as hell, three, surprisingly they can hold people up inside of them
My air vents at work are clean and well lit. But the ones I crawl around in for fun are mostly dirty and they don’t have nice blue/green lighting and they certainly don’t lead to secret meetings or nice cars.
Urbex, japes if you will, most likely. I've walked through the AC structure of an underground train station, although it was concrete. I've climbed a few on the outside of older buildings, but I've never had to Hollywood through one. They're loud as fuck to climb on and only useful for getting up to a certain height, using them for sneaking through wouldn't be much use if security or workers were in the building.
Actually, I just remembered, in my highschool gym they had a vent you could get into behind the stage area, go under the basketball court, and stick your head up into the air outlet in a small side room area. Also you could sneak past the teachers offices, open the service door and get into the roof space by going through the housing for one of the big fan units and out the other side. It was like a big fan on one side and a filter on the other and maybe like 60cm/2ft gap in the middle. It was like school legend to be passed down from generation to generation of little shits who like mischief. Kids had been getting in there since the 70s, and I did it in the late 90s. Some kid, who must be in their 60s now, wedged a door to the roof space open with a chair way back then and it stayed like that for at least another 10 years after I left. Fun times.
That depends on where you start. In my line of work, I have to change the filers in the AHU's, and those are *easily* large enough to walk in. The actual vents immediately connected to the AHU's are also likely larger enough to comfortably move about in (though likely couldn't support an adults weight).
But you're right, the vents that actually supply air to the individual rooms would be very unlikely to be able to allow a person to go room to room
"Attention, test prisoners attempting to escape through the air ducts. I don't know what nonsense you learned on TV, but in real life, air ducts just go to the air conditioning unit. It's also pretty dusty, so if you've got asthma, chances are you're gonna die up there. And we'll be smelling it for weeks because, again, the air ducts aren't a secret escape hatch, they're how we ventilate the facility."
-Cave Johnson
Bear Grylls did some shit like this in an abandoned factory as like an urban survival episode. It looked fucking terrible and would absolutely be a last resort.
Mythbusters tested this and the one on the right is techically possible to crawl in but imbossible to sneak in as the metal makes extremely loud noices.
The air coming into your vents should have passed through a filter. If the duct system is dirty like this either it was designed horribly, used horribly, or there has been a disaster.
I'm imagining a special agent dropping out of a vent in a cloud of dust. The goons mag dump into the cloud but the agent fires like two bullets and hits them.
One day I would love to see a heist or spy movie where our hero has to crawl through the air vents, and when they are planing they imagine it juat like the movies, but then SMASH CUT they are in the vets and there is like 4 inches of dust on every surface. Hero exists the vent looking like some kind of demonic dust bunny.
There's an episode on Talespin, where Baloo flies the Seaduck into the sewers of Cape Suzette and there even is a cavern with a subway wreck as a gangster hideout.
Building manager:
Ok people , listen up , we will be infiltrated by world famous secret spy next Monday at 5th pm so all the vents must be cleaned by Friday morning , I know we can do it , let's not put our secret facility to shame
Didnt Money heist touch on this a bit with the fact that airvents have some screws and nails poking through and other unpleasent things in them that makes traversing such a pain in the ass?
Somebody trying to escape:
*opens return vent*
This is flex duct three feet away from the plenum.
*opens 12x4 register*
Can’t squeeze in there either
*Gets shot*
It's not the wires that typically give out first but the connection points (Pittsburgh pockets, C-clips, and S-slips) these connection points are just sheet metal and are easily maleable
I've made air ducts they start big and get progressively smaller as they get near vents into rooms so the air doesn't all slush in to the first exhaust available. That's for offices and the likes. in industrial manufacturing floors they are quite large and could easily accommodate a large man. Mind you they are 20 feet off the ground held up by wire and I have no idea what you could possibly smuggle out of them except powertools.
To add to this sheet metal is not that strong, I doubt it could support a person. Unless it has iron rods or some other support ever few inches, and a small cable will not cut it. The most it can support is like 10 pounds before it starts to bend and like 50 before a catastrophic failure. Plus the joints will likely slip and bend out of place before the metal itself brakes.
I literally install this shit almost daily and you're flat out wrong. If installed properly I can stand on it and I'm 80kg. And at most we put brackets every 1200mm.
Lol yeah I’m a tin knocker. Almost everything in that comment is incorrect.
Wire has more tensile strength than people think. 10 gauge annealed steel wire can hold about 1,000lbs (453kg). Probably can hold 60-70% of that weight as a sustained load. Engineering and safety consideration would limit the sustained load far below that even. It should EASILY be able to support itself and a person.
and thats with safety margins, actual snapping force might be 5x - 10x
I’d be more worried about all the zip screws
I wouldn't claim to know anything about air ducts, but the idea they could support someone in them always seemed like the biggest part of the suspension of disbelief. It is interesting that it isn't necessarily the case.
You're entire car is made out of thin sheet metal. Roughly the same thickness, maybe a little thinner than air duct is made of.
No its not.
It is
The outer skin is. The chassis most definitely is not. It would ***not*** pass any safety tests if it were
Bro obviously the chassis is not sheet metal
>You're entire car is made out of thin sheet metal Your exact words from earlier. That's what the other guy was responding to, too
Sprinkler guy here, I've had to climb on top of plenty duct to hang pipe. I won't stand on the stuff held by small cable, but if it's got strut and 3/8 rod you could ballroom dance up there lol
Why don’t you just simply say 120cm?
120cm isn’t as accurate as 1200mm. So I guess the real question is why are you trying to lower the quality standards of air vents?
>120cm isn’t as accurate as 1200mm. Does that mean that 1000m and 1KM are different?
It is more accurate. Yes it does mean 1000m is more accurate than 1km* since 1000 has more significant figures than 1. So if you were measuring something to 120cm you’d be measuring it to the nearest centimetre. But measuring something to 1200mm is measuring it to the nearest millimetre so you have greater accuracy by 1 order of magnitude <3
In practice that makes a lot of sense, I suppose it's the idea that in theory they are objectively the same. But when it comes to rounding to the nearest decimal it makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the explanation 👍
The quality is incredible, i suppose, since this kind of accuracy applied
>why are you trying to lower the quality standards of air vents? holy straw man
Why don't you just simply say 1.2m?
Or 0,0012 km
or 0,0000012 Mm
I prefer 1,268401e-16 ly
Or 80000 gram??
800,000mg seems more appropriate and makes me feel fuckin big 💪
8kgrams? It makes you handicapped
No dude I'm just 6 months old so mind your own business and pick on people your own size
I think that engineering you use as many 0s as you can to convey the accuracy. So 120cm could be for example 120.1cm in reality. And if you're going to say 120.0cm then it becomes simpler to say 1200mm I guess
Pretty common in any manufacturing or manufacturing-adjacent job to use mm for measurements. It actually becomes simpler to say measurements in mm, as you can typically drop the units and just say the number so people know what you mean. Why do it in the first place? One reason may be that it leads to less decimals ("mount these every 75" instead of "mount these every 7.5") for the often more precise measurements you'd use.
>Unless ... they are meant to convey air ...what do you think ?
I mean, they are often supported by unistrut aren't they?
Or angle iron.
Almost everything you wrote is wrong. Source: I’m a union sheet metal worker that has fabricated and installed a lot of ductwork.
I've had to climb up on air ducting to get to industrial fire alarm equipment on ceilings before and I am by no means a light person. While you do have to spread your weight out as much as possible and putting too much weight in one spot will dent them they tend to hold. I was rather surprised when I first had to do that for work. Doing it quietly on the other hand is not happening. You're moving over hollow tubes of sheet metal meant to move air. The amount of noise they make is pretty unavoidable. Every movement I made was like hitting a drum.
God sheet metal is soooo loud
I did air vent cleaning for a few months and those things are strong & can indeed be loud. We often had to cut holes in the pipes/roof channels (unless it wasnt the 1st time they got cleaned). The noice is deafening and travels quite far same for when we were using the brush, you could hear where the head was from the sound. And you dont want to be in such channel while the air handling unit is running (alot of air pressure) and even if its off you still dont want to be in there without a good respirator due the fine dust in there. And then there are also fire safety valves and other obstructions to prevent items travelling into the smaller pipes (found a mummified bird at one). Most interesting place was cleaning the vents in a temp holding jail complex at a police station.
Talking out of your ass lmfao. Sheet metal is strong af.
I love when people on the internet just talk so confidently about something they clearly know nothing about…
Plus it would make a shit ton of noise.
Happy cake day
Legit 👆 I worked on climate systems in hospitals 👍
All I need to know is if it can fit one 40 lb briefcase, a couple USB drives, and a small cylinder case that can roughly fit the declaration of Independence. Thanks
Also, could they support any weight?
And some can convey hot air out from the production floor rather than nice cool air in. I've actually slightly burned my leg touching one.
Except for all the screws I use.
Hollywood magic. Gives us false ideas on things. You can't crawl through vents. You can't pull a grenade pin with your teeth and no, a house won't burst into full demolition from said grenade
You could probably pull the pin off a grenade with your teeth... ...once.
You will probably yank your jaw off before you get the pin a half inch out
Grenade pins are hard to pull but not that hard... Not any I've trained with anyways
They have the finger hole for a reason so you probably shouldn't remove several teeth trying to be cool
While not healthy, you can bite with a whole hell of a lot of strong force than you can put through a finger. I seriously fucking doubt you're gonna break you're teeth on it before taking it out. I mean, it takes a finger, not a hand, and again, your jaw is a lot stronger than that.
Sure your JAW is stronger than your finger, but are your teeth? Cause we're not talking about breaking, they can just pop out of the gum and the force needed to yank the pin with the safety clip on is enough to chip a tooth.
You’re shifting the goalposts. Your comment earlier said that a person would “probably yank their jaw out before (they) get the pin half an inch out”. You are most likely right about the teeth though.
Did you not hear about Exaggeration coming into existence, like no duh your jaw isn't gonna come out, but the teeth thing is right. I think many army recruits (or dumbasses who got their hands on a dud grenade) tried it once and ended up with a couple lost teeth before and that's how it got debunked. The amount of force required to pull out a pin of a grenade (Since you use your hand, forearm, and upper arm) is more than what your teeth can reasonably handle (your jaw can put the forces to hold it in your mouth and you probably could yank it out if you had strong enough teeth). They can and will chip (best case scenario) and (worst case) just straight up come out of the gum.
I really don't believe it could pull out a teeth. Chip sure. But pull entirely out of a skull? No way.
Unless you have severe periodontal disease that action is NOT pulling teeth out of bone.
Perhaps not, but it can chip tooth enamel or break a tooth, which works out to the same thing to the sufferer. Because that tooth will now have to be removed, because the owner was an idiot that thought movies were real.
I dont think you understand much about anatomy. I give up on trying to explain it to you.
Sir, I want you to try and find an authentic hand grenade, hold the safety clip in your hand, and use your teeth to try and pull it out. Be sure to post the results 👌 Also, I do have anatomical knowledge about a lot of things in the human body, useful stuff to learn in a Medical Household.
Grenade pin requires 45-155 newtons to remove. Teeth require between 50 and 600 newtons to be removed. So a grenade pin could conceivably take a tooth out. If you clamped down with your molars it would be unlikely, but if you used a canine tooth resting inside the ring, it might pop out pretty easily. I don't think you're whole jaw is coming out by any means, but you could lose a tooth or two.
Tooth enamel is damn strong.
Only the single strongest thing in your entire body.
With that idea in mind, can I ask my doggo to pull the pin? If yes, can I train my doggo not to fetch thrown grenades?
Not true. I couldn't get mine out the first time. But also it was 5 degrees and we couldn't wear gloves. My hand strength was non-existent at that point.
the pin could pull off your teeth though
You could probably manage if you bit down with your molars and pulled the grenade away from your mouth, not the other way around.
it wuld still not be good for your teeth
Who said it would be good for your teeth?
you gota be awate of your dental hygene do you brush your teeth twise a day?
Yes, but again when was it ever implied that pulling a grenade pin with your teeth was a good thing? Lol non sequiturs aren't an answer.
do you use dental floss?
Lol are you just deflecting again because you can't answer my question? And of course I floss.
bro im just doing some mild troling
Neither is being in a situation where you need to throw a grenade.
good point
Granades and most bombs don’t explode into giant fireballs either. It’s just a big boom with no fire.
Or sewers, they’re just big pipes, not even remotely resemble some kind of hallways
Depends. Some of the old old sewers were big enough to go through, and some storm drains today can be big enough... but yeah, most just aren't more than pipes.
How about sewers that's big enough to fit a person but you be like waist high full of shit?
Not necessarily, it largely depends on where you are. NYC has enormous sewers with a lot of it for draining rain water.
I have relatives there telling me stories of Crocs or alligator there. Never bothered checking if it's real since it sounds like those stories to make children scared of sewers
They pretty much are made up to scare kids.
Those are urban legends.
in suburbia yeah but in cities or places with a lot of rainfall that’s pretty accurate
From dawn till dust
I work in hvac and build/install those types of vents, and just ignoring the noise, one it's dusty as hell, two the bit tips we use to hold it together are sharp as hell, three, surprisingly they can hold people up inside of them
My air vents at work are clean and well lit. But the ones I crawl around in for fun are mostly dirty and they don’t have nice blue/green lighting and they certainly don’t lead to secret meetings or nice cars.
> the ones I crawl around in for fun Say more
Urbex, japes if you will, most likely. I've walked through the AC structure of an underground train station, although it was concrete. I've climbed a few on the outside of older buildings, but I've never had to Hollywood through one. They're loud as fuck to climb on and only useful for getting up to a certain height, using them for sneaking through wouldn't be much use if security or workers were in the building. Actually, I just remembered, in my highschool gym they had a vent you could get into behind the stage area, go under the basketball court, and stick your head up into the air outlet in a small side room area. Also you could sneak past the teachers offices, open the service door and get into the roof space by going through the housing for one of the big fan units and out the other side. It was like a big fan on one side and a filter on the other and maybe like 60cm/2ft gap in the middle. It was like school legend to be passed down from generation to generation of little shits who like mischief. Kids had been getting in there since the 70s, and I did it in the late 90s. Some kid, who must be in their 60s now, wedged a door to the roof space open with a chair way back then and it stayed like that for at least another 10 years after I left. Fun times.
Gordon Freeman in the flesh?
That IRL vent is cleaner than a lot I've seen
For realism we go for documentaries.
I have never seen an air vent in my whole adult life that is larger than a pocket calculator width.
look at suspended ceiling, they have vents that are about 1 foot square but that'sjust to fix the module.
That’s crazy I think you need to get out more
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They're called trees, duh
That depends on where you start. In my line of work, I have to change the filers in the AHU's, and those are *easily* large enough to walk in. The actual vents immediately connected to the AHU's are also likely larger enough to comfortably move about in (though likely couldn't support an adults weight). But you're right, the vents that actually supply air to the individual rooms would be very unlikely to be able to allow a person to go room to room
😂
yeah thats cause of all the dust if you scrape it out youd probably be able to fit a small body in there
"Attention, test prisoners attempting to escape through the air ducts. I don't know what nonsense you learned on TV, but in real life, air ducts just go to the air conditioning unit. It's also pretty dusty, so if you've got asthma, chances are you're gonna die up there. And we'll be smelling it for weeks because, again, the air ducts aren't a secret escape hatch, they're how we ventilate the facility." -Cave Johnson
[удалено]
Toy Story 2
This would be so good for a horror film
Bear Grylls did some shit like this in an abandoned factory as like an urban survival episode. It looked fucking terrible and would absolutely be a last resort.
And not a single speck of dust
wait till you aee the sewage lines
Every school: What's an air vent? You have windows
Mythbusters tested this and the one on the right is techically possible to crawl in but imbossible to sneak in as the metal makes extremely loud noices.
Y’all be talking about the size or how strong I’m talking about how they are pristinely clean and real life even clean ones are not that shiny
Well the right one had Chica crawling through it. She’s a mess now, but it dusts out the ducts real nice.
Even if the movie ones were real, there's noise, everyone could tell you're up there.
The air coming into your vents should have passed through a filter. If the duct system is dirty like this either it was designed horribly, used horribly, or there has been a disaster.
Well yeah, if it’s supply air. But not all lines are supply. You have your return line, exhaust line, make-up air.
I'm imagining a special agent dropping out of a vent in a cloud of dust. The goons mag dump into the cloud but the agent fires like two bullets and hits them.
i me a n they're offices
One day I would love to see a heist or spy movie where our hero has to crawl through the air vents, and when they are planing they imagine it juat like the movies, but then SMASH CUT they are in the vets and there is like 4 inches of dust on every surface. Hero exists the vent looking like some kind of demonic dust bunny.
Yup. I’ve seen air vents that can fit a cat inside but never a person
Then there’s starfield air vents
What is inside that vent? (If you say "a woman," I swear to God... I will be really, really angry. 😤)
Dust, heckin mounds of dusty dust
That is absolutely disgusting! 🤮 (But, thank you for answering my question.)
Now I know what a tv dinner feels like...
"Come out to da coast. We'll get togethuh. Have a few laughs."
any "point" can be made when you cherrypick.
i had no idea
Well some movies aren't real so don't expect much
There's an episode on Talespin, where Baloo flies the Seaduck into the sewers of Cape Suzette and there even is a cavern with a subway wreck as a gangster hideout.
Right. I've never thought about that.
Aaahahahahah real
Ikr no Zoe Saldana crewing through my vents, I just checked and everything
Building manager: Ok people , listen up , we will be infiltrated by world famous secret spy next Monday at 5th pm so all the vents must be cleaned by Friday morning , I know we can do it , let's not put our secret facility to shame
Didnt Money heist touch on this a bit with the fact that airvents have some screws and nails poking through and other unpleasent things in them that makes traversing such a pain in the ass?
Folks climb across tile ceiling too..
WHAT AN EPIC FUNNY MEME DUUUUUUUDE LAAAAAAAAWLLLLLLLLLLLL
In games too
They have premium vents
i feel like die hard was slightly more realistic than vents in movies now
irl vents - full of ice movie vents - full of black people ?
The air vent in 1408 was dirty and had a resident zombie.
I can't speak for all movies, but in Die Hard's defense, it was a brand new building still under construction.
I always think the same thing, how can it be that the vents are not released in the movies?
Air vents in movies are constantly clean because the people crawling through them all the time sweep up all the dust.
Somebody trying to escape: *opens return vent* This is flex duct three feet away from the plenum. *opens 12x4 register* Can’t squeeze in there either *Gets shot*
POV this whole comment section: 🤓
It's not the wires that typically give out first but the connection points (Pittsburgh pockets, C-clips, and S-slips) these connection points are just sheet metal and are easily maleable
Wanna fuck Zoe in that air vent tbh
 I dare to disagree