3M 8233 Particulate Respirator N100

Review

Video Transcript

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the place on the internet where we test every mask in the world. That's right. All 6,223 of you, got your back. And interesting today, well not today, probably a long time ago, because these things stack up on my desk and I get to them eventually. I got a letter from somebody with really bad handwriting. I think you're from Washington state, not DC. And you sent me a lot of masks.

I'd read the letter, but it's a letter. It says I wanted you to test a few masks our hospital systems use, see how they stand up. And then it lists the different mask type. So I got a bunch here. I'm going to go through these one at a time, starting out with, I mean this thing's got to be worth a lot. This is a 3M 8233 N100.

That's right. The N stands for an N 95 stands, for non oil and the 95 stands for 95%. So this is supposed to test, pass a hundred percent. The crazy thing about the N100 is it's a much crazier test than what we're going to do here. The seal has got to be absolutely insane on that. And while we've gotten a lot of things on this machine that have been 99.99999, never gotten a hundred so excited to open this up. All right so here's of the bag, it comes sealed very nicely. Open it up. It's got the instructions. Look at that. That is...it's legit right there. All right, well this one has a valve. You may have heard that the CDC says not to use valves because if you're breathing out, it can expel COVID if you happen to have it. Which they now say you can fix by putting a surgical mask over the valve, which would save the rest of the world from your nasty COVID breath.

So I'm going to put this in our machine because with the valve if I put it the wrong way, obviously particulates will just shoot right through. But if I put it the right way, which if I can just remember is up like this. Because the way that this may machine works it's actually pulling air as if you were inhaling. So I'm going to put it this way on the machine and I'm just thinking out loud here, so forgive me. Let's do this, put it on here like this. Looks good. And we'll let it rip. So the 3M N100. Wow, holy cow, I actually don't know the standards for N100, but if you look at this, this is crazy. Look at the airflow resistance 590. I That's like N95 for inhalation is 250 pascals and this is showing at 566. That's really hard to breathe through, almost impossible.

And we're doing the N95 tests, were using 0.3 micron averaged particles for NACL mixture. And we're just right at the 99%. Now this is going to take an average over time. So it could be that we get back up to the 100%, but right now we're not quite there. I've actually had N95s, I think, that have hit higher than this. If I'm looking... The highest that we've had, 99.93 is the 3m 9210 aura mask. And this is right about at that. And then right after that, the highest...

Actually Indiana face mask N95 was tied for that. It's pretty good. I don't know with that breathability I wouldn't want to use this, but you wouldn't use this in a hospital anyways. So I'm looking and it's selling for as much as $275. This is insane. Look at this.

Someone's selling this for this mask for $275. Oh, it's for a box of 20. So that's about $13 a piece. Expensive mask, especially since it's not reusable. So this has got a whole strappy system that I'm think I need some sort of a degree to put on correctly. So I'm just going to try this, it smells delightful. That's for sure. And wow this nose wire's insane. That's crazy. It doesn't feel like it's that hard to breathe through. So I'm wondering why it pinged the test that much. That's pretty crazy.

Oh, I know why. Okay. So I don't think that that airflow resistance is accurate because what we are doing is we're testing just for ease. We created this little apparatus here that makes it so that we can really easily add KM95s and N95s on to test them.

And it's only testing that service area. So we have the machine set up to pull air and test a certain amount of surface area. And I think a lot of it was been taken up by this thing. And so that's going to skew the airflow test. I don't think that's fair. But let's take a look at the PFE. I'm actually surprised that it got this low. The efficiency is 99.952. I would think that an N100 would get a lot higher. Who knows, could be the storage. I don't know how old this is, this bag. I don't know.

But at 99.952, I mean are we really... Seems like it's a pretty good mask, I don't know. Seems like it's a [inaudible 00:07:10] to do though. There are plenty of other masks, like the KF94s that I'd probably do. All right. Well, this was probably the least exciting video I've ever done. So if your still watching his, I've said this before, but you should really consider a hobby, maybe gardening. All right. I'll catch you on the next test. Thank you so much.

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