Below are some tips to keep in mind when building a cigar room.
Exhaust Fans
The key factor to look at when selecting an exhaust fan is it’s CFM rating. This tells you how many cubic feet per minute of air the fan can move. The amount of CFM’s you will need correlates with the overall square footage of your room. For my 8′x12′ cigar room I chose to go with a 1200 CFM fan. To give you a gauge, most bathroom fans are 50-100 CFM, so you will definitely need to choose something stronger than a bathroom fan.
I would strongly suggest a variable speed controller for your exhaust fan. This wall mounted control gives you complete control over how many CFM your fan is exhausting. This allows you to get a fan with a high CFM rating, but not be forced into having it full blast all the time if it’s not necessary.
There are two types of fan mounting types, overhead and in-line. Most bathroom fans are overhead as you may have guessed. For my cigar room my 1200 CFM fan would never have fit overhead though, it’s simply too large and would take up too much clearance. In-line fans can have their ducting overhead like my scenario, but the actual unit is in another location. I chose to run the ducting to a small backroom behind the cigar room where the in-line fan is mounted. A nice bonus to this is easy access to the fan and also a much quieter setup since the fan isn’t directly overhead in the room.
The loudness of exhaust fans are rated in sones. The larger the sone rating the louder the fan. My fan is rated 6.7 sones, but since the fan is mounted outside of the cigar room and the walls are well insulated, the overall decibel level of the fan in the actual cigar room is much quieter than that. You can have the fan at full speed and still have a normal conversation in the room.
Ducting
At the beginning of the project I didn’t give much thought to the importance of the size of the ducting for such things as the exhaust fan and the fresh air intake. I quickly learned their importance though. My 1200 CFM exhaust fan required 8″x12″ ducting. That’s fairly large so I had to accommodate for this in the plans. I have tall ceilings in my basement and this ducting still barely fit, so you can see how the exhaust fan itself would never have been mounted overhead in my scenario. As a point of reference standard HVAC ducting is 6″ round and standard fresh air intake runs are 4″ round ducting.
I ran a completely new fresh air intake into just the cigar room. The main reason is that standard 4″ round fresh air intakes simply weren’t large enough for my application. Remember, you have to be able to replenish as much air as you exhaust. I choose to do 8″ round ducting for the fresh air intake to ensure enough air could be brought into the room.
The question I battled with the longest was what to do about the fact that bringing in large amounts of fresh air in the winter is downright cold. The solution I found is a duct heating system to temper the fresh air. The unit I bought mounted right into the ducting. There is a temperature gauge that tells the unit to turn on when the air is below a certain temperature. When this happens coils heat up in the ducts that warm the incoming air. This unit is perfect in the middle of winter to ensure the incoming fresh air stays at a comfortable temperature.
Most of my ducting was pre-fabricated, but there were some parts I had to have specialty made. The ducting to get over and out to the outside of the house needed to be exact since it was a tight squeeze so that was custom made. The hood for the outside of the house was also custom made. They do make 8″ round and 12″ round exhaust hoods, but the reason neither of those would have worked is that an 8″ hood would have slightly bottle necked my air flow at the exit point (since the rest of the ducting is 8″x12″) and the 12″ hood didn’t fit into the opening I had to work with to get to the outside of the house.
Ventilation
There are essentially two lines of thought for the functionality of a smoke room, either purify the air or exhaust the air. Purifying the air (i.e. a Smoke Eater) is a common approach in scenarios such as bowling alleys and bars. This saves on their heating/cooling bills to be able to purify the smoke without exhausting the air. It works in this situation because of the overall size of the room(s) and the fact that you can get away with reducing smoke versus completely eliminating it. For a home-based cigar room, exhausting the air is a much better route in my opinion. There are a few reasons. First, recycling the same air (even if it’s purifying it 99%) eventually becomes stale and is more noticeable in a smaller room. Second, smoke purification systems are much more expensive and require a lot of maintenance. Third, you’ll never be able to completely 100% purify the air, so why not exhaust it. I can think of more reasons, but the basic jist is for the lower cost you might as well make it fool-proof and get rid of the smoke completely.
I installed electronic duct dampers to control when the HVAC venting is open and when the fresh air intake venting is open. I discuss this further in the Smoke Containment section below. It basically ensures the fresh air intake is open when you are in the room, but stays closed when you’re not so the room stays heated like the rest of your house.
Smoke Containment
I put in a door jam on the floor to make sure the door sealed nice and tight. I would strongly recommend this to ensure smoke doesn’t seep under the door.
I put in a dry-walled ceiling instead of drop ceiling and did all the lighting as wall sconces. The reason on the lighting is that as smoke rises the easiest exit point would have been through the light fixtures. Wall sconces are mounted on the outside of the wall versus the inside which also helps for smoke containment.
Insulating the room is a good idea. Make sure to choose the type of insulation with a vapor barrier. It’s kind of a last line of defense to ensure the smoke never leaves the room under any circumstances.
The number one thing to think about regarding smoke containment is your HVAC venting. You’ll undoubtedly want heating in the room but you can’t have an open register where smoke can back draft into the rest of the house. My solution was electronic duct dampers. In my room there’s a wall switch you can flip when coming into the room that automatically closes the HVAC ducting and opens the fresh air intake ducting. This means when you aren’t in the room it stays heated (HVAC is open, fresh air intake is closed), and when you are in the room (HVAC is closed, fresh air intake is open) there’s no back drafting of smoke and you get a nice supply of fresh air.
