Homeless in Vancouver: Geek cool? Beating the heat with a gas duster

Here’s a silly, geeky way to cool off on a hot day: use a compressed gas duster—one of the many brands of canned compressed gas you normally use to blow the dust out of your computer’s keyboard.

Yesterday I came across two cans of “Dust Off”-brand gas duster in a Fairview dumpster freshly garnished with the bagged results of a large apartment cleanup.

When you spray the gas duster, the can gets very cold.

So cold that you could probably use the cans as ice cubes, if your drink was sufficiently large and you thought the cans were clean enough.

It cooled me off and I was dust-free!

On a hot day—like yesterday was—spraying off some gas and then pressing the ice-cold can against your arm or neck is very soothing. This would obviously also work with lots of other aerosol spray cans but I don’t know that every other kind would get quite as cold as a gas duster .

You have to wait a bit between sprays for the can to warm back up and restore internal pressure but you can get lots and lots of sprays out of one can.

And since the genius of science lopped the cloro off the fluorocarbon, aerosol sprays are safe as houses for the environment, right?

These compressed gas dusters used to be commonly refereed to as “compressed air” dusters but have, I believe, never been filled with breathable compressed air.

Along with the cans of gas duster I found useful LED lights, cables, a USB device to route cable TV into a PC laptop, and a lot of mostly full cleaning stuff: tile cleaner, bleach, and so on.

I didn’t Dumpster dive so much as just cherry-pick the topmost strata. And I did also use the gas duster to clean the dust out of my keyboard.