Garage ventilation planning w/ zero experience

Ideas

Good day to whomever shall read this :)

The attached 2-car garage on my rental house has become a bit of a hangout spot and smoking room as of late due to the fact that it’s pretty much always shady inside the garage during times when I spend time there.

I’ve got a B-Air 1/4HP air mover/floor dryer fan, along with 2 simple Lasko pedestal fans, to keep air moving and to keep weed and cigarette smoke pulled out as much as possible with the minimal equipment that I currently have. It’s not efficient at all and has left the garage smelling smoky (which I fix with Zep Smoke Odor Eliminator, but that’s getting pricey at $8/can) and I’d like to design and build a smoke-sucking-solution so I can still chief down in my garage without it smelling too foul.

So, here’s the question: How could I design a simple yet effective and efficient ventilation system that is both cheap and not permanently affixed to the house, and therefore also not hardwired into the existing wiring (a plug-in solution, preferably with either WiFi controller connectivity or at least an inline hardware controller for fan speed, is what I seek.

I’m thinking of some sort of intake vent, perhaps like you’d put in a bathroom ceiling, in the area where I physically smoke; that goes into 6” ducting (I figure that’s likely sufficient volume for the purpose but I’m no engineer so someone chime in if I need 8” or if 6 is actually too big) into an inline fan, short duct to a carbon filter at the output, which I’d like to be storable/removable for when it’s not in use. Nobody has complained about the smoke smells yet, but I figure if I get ahead of it, all the better.

If anyone has any advice or suggestions or can help me build out a plan, I’d appreciate it! This is one of those “fix the problem before it becomes a real problem” things so there’s no hurry in completing this project, but I do want to get it done before Florida summer hits so I can be indoors and not outside sweating to death while enjoying my nicotine and THC.

Thanks, y’all!

Posted Mar 7, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

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