I prefer working at night, but running an air compressor and a vacuum pump at night when you have roommates or neighbors is not the best idea and so I had to find a solution for this problem.

Starting with the vacuum pump:

Because I was concerned about acetone vapor buildup in the vacuum tank and therefore risk of fire or explosion I had to remove the vacuum tank.

Without a tank the pump has to be able to run the entire time without overheating.

To keep the pump as cool as possible I mounted it on an old LED heatsink and also reduced the voltage from 12V to 6V what also reduced the noise level.

To prevent the pump from stalling at such a low voltage caused by too much load/too high vacuum level I added a regulatable muffler to let air in.

To further reduce the noise I put a fitting with cap on the outlet and placed the pump in a plastic box.

This worked very well and was also really quiet.

Now I had a solution for vacuum, but still needed something to create pressurized air without being noisy.

So I bought an old fridge at ebay Kleinanzeigen to get the compressor from it.

After cleaning it I drilled 3 holes in it to let the old oil out and for modifying the case. After the old oil was gone I cut threads in the holes to attach fittings and a transparent tube to it for showing the oil level and to close the hole in the top with a screw.

Then I filled in some new oil and attached the new compressor motor to the compressor tank.

This setup worked very well and was really quiet, too. The most noisy part of the system is the check valve after some oil got to it. The noise is not really loud, more like a quiet oscillation that sometimes dissapears completely. Because of the oil I used a water seperator unit what should also prevent the oil from entering the printer.