12 foot Cigar Lounge Height is Your Smoke Ceiling
Cigar Lounge Owners and Contractors often ask us how they should calculate the air purification ceiling height of a space that has a tall ceiling. The simple answer is you should always consider the actual height as the smoke ceiling unless the Ceiling is over 12 feet. If the actual ceiling is over 12 feet then you can use 12 feet high as the smoke ceiling.
Understanding air layers in a cigar lounge
In a working cigar lounge, the air naturally forms layers. There’s a reason you can walk into a place and see the smoke hanging above you.
The first layer is what I call the people zone. That’s the lower 6 feet of the room, where people sit, stand, and breathe. This is also the zone ASHRAE 62.1 is focused on when it defines occupied breathing space.
Above that is the safety buffer — the space between the people zone and the point where smoke starts collecting.
Then there’s the top layer: the smoke layer (sometimes referred to as the neutral zone), where smoke tends to settle and hang once it has cooled. In many high-ceiling lounges, that collection point is often somewhere around 60% to 75% of the total ceiling height.
This is why I recommend placing Smoke Eaters within the smoke layer whenever possible. When the unit is positioned where the smoke naturally collects, it can filter the highest concentration of smoke first — which helps keep the entire room cleaner and more comfortable.
Why smoke collects overhead
Fresh smoke is warm, so it rises. As it cools, it stops rising and spreads out, forming a layer above the occupied breathing space.
Exactly where that layer forms can vary from lounge to lounge. It depends on things like:
how tall the ceiling is
how much smoking is happening
where your HVAC pushes and pulls air
and how much the air is being stirred by fans or movement
This is one of those things that sounds simple until you dig into it. If you want to see the actual studies that helped us validate these statements, you can read A Study on Smoke Layer Height(MDPI)
Why We position Smoke Eaters in the smoke layer
That’s why we want the Smoke Eater sitting inside that layer. If you put filtration where the smoke actually collects, you remove more smoke faster, and the entire room stays cleaner. While this concept makes sense on the surface, it might be useful to dive deeper into the topic. A Study by Price Industries (PDF) contains many illustrations that could clear (pun intended) up the subject.
By drawing smoky air from the neutral zone, you keep this area from expanding. Without effective smoke removal and proper positioning, the smoky area will expand downwards into the people zone.
This is also why placing a Smoke Eater on the floor is usually not the best strategy for a smoking establishment. A floor unit has to clean the air from floor to ceiling, which takes longer. Even with powerful blowers, no unit can magically pull smoke down from the level where it naturally collects overhead. The fastest way to clean the room is to capture the smoke where it already wants to be.
That’s exactly why LakeAir offers multiple models designed to pull smoke from the front or from underneath. For example, the LAFC-RC2 and the LA6-RC4 are engineered to draw smoke from directly below the unit, helping pull smoke out of the collection layer before it spreads back down into the occupied space.