Breathing in fumes while soldering is not good for your health, so it is recommended that you have a fume extractor in your workshop. A typical fume extractor sucks in air and passes the fumes through layers of active carbon. While effective, it is probably an overkill unless you spend most of your day in your workshop.
I have seen some people using small fans to blow air across the work area. This works pretty well as long as you don’t deal with the SMD stuff. Those small SMD components can be blown away very easily. So my preferred method is still sucking air out of the work area.
So I experimented with a few different methods and found that using server blower fans achieved the best results.
The following is my version of the fume extractor using two 10cm 24V server blower fans.
When powered at the rated voltage (24V), the created suction is effective at least within 2 to 3 feet. This should cover enough area for your soldering work.
A draw back is that this kind of blower fans are very noisy. But they can be operated at lower voltage to reduce the noise (and thus the air flow). You can easily control the air flow with a TRIAC dimmer circuit or using a variable power supply for the blowers.
