Hey Wood Shop Crew,
I’ve been wondering what the plan is for the dust collection system at DMS. To the best of my knowledge we are having many issues due to our current dust collection system. Also, we are talking about expanding the collection system thanks to a generous donation. So I wanted to open this thread as a discussion point to hear the issues and suggestion to solve them.
###Issues that I see happening:
- Exhaust filter of Dust collector seems to be constantly clogged to the point that the pressure gauge is maxed out.
- Blowing out the large filter doesn’t seem to fix the issue of the pressure gauge reading max pressure. ( I’ve heard that sometimes the gauge gets stuck, but I’ve also cleaned the filter by blowing it out and watch the gauge max out again when the filter was installed. So probably an issue.)
- Not enough dust is being collected from the air to keep our AC Filters from clogging and allowing the AC Unit to freeze up.
- Heat, the wood shops gets very warm right now when the dust collection is running.
- Noise, when running the dust collector produces quite a bit of noise in the room.
If there are other issues I’m forgetting please share them.
So I went to one of the local lumber yards yesterday and took a moment to check out their dust collection setup and chat with I think the owner or manager of the property.
Here is a picture of their unit for reference:
You’ll notice that they are running a modified cyclonic system, we use something a bit similar. I was particularly interested in the unit on the bottom of their cyclone chamber. It is a closed loop blower that circulates the saw dust to a container trailer that they have routinely picked up by a waste company. I wonder is this second blower improves their cyclone’s ability to work at gather the dust?
Their system exhausts the air outside which allows them to use a dust bag as the filter for the exhaust rather than the large expensive filter that we are having some issue with. I asked the manager if this was a good solution for actually catching the fine particulate that we are concerned with. He answered coyly “Yes, but we try not to draw attention to it or look too hard.”
So, I know we have talked about moving our dust collector outside and I’m guessing the issues raised by that are that:
- Need landlord approval
- We would be exhausting our AC to the outside
- It would be a pain to empty the saw dust (if on the roof)
- How would the unit survive in the elements?
- What are the environmental requirements?
- How would we get power to it?
- Vacuum Drop from blower being too far from room.
Landlord approval, I’m not sure if DMS is going to move or not so this could very well be the lynch pin in this, but I’d like to tackle the other issues to see if the idea is theoretically possible if we had an approving landlord.
Exhausting Air Conditioning, currently we are freezing up the AC unit regularly due to clogged filters and the Wood Shop gets very hot putting a real toll on the AC Unit as well. Also, the majority of the air exhausted is probably coming from the sources of heat within the room thus, hotter than the ambient air as well. So we may not be losing as much efficiency as we might expect from first glance?
I don’t have the time right now to tackle the rest of the issues, but please take a glance and add comments to help classify issues or add opinions on solutions to the issues.
