finally have dust collection- shop is almost ready

Re: finally have dust collection- shop is almost r

David Walser

John -- It looks like a nice setup. I'm sure you've told us before, would you mind telling us again about your dust collector/cyclone? I couldn't tell where it was located from the pictures.

Re: finally have dust collection- shop is almost r

John lucas

The dust collector is a grizzly 2300 cfm double bagger I had a 6x12 foot room added to the back of my shop for the collecto and air compressor. In the photos its behind the table saw the vertical pipe with the Y at the top is where it comes into the shop

WOW!

Don Orr

That looks fantastic. Nice work. Now down to business. Do you think you can keep it that clean ?

Re: finally have dust collection- shop is almost r

robo hippy

John, your shop looks too small now... Noise levels from the DC can be a lot, and some of that depends on the unit. I would suggest replacing the bags with pleated paper filters as you get a lot more exhaust room in less area.

robo hippy

Re: finally have dust collection- shop is almost r

John K Jordan

Excellent! Sure is looking like a real shop now.

Re: finally have dust collection- shop is almost r

David Walser

If I were John, I'd replace the dust collector with a cyclone and vent to the outside. This would get rid of the filters entirely. Since a cyclone captures 99.9% of the visible dust and he's out in the country, I don't believe venting to the outside would pose any health risks. (Of course, I'm not a doctor!) It would certainly increase the airflow!

There are plenty of videos and instructions on the internet on how to convert a dust collector into a cyclone. Given John's skills, the switch shouldn't cost much.

Re: finally have dust collection- shop is almost r

john lucas

I want to look at a cyclone unit but don't think I'll duct it to the outside. It would have to make a mess somewhere and my wife won't like it in the yard if the house sells next door they probably wouldn't like it in their yard. I am out in the country but my yard isn't

Re: finally have dust collection- shop is almost r

john lucas

I am going to look at getting some different bags later on mostly to improve the air flow although the air flow is what is causing the noise.

Re: finally have dust collection- shop is almost r

Dennis in Southern Oregon

John if you use a good cyclone separator, there will be no detectable dust to vent to the outside even if you do not have a post filter. A very good reason not to do so though is that you will vent all of your precious warm/cool air to the outside in the summer/winter.

sucking inside air out

john lucas

Dennis seems like I read somewhere that venting to the outside was really not much of an issue. Something about the volume of air vs the size of the shop. I'll have to see if I can find that because for all practical purposes that's what i'm doing now. It's in a separate non heated building attached to the shop. If it becomes a problem I'll insulate that building and cut a return duct in the wall. Does anyone know how much air is actually sucked out and how long it would take to really notice a drop in temperature.

Venting

John K Jordan

>I want to look at a cyclone unit but don't think I'll duct it to the outside.

>It would have to make a mess somewhere...

It might not make a mess at all.

I put in the 5hp ClearVue in a sound-insulated closet. It exhausts through the filter stack with the air then returned by duct ceiling to the shop. I do this since my shop is heated/cooled and I don't want to vent the air I paid to condition. Bill Pentz does not recommend this but suggests it is healthier to dump that air outside.

Absolutely nothing visible gets through the filters. Running for a year now and there is even almost nothing in the cleanout box at the bottom of the filters, only the finest whisper of powder.

The cyclone needs the big sealed trashcan or drum on the bottom to work and is so efficient it drops everything from chunks to very fine dust into the can. It is amazing. If you used the standard configuration with a filter stack and simply vented the positive air pressure of what comes through the filter to the outside you will completely eliminate even the invisible sub-micron dust in the shop. Your wife, dogs, and neighbors would see nothing outside, even if they were standing by the vent. The vent could be a simple louvered wall vent or even some holes drilled up under the eves and covered with screen to keep the wasps out. If I didn't use AC that's what I would probably do.

Where does your exhaust air go now? Unless there is a vent back into the shop it is going outside somewhere.

Even if you eliminated the pleated filter and ran the exhaust duct directly outside I suspect very little visable dust would get outside. (It would be probably be louder, though.) We could pull the filters off mine and do a test run if you want.

JKJ

Re: finally have dust collection- shop is almost r

David Walser

I suspect the issue would be more of noise than visible dust. When I worked at a furniture mill, there were two two-story tall cyclones at one end of the mill. The cyclones' exhaust air was un-filtered. There was no visible evidence that the cyclones were spewing out thousands of cubic meters of unfiltered air. Today, I suspect air quality regulations would prohibit a mill from doing what we did back then, but there was no visible pollution from the cyclones. That's why I doubt your occasional use of a much smaller cyclone would cause any visible problems.

You are making a career out of this workshop

If you are sending all the exhaust outside

Dick Coers

Then you are pulling what ever amount your fan pulls outside. You'll be pulling air through cracks around the building, and pumping it outside. Surely nothing I would want to do in Central Il in the winter!

Re: sucking inside air out

Dennis in Southern Oregon

John, I don't know the size of your shop, but suppose it is 20 x 40 x 10 feet. The air volume will be 8000 cubic feet. You said that the dust extractor is rated at 2300 cu ft/min. If it actually produced that flow rate, it would empty the air in your shop in about 3.5 minutes and replace it with outside air.

Yea, seems like it. 

Re: finally have dust collection- shop is almost r

Barry Irby

My shop is only 14 y 22' and my dc and Air Compressor are out side in an open closet. My blast gates have micro switches on them that turns on the dc when I open a gate. I open and close them as I turn the machines off and on. I heat my shop with a tiny little barn heater. Maybe two on a really cold day. The intermittent use of the dc seems to have almost no effect on the temperature.

I have never put dc on my lathe. So when I am turning and uses chisels I do not have dc. When I sand I bring a pick up close and it gets the vast majority of sanding dust.

A friend of mine has a much larger shop and he is producing kitchen cabinets. He turns his dc on in the morning and runs it all day. I am not sure he even has blast gates on many of his machines. I think he vents the air outside into a giant bin with the dust.

Automatic DC

John K Jordan

Just a note: I read recommendations to avoid cycling the larger cyclones too often to avoid overheating the motor. (mine is 5 hp.) The idea was the motor heats up more during the demands of starting and starting too often in a short time could cause overheating.

I never tested this but just in case I do tend to leave mine on if I know I'll be using another machine before too long. I usually close the blast gate to reduce the motor current (and air noise) a little.

I have a receiver wired into the controler and wireless remotes scattered around by the machines.

JKJ

Re: sucking inside air out

Mike Brazeau

Looks great John. You are going to have a lot of fun! I would put in a return with one of the large pleated filters that are good enough that they are changed out once or possibly twice a year on a furnace. They are 4-5 " thick and replace electronic air cleaners these days. Cost in Ontario is $35-$40 but they really work well. Just looking at a new furnace for our daughter and SIL's home next door and furnaces run 4800-6000 CFM so it is in the range of the dust collector.

Re: Automatic DC

Barry Irby

I have some sort of Delta DC with a TEFC motor that is 1 1/2 HP IIRC. Its outside the shop in an open closet/shed. I have never had it overheat until recently. I was making the fifty cabinet doors and drawer fronts I have posted about. It ran in a long run, probably a couple of hours and it shut down. The motor only seemed warm to the touch. I let it cool a short while and pushed the reset button.

I emptied the DC bag almost daily for a while. Heavy use for me. I wonder if letting the bag develop too much "cake" was part of the problem? OTOH, I thought the air passing through the DC did not cool the motor.

Normally my projects are much smaller and do not involve such long run times, but much more starting and stopping. When I am jumping form machine to machine, I try to open the blast gate on the "next" machine before closing the one on the "last' machine to prevent a lot of stopping and starting of the DC.

Am I the only one that finds the fact that the DC motor is often the biggest motor running in the shop to slightly odd or amusing?

Re: Automatic DC

John K Jordan

>I wonder if letting the bag develop too much "cake" was part of the problem?

On the ClearVue forum I read that the least electrical load on a cyclone DC is when the blast gates are all closed, i.e., when the system was not moving much or any air through it. The manual warns:"NEVER run the Impeller on the Motor, or the Motor by itself until the system is completely assembled! Doing so may cause physical damage to your system, breakers to POP, or harm to yourself."

Besides the obvious hazard of a spinning a non-contained heavy steel impeller near your face, the implication is the motor draws more current when running free in air than when in the closed system. Because of the partial vacuum inside?

This was contrary to what I imagined would happen. I did not test this with an amp meter. I did put a clamp-type amp meter on the motor lines at one point and read about 14 amps, but I don't remember if that was with the all the ducts closed off.

I don't have a clue if a bag system such as yours even has an an impeller or if the same open/closed load issues apply. If you have a good amp meter you might try measuring the current with the bags both clean and caked up.

The cyclone people recommend using a manometer to occasionally monitor the filter condition, taking a base reading when the filter is new and clean. This might be a good way to monitor performance on a bag system too.

Is your closet just getting too hot?

One thing that got a lot of discussion on the ClearVue forum was how to keep the air moving in a closet to cool the motor cool during extended runs. An often repeated recommendation was to mount the return air intake high in the closet near the ceiling and perhaps near the motor. This would cause the cool filtered air to move up and past the motor before being pumped back into the shop. Since the motor on a larger cyclone is almost always up near the ceiling (mine is tight with 9' ceilings), this is should minimize a heat buildup at the top of the closet.

Since cyclones are screamers, for noise abatement, rather than simply cut a return air hole in the closet wall, people often build a plywood return duct running down the inside of the closet before breaching the wall. I didn't do that - my duct intake is lower in the closet and the duct runs up into the ceiling before making a series of 90 deg turns for noise baffling. (I also sprayed a rubberized coating inside the duct - the result is a quite comfortable dB level in the shop.) I plan to make an extended run test sometime and monitor with thermocouples to see if I need to pull the return air from higher in the closet. BTW, my closet is 4'x8', 9' ceilings.

JKJ

Re: Automatic DC

Barry Irby

My closet is about 2' by 6' wide by about 7' tall. I basically disassembled the roll around DC and installed it in the closet. The outer side of it is a lattice. Not even screened. Literally pretty close to being outdoors.

I dump the air outdoors and don't give a thought to the fines that escape the bag.

And as I said, I have not noticed it significantly disturbing the temperature in the shop. OTOH, the shop temp is pretty rough and I don't care. If I am going to do a glue up or spray some finish I will warm it up an hour or two in advance and keep it warm for a while. Otherwise, its on it's own.

As an aside, the air flow is highly variable. Mine is rated for about 1100 CFM. That's pretty much with no ducts and running full bore. I don't know what it can draw through a 4" duct but I'm sure it's way less than half that. Not to mention the duct run, elbows, gates, etc.