Benefits of Cyclonic Dust Collectors
George VondriskaDescription
When you’re ready to shop for a dust collector for your shop, it’s a good idea to have a look at cyclone dust collectors. They offer a variety of benefits that that simply don’t come from other types of dust collectors.
Cyclones separate
One of the best aspects of a cyclone dust collector is its ability to separate dust from the air before it hits the filter. Why is that a big deal? The cleaner the air is when it gets to the filter, the less maintenance you’ll have to do on the filter. That means more shop time spent woodworking, instead of dust cleaning. Remember too that air can only get into the dust collector if air can get out. So, if the filter is getting clogged, no air can leave. If that happens, you’ll start to restrict the air flow coming in. That means dust collection at your tools will drop off, and that’s no good.
Where’s the fan?
When you’re shopping for a dust collector check out where the fan is; is it in the air stream, or out of the air stream? It’s better for a fan or impeller to be out of the air stream. That way if you suck up a chunk of wood, it’s not going to plow into, and possibly ruin, the fan.
More info
For more information on Laguna dust collectors and Laguna cyclone dust collectors visit www.lagunatools.com, www.lagunacleanair.com or www.lagunatools.ca.
If you've been researching and shopping dust collectors for your shop, you have probably come across the idea of cyclonic dust collectors, like this unit which very likely brings questions to mind of what are the benefits of a cyclonic unit? Why would I wanna consider adding this to my shop? So that's what we're gonna talk about is what are the benefits of cyclones? What's the deal? What do we get out of this?
Let's start out first by just kind of a 50,000 foot view of how cyclones work. Then we'll come back and drill down a little bit to get some of those benefits. So here's what we've got cooking. Up here on top of the unit is a motor that drives an impeller or a fan. That fan is gonna spin, and that of course is what's drawing air into the unit.
Below that impeller, we've got this funnel shaped device. And that's where the cyclonic magic starts to happen. This is where debris falls out of the air stream, falls, falls, falls, ends up in a barrel, a collection point down below. We're gonna come back and look again at this barrel in just a little bit. Now let's go back up here to the whole air flow idea.
Impeller then is still pushing air in this direction and behind this door, we've got a filter. So this is where, what we're asking this unit to do is output clean air back into our shop. Now think about whatever kind of dust collector you end up with, whatever kind of filter it has, if we start to clog up the inside of this filter, and air can't get out on this end, then air can't get in on that end. What's the problem with that? Well, it starts to diminish the air flow at your tool.
You don't have the dust collection you need. You start to get more airborne stuff. So it all comes back to, the cleaner the air is when it gets here, the better our unit is gonna perform. So let's go back again and start to talk some more in detail about what's happening here. The impeller is spinning.
It's moving air. Now, one thing to notice that's pretty important is that our input is here. The impeller is here. If you've already got a dust collector in your shop where the input is in line with the impeller and you've ever accidentally sucked up screws, nails, a block of wood, then you hear a big chunk sound when that thing hits the impeller. Here, that's not gonna happen.
We're bringing our airflow in below the impeller. So even if you do accidentally suck up a block, that's just gonna fall out of the system, fall out of the air flow and end up in the barrel. So we draw air in, it spins. That's the cyclone part. Gravity forces it to fall down into the barrel.
That's stage one. Stage two, we continue in this direction with pretty clean air. And now we're filtering it back into the shop. And our general deal here is something like 99 to one. Meaning that for every hundred gallons of stuff that you pick up about 99% of that is ending up here in the barrel.
About 1% is finding its way out here. So that's really cool because it means less maintenance of your dust collector. You wanna be over here, cleaning filters out? Or you wanna be doing woodworking? Here's what we're gonna do now.
We've got the hose connected to a planer. We're gonna kick the machine on, run the planer. And we've got some really cool video footage of the cyclonic action. So you can see just what's happening there. And then we'll come back and wrap up on our benefits of a cyclone.
So... Here we go. Isn't that amazing to see how those particles are spun out of the air and end up down in the barrel? Now of course, the other thing that's pretty handy in the world of buying a device for dust collectors, isn't it great to have a remote so that from the tool you can control the dust collector turning it on and off as needed? It's a really nice benefit.
The other thing on this unit that's gonna happen is as the drum fills up with debris, a light's gonna come on and tell us when that barrel is full. That's pretty nice to know when to empty that. Speaking of emptying the barrel, let's have a look at just how the system works. Kick that up. Roll the barrel out, remove the plastic bag, dump it or throw the bag out.
New bag goes in, put everything back together. We're back in business. So big deal with cyclones two-stage systems impeller is out of the air stream. So if you do pull in a block of wood you're not gonna mess up the impeller. Air on the exit side of this thing is coming out real clean so that filter's gonna stay clean which means your performance is gonna stay high and your maintenance, you messing with that filter, is gonna stay low.
All really good reasons to consider putting a cyclonic dust collector in your shop.
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