Dust Collector Nightmare HELP!!!

Before I became educated on static pressures, duct size, cfm and the 23 different stylizes of impellers. I installed 3" pvc ducting to all my tools in a 2 car garage. Near as I can tell I need a 16" impeller and at least 5hp blower to run this setup. Nope can't find a dang thing. I really need a complete blower as my sheet metal skills are non existent. Please I know someone has been through this any and all advice is welcome. Thanks in advance.

Reply to
Bill
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I don't doubt your analysis but I'd sure like to know how you deduced that you need a 16" impeller and 5 hp motor. How does rpm of the motor affect impeller diameter?

Do you have shutoff valves or gates to each of the tools or are all of them being sucked at the same time?

BTW, I can't cite the magazine but I have seem how-to articles on dust collection systems that might help....

Good luck!

Reply to
Never Enough Money

Hi Bill,

I can't argue with your figures, but you might be over analyzing this. If you have a blast gate at each tool, any normal DC will pobably do the job. Although I sometimes wish I had a bigger unit, the 1 HP Penn State model that I have does a very good job through 4" PVC from 5 different machines throughout my basement. Don't forget the ground with PVC.

Lou

Reply to
loutent

What are alternativest to PVC? furnace pipe? I can't seem to find any 4"

Reply to
mark

They sell it at both Home Depot and Lowes in the plumbing department. I've never been in one that DIDN'T sell it.

Reply to
Mortimer Schnerd, RN

You know what, you are right. I have two old propane furnaces I was going to use for my shop heat, and they require 5" -- I think THAT was the one I couldn't find, now that you mention it....so my dust collection needs are met. :) I see a lot of catalogs that show the flexible plastic see thru stuff hanging on hooks -- I can't imagine that this works very well. Sorry, didn't mean to hijack the thread. Back to your regularly scheduled program.

Reply to
mark

You didn't hijack the thread. It's the nature of these discussions that we go back and forth.

As a point of possible interest, I just went through a little plumbing project myself: running tubing from my 1.5 HP dust collector to my table saw, RAS, jointer, floor sweep, and an auxilary port. I used a combination of 4" PVC and the free 50' of 4" hose that came with the dust collector (plus a bunch of blast gates and fittings). I can post a picture of my Rube Goldberg creation in APBW if anyone's interested. Of course, if I do, you have to promise not to laugh.

Reply to
Mortimer Schnerd, RN

I've found 4" ductwork At Menard's and the Orange BORG.

Bowhunter

Reply to
bowhunter

They should have 5" too... it's code in most areas for second floor heating applications (Ontario for sure)

-Brian

: : You know what, you are right. I have two old propane furnaces I was going to : use for my shop heat, and they require 5" -- I think THAT was the one I : couldn't find, now that you mention it....so my dust collection needs are : met. :) I see a lot of catalogs that show the flexible plastic see thru : stuff hanging on hooks -- I can't imagine that this works very well. Sorry, : didn't mean to hijack the thread. Back to your regularly scheduled program. : :

Reply to
Cherokee-LTD

That's a honkin-big dust collector. 3" PVC is not likely to flow enough air to utilize the full power of anything that size.

You could start with one of Clarke Echols welded blower housings and a Sheldon's Engineering 14" material handling impeller with a 5 horsepower Leeson motor . That housing is a welded version of the Bill Pentz plywood and sheet-metal design and look for "budget blower".

The blower housing is designed to work with a cyclone, but with a couple of sheets of MDF and some ducting it should be possible to adapt it to serving in a non-cyclone dust collector. Or you could build one of Bill Pentz' cyclone designs --Clarke's is based on Bill's design, and it will fit, barely, under a 7 foot ceiling.

If you have 3-phase power you can get a 5 horsepower dust collection blower from Penn State Industries , but again it's a 14" impeller.

Reply to
J. Clarke

Can't see any reason why furnace pipe, 4" or 5" wouldn't work, as long as it doesn't leak. You may be in the wrong department looking for the PVC. Your cheapest type will be DRAIN pipe, not supply water pipe, it's much thinner. I have seen it at Loews and Home Depot for around $4 per 10' length.

Reply to
Gary DeWitt

This is what I used, mainly because it provided a better (tighter) fit with the black PVC bends which I picked up at the local WW store.

They work fine.

Lou

Reply to
loutent

You're not going to like the answer, but I think you need to consider changing the ductwork rather than trying to increase the size of the dust collector. When I went through the analysis, 5" duct seemed to be the optimum for a home shop -- check with HVAC supply companies for metal spiral pipe.

Reply to
Mark & Juanita

Reply to
Jim Behning

Bill Pentz discusses this and has numbers for various types of ducting. Spiral duct is indeed not very good from a flow viewpoint. And smooth metal duct unless it's very heavy generally won't stand up to a big dust collector with all the blast-gates closed, so PVC is the obvious choice.

Reply to
J. Clarke

Reply to
Bill

"Bill" wrote in news:kEUcd.18561$ snipped-for-privacy@bignews4.bellsouth.net:

It's time to let go, Bill.

The collected experience of an entire industry points you in a different direction. And you seem to be leaning towards spending more money than you otherwise would need to, on a non-standard solution, with no guarantee of success.

I can see that easily in others. And yet it took a bunch of head banging to get me to stop trying to repair that darned Maytag Neptune washing machine, over and over again. ;-)

Wanna borrow a hard hat? ;-)

Patriarch

Reply to
patriarch

Increasing the RPM shouldn't make any difference in flow--once the impeller's stalled out more RPM doesn't help very much. And even the material handling impeller will stall out if the flow is restricted enough.

Might not need to take down all the pipe though, plumb it into the big ducts and then only run a big one where the little one doesn't do the job for you.

Reply to
J. Clarke

This is true with plastic flex pipe. The metal spiral pipe I'm talking about is smooth on the inside. Like:

This type of ductwork has very low static pressure loss.

The kind I bought is lined with goretex on the inside.

The spreadsheet on Bill Penz's website: also supports this. Anecdotally, I know that the metal ductwork with my 2 hp Woodtek system greatly improved the performance of my system vs. what I had set up previously. The key is making sure the system is well sealed with silicone seal. As I said, at least with the ductwork I got, there are no leaks due to the gore sealing.

Reply to
Mark & Juanita

When I did mine, I realized that every tool almost has a 4" collection hood. This is because when DC's were introduced to the home WW'er, they were 4" to begin with and the after thought of dust hoods were also made

4" to match the DC input. When I changed the size of the collection hoods on my tools there was no affect on the dust collection process.

Here's a note. To start with, I was using a 4" line into the collection hood of my planer which went from 4" round to a 4" square. This meant that there was 12.56 sq in. area where the air from the dust collector was coming from was being drawn from a 16 sq in area hood. This meant that before anything could be done, there was a 25% drop in the efficiency of the DC dust collection when it was hooked up because of the dust hood design. When a 2.5 inch line was made as the DC line there was a 7.85 sq in suction area from the same 16 sq in. hood, which made a less than a 50% loss. When the hood was redesigned to a 8.2 sq in suction area, the dust from the new hood rushes from the planner as fast as if you were picking the dust from the floor. Thus the hoods of all tools were redesigned to be a better comparison from the vacuum line to the hood. Now, even a shop vac would work well on my planner.

-- Woody

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Reply to
Joe "Woody" Woodpecker

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