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Summary

Applicability

Although woodworking dust inspired this site creation, all fine airborne dusts endanger our health. Air quality experts recommend fiberglass workers, coffee roasters, granary storage workers and others with fine dust exposure read these pages. Three large industrial dust collection providers who guarantee air quality require their air engineering and sales staff read this site and they recommend customers read these pages.

Background

Most small shop workers assume wrongly that fine invisible dust exposure poses no serious risk, or we receive so little exposure it represents little risk, or that we use ample protection. As a senior engineer and university instructor I understood the seriousness of fine dust exposure, so installed the top magazine rated cyclone system. I followed the vendor duct design, used vendor ducting, and used vendor recommended fine filter upgrade. That expensive system hospitalized and nearly killed me.

I got badly burned by the cyclone maker that most small shop woodworking magazines rate as the top vendor. Although many claim this cyclone worked well, its performance proved so disappointing I decided quickly to throw it away. Even my portable dust collector provided far more airflow and much better collection. Roughly every twenty minutes this cyclone clogged its filter, clogged its cone, and clogged its ducting. Clearing the clogs required extensive disassembly that took more time than my woodworking and left me and my shop covered in the fine dust I installed this expensive cyclone to avoid. So many had similar problems the early woodworking forums members hated this vendor, but few of the long discussions lasted because this vendor became a big advertiser on the forums, paid salaries to “volunteer” forum administrators, and paid people a 10% sales commission if one of their on-line posts resulted in a sale. Before I discarded this cyclone, an apparent heart attack hospitalized me. My doctors found my respiratory tissues filled with fine wood dust that kept triggering a worsening allergic reaction which cut the oxygen my heart needed. This problem cost me over half my lung capacity and left me supplemental oxygen dependent. I vowed to understand exactly what went wrong and repair my shop amply to return to my lifelong woodworking hobby and sometimes profession.

When my health failed to improve I bought expensive certified air quality tests. The air quality test showed wood dust badly contaminated my home three months after I stopped woodworking. My garage based shop tested clean until my air quality inspector started my cyclone. Then his test meters showed my cyclone filter blew out so much stored fine dust that my shop failed its air quality test before we did any woodworking. Testing while me made a little dust showed my expensive cyclone advertized to protect my health launched the maximum dust that normal shop air currents support and failed every different air quality test. This inspired me to aggressively clean up my shop and home, plus research further.

Risks

The medical research clearly showed every fine invisible dust exposure causes a tiny but measurable respiratory capacity loss and some loss becomes permanent. Fortunately, this loss remains so slow that most do not feel its effects until our older years when these problems worsen other age related health problems. Unfortunately, a little more research showed more immediate problems because airborne wood dust contains many toxic chemicals including poisons, neural toxins, carcinogens (cancer agents) and sensitizers that build allergic reactions like mine.

Solutions

Then I discovered the major large dust collection firms that guarantee good air quality long ago mastered good fine dust collection, and they share freely exactly what we need to do to provide good fine dust collection. This air engineering information required translation which my friends and I provided. We discovered two huge filtering issues. First, there are two standards used to measure filtering efficiency. ASHRAE provides the standards for indoor filters and their standard requires testing filters when clean and new. Our small shop vendors ignore this standard and instead sell filters tested after they have built up a thick load of dust trapped in the filter pores that does not come out with normal cleaning. It typically takes a year and a half or more for a filter to build up that cake of dust called seasoning, so in that interim we use our lungs to filter the fine invisible dust. In fact, this is exactly why my so called fine filter failed to provide good protection. Second the much finer filter material we need to protect our health costs far more and we need to either greatly reduce the amount of dust sent to these fine filters or use lots of filter area. Too little filter material creates filters that clog too quickly then rapidly wear out and no longer provide good filtering. Existing small shop dust collectors and cyclones still sell so called fine filters that freely pass the unhealthiest invisible dust. I invented a more efficient fine dust separating cyclone that sends less than one fifth the dust to our fine filters. This cyclone design with a bigger blower, amply sized ducting, better hoods, and downdraft table cured my dust collection problem and it provided my family with better fine dust protection.

Sharing

Success

More than 10,000 small shop owners worldwide use cyclones of my design and thousands visit this site daily to learn about fine dust risks and collection. I freely helped almost every small shop vendor improve their products. Most small shop vendors made some repairs such as adding finer cartridge filters, but almost all chose to continue selling the same dust pumps that fill our shops with dangerously unhealthy amounts of fine invisible dust. Two vendors I helped flagrantly stole and patented variations on my work, falsified information and emails about me on their web pages, and have for the last five years run a nasty campaign using Internet forum administrators and posters to discredit me and these efforts. One of my friends recently laughed when I moaned at how much this terrible campaign continues to cost me. He reminded me what Winston Churchill said, “You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

Acknowledgements

Financial Help

Helping the many who view these pages daily and knowing thousands world wide use my cyclone design leaves a positive feeling, but positive feelings leave the bills unpaid. This research, tests and web page overhead costs me at least $10,000 yearly. Recent vendor complaints and harassment added even more in legal expenses. I continue this effort voluntarily, but my respiratory issues forced retirement and left insufficient income to keep up this sharing level. The current poor economy cut donations and advertisement revenue severely. So if you find this information useful please help support these efforts with a small PayPal on-line contribution each time you visit these pages:

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