Challenge
Wood Technology is an architectural woodworking facility. They design, manufacture and install commercial products — including countertops, cabinetry, trimming, and paneling — for schools, hospitals, and offices.
Their varied woodworking processes all produce fine, fibrous wood dust that can be prone to an explosion if not properly handled. To combat this problem, Wood Technology employed a small baghouse dust collector. But when the company began to expand, they realized that their smaller system wouldn’t support additional machinery.
“When we decided that we were going to expand, we knew that we needed to get something that would be able to handle all this computerized machinery that we were getting,” described Dave Salmans, the production manager at Wood Technology.
Solution
To prevent the dust collection problems they expected to encounter after upgrading all of their equipment, Wood Technology purchased a Gold Series GS8 unit. Salmans said, “I spent many hours redesigning our entire shop to make things flow in a certain pattern. It was quite the challenge.” An entirely new shop was designed with adequate dust collection as a focus.
The Gold Series unit was an integral part of the revision of the facility. New, larger machines were put into place. “We were planning ahead. We knew what we wanted, and we knew where things were going to go,” Salmans mentioned.
After some time, however, the original dimple pleat filters that were included with the units clogged. The filters required larger glue beads to be held in place and wouldn’t release dust properly, even with cartridge overbags; they needed to be changed often. Salmans noticed this and began to record data about the filters. “I would take a reading in the morning, when we turned it on; at lunch, when we turned it off; after lunch, after it pulsed for 30 minutes; and at the end of the day,” he explained. This information was mailed to Camfil APC.
To remedy the problem at the facility, Camfil APC sent Wood Technology eight HemiPleat Gold Cone filters, which were a newly developed product at the time. The HemiPleat Gold Cone filters vastly outperformed the older filter types. “Those filters have been installed since 2006,” said Salmans.
“If your dust collection system isn’t working at capacity, it’s going to cause you problems down the line,” Salmans added. “When you can go an entire year and not even think about what your dust collector is doing, that’s a good thing.”