 In the war against workshop dust, gathering debris directly from the tool with a dust collector or shop vacuum should be your first line of defense. You can win that battle but lose the war if those tiny but dangerous airborne particles escape, so you also need air support. That's where a ceiling-hung filtration unit comes in.
Here's how these simple machines work. Each has a steel box with a blower inside that sucks dust-laden air into the filters and exhausts clean air out the other end. The prefilter (which looks like a common furnace filter) catches the bulk of the larger dust particles. Smaller particles get trapped in the high-efficiency filter behind the prefilter.
With most of these machines costing more than $200, we wondered if they were much more effective than a simple box fan with a filter taped to the front. So we ran that option through our tests, too.
At a minimum, the air-filtration system you choose should be able to recirculate the air in your shop every 10 minutes. To find out how much airflow you need, first figure the cubic footage of your shop (length width ceiling height, in feet), and then divide that number by 10. The resulting number shows the minimum air flow you need in cubic feet per minute (cfm). For example, a 1418' shop with an 8-1/2' ceiling holds 2,142 cubic feet of air. Divide that by 10, and that shop's filtration system should pull at least 215 cfm of air.
Because manufacturers use different testing methods to arrive at their airflow specs, we evened the playing field by testing all of the units using a single method. (Our numbers may not agree with theirs, but they provide a fair head-to-head assessment.) We measured the airflow of each system in our test using a hot-wire anemometer at 25 specific points across the face of the prefilter, and then averaged those airflow readings.
Learn the results of our testing of the Delta AP-200 and 50-875, General International 10-550, Grizzly G0572, JDS 750-ER, Jet AFS-500 and AFS-1000B, Lee Valley/Workshop #650, Penn State Industries AC620, and Shop Fox W1690 when you pick up the October 2006 issue of WOOD magazine and turn to page 70. Or you can download the review for only $4.95.
Editor's Choice Top Tool: JDS Air-Tech 750-ER
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