High Dust Collector Pressure

Welcome to this week’s Primed Insight.

Typically, your dust collector’s talking to you. Do you know how to listen to what it’s telling you?

So in most applications you have a differential pressure gauge. And that differential pressure is telling you how clogged your filters are. If your filters are really high, your differential pressure is going to read high, and then your reverse pulse system is going to kick in. Well, if your reverse pulse system isn’t working, could be your problem.

Many operators don’t actually understand what differential pressure is or what the gauge is reading on the system. So your differential pressure is reading in inches of water from dirty side of the dust collector, where the dust is coming in, to the clean side of the filter. So that restriction across the filter is what your differential pressure is reading. And that, in essence, is telling you how clogged your filters are.

So often we get calls from customers saying, “Hey, what should my differential pressure be on my dust collector?” And it’s important to understand that your differential pressure can range by the design and airflow that goes to your actual dust collector. So you need to read your owner’s manual and understand what the typical DP ranges are.

So new filters on average are somewhere around one and a half to 2.5 inches of water, and to where clogged filters are anywhere from that four to maybe seven inches of water on the DP gauge. So you could be anywhere within that range. But again, look at your owner’s manual to really find those details.

So as we talk more about differential pressure, and if you go out and you check your Magnehelic gauges at the end of the day and your DP is an acceptable range that you feel, and throughout the day you’ve watched that differential pressure rise, and this is for a full eight hours of production, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Remember, those filters will get kicked up and then the reverse pulse kicks in. Maybe it’s at the end of the cycle. So you’ll clog your filters all day long. At the end of the cycle, when you shut down that dust collector, it’ll clean its filters back out and get you ready for the next day.