Some time ago I posted a question concerning the Oneida Smart Dust Collector. The thread received a number of different replies with a lot of suggestions. After reading the responses, I decided that I needed to start over and evaluate what I had and then what I needed.
I read a lot of the posts, read and studied the Pentz information and traded some personal messages with people on the forum. I used some of this information to do some testing on my current system which is a Jet Vortex Collector with a canister filter and has the following specs -
1.5 HP 11 impeller
10.5 Max Static Pressure 1100 CFM with 4 Duct
6 Port with reducer to two 4 ports
My measurement of static pressure was made using a homemade manometer gave 10.25 and very close to the specs. However, the CFM measured using a digital anemometer gave only about 670 cfm at the 6 port on the collector and about 450 cfm at the 4 port at the collector. This is much less that the spec but not unexpected.
(Note: Using a digital anemometer is not real easy and I moved it around the port and obtained what I thought was representative. Even if I was off several hundred feet per minute, the numbers were still quite low with respect to the specification.)
I also checked the CFM on my ducted system about 10 feet or so away from the collector through a short length of 4 flex pipe and 10 feet of 4 PVC and found only about 268 cfm at 3100 feet per minute. Farther down the line at about 20 feet and through several elbows, I got 216 cfm at 2500 feet per minute.
Bottom line, while my collector gets the larger chips, it does not have the velocity to get the fine particles. I am looking at systems to do this along with increasing my duct sizing to 6. I will be posting what I intend to do for ducting and also the choices for a dust collector.
It would really be nice if anyone else could post actual data for their dust collection system as a comparison to what I measured.