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.