You can use (1) a dust collector to collect dust at the source >>>> (2) use a respirator to filter dust at the destination (your face) >> (3) use an air purifier to try to scoop up all the dust in the room as it’s on its way from one to the other. (Or — best — several of these at once.)
(This ranking is in terms of how effective these techniques are at keeping particulates out of your lungs. Swap the order of the second and third to see how effective dust control is at keeping dust off the surfaces of your workspace, off of anything that you’ve just painted / finished / epoxied and are leaving to cure and/or dry, and out of the rest of the house — my particulate meters on the second floor could tell when I’d been using power tools on wood in the basement.)
Also, source dust collection makes a world of difference for sanding. It makes it quicker (you’re applying the paper to on the wood instead of the dust that builds up on top of it — otherwise you need to stop and puff the piece with a hose or vacuum it more than you actually will), and extends the life of your paper (because it doesn’t heat up). That’s why this, which looks like an April Fool’s joke, exists.
I bought the JET after I decided dust collection was really important, but before I understood this. Also, the JET too loud — I was always looking for ways (switches, remotes, timers) to run it as infrequently as possible, which added a lot of overhead to just using it. I’m not sure what it offers over a quieter consumer living-space solution such as the large Coway’s that I started buying for the pandemic — maybe it lasts longer; maybe that matters more in a shop with heavy dust generation 10-16 hours a day. I didn’t feel that it saved me from needing a dust mask, but it did clear the air after I was done machining much more quickly (according to my measurements) than waiting for the dust to settle out of the air and onto the floor and other surfaces.
If you use the JET (you can borrow mine, but save your back and get help from a friend) or another purifier for whole-room filtration:
- This system works best if there are at least two of them. The idea is to create a current that swirls around the room.
- It should be mounted high up, and near (but not at) a corner. (Ditto.)
- The only air that’s immediately pure is what’s blowing out of the purifier. In which case you can use a smaller purifier such as https://www.oneida-air.com/dust-collectors. And, then you don’t need two.
(I didn’t follow any of these recommendations. I was very slow in learning how to set up dust collection; and then, in trying to figure out how to mount it; and I didn’t get there before we left. Instead, I switched to learning about masks, which paid off in other ways, I guess.)
What I recommend instead is one of:
- Lightweight incremental solution: Get one or two shop vacs with HEPA filters to use as portable dust collectors for source dust collection (you can borrow / evaluate mine from Greenfield; they are excellent), and enough ducting to connect to anything that makes dust. This is a royal pain / may not be fully possible with the router :cry: . There are routers that work well with dust collection, but I don’t know if you can retrofit an older one. Maybe if you 3d-print some parts for it — people do this all the time for adding dust collection to woodshop-grade CNC machines, and for making adaptors between the infinite number of tool duct sizes and the infinite number of shop vac hose sizes. (These infinities appear to have an near-empty intersection.)
- More time, expense, and up-front planning: Instead of the shop vacs, get a stationary (or wheeled) dust collector like this https://www.rockler.com/rockler-wall-mount-dust-collector-1250-cfm, maybe with a canister filter (I don’t know if the bag that one ships with catches the smallest, and most dangerous, particulates). Or — Richard has a a big old dust collector that he was willing to let me have, that’s probably still available. This is a bigger project because you have to figure out how to run the ducting where you want it, which is why I didn’t get to it before we left. The woodshop here at NYU uses this system, and it’s really great — it’s relatively quiet, and eats up almost all the dust before it gets into the air.
With either shop vacs or a dust collector, you may want to run a cyclone such as https://www.rockler.com/dust-right-dust-separator or https://www.oneida-air.com/dust-deputy in front of it, in order to capture all the big chips before they hit the filters. Doing this greatly extends the life of your filters, and reduces the frequency at which you’ll need to empty the heavy messy allergenic dust bins. (Instead, you get to dump out the cyclone more frequently, which is much more pleasant to deal with and doesn’t release tiny particulates back into the air.) It’s critical with a planar or table saw that produces big chunks; unnecessary for any kind of sanding; and intermediate in importance for a router, band saw, miter saw, etc.
The Rockler accessories seem pretty great for working around all the incompatibilities in hobbyist woodworking, whether you buy into their big expensive dust collectors, use somebody else’s, or use shop vacs. Oneida is the big name in dust collection and their stuff is often recommended; their prices start near the high end of Rockler’s then go up and up and up from there.
I invested in dust collection when I started to get sniffly after woodworking, and started to notice lots of stories about “I got sensitized to X wood and now I can’t work with it” for various values of X; and occasionally “I got sensitized to all woods and now I need a powered face mask to continue my hobby”. (Powered face masks seem nice, but I’d like to defer finding them obligatory.) (https://www.wood-database.com tells which woods are particularly allergenic, but there seems to be a fair amount of indivudal variation.) These anecdata made good cases for closing the barn door before the horses had left. (Just like the number of nine-fingered woodworkers who had their injury after ten or twenty or thirty years of woodworking experience convinced me never to use a table saw that wasn’t a sawstop.)