Dust and Workshop in a house basement

[Yuri Sadykov]

Guys,

I got so in love with woodworking and started more and more to think about changing my house for another more suitable to have a woodshop. I see that a lot of folks have one in a basement. I am just wondering how you guys deal with wood dust? Most basements have common air forced heating/cooling airflow. Dust produced in a basement woodshop will be sucked in and distributed through whole house. On other side closing duct gates will prevent basement from heating and may rise unwanted changes in heating air flow. Oh, btw, the same concirn about finishing fumes.
What your thought on that?

[Chris True]

My air handler is in a seperate room from the rest of the shop. Not to say it is dust free but it isn't sitting next to the planer of table saw. Buy the more expensive / better quality air filters and change them every month. As far as finishing fumes go, don't . I do a lot of waterbase, a wiped on oil is OK and an occassional quick shot of spray shellac but anything larger than a trivial spray job is done outside or in the garage.

[Lee Schierer]

My shop shares the heat system with the house. I put hepa style filters on the air returns and I don't get dust in the house, except what I track in on my feet.

Finishes that have fumes get done outside in an unheated garage.

[Matt Kestenbaum]

I have an old house...built in 1920. The heat is hot water and there is no central air, so I don't have to worry too much about the HVAC system spreading dust through the duct works. There is a sub-flooring layer and then original (to the house) white oak hardwood between the basement and the first floor, so sound is actually not too bad. A good bit of the house has plaster walls, which tend to create their dust...so it can be hard to say I haven't seen any from the shop. Once I had a collection bag on the DC pull free and make a huge mess in the shop, there was some surface dust in the room closest to the basement steps. Not too bad though. The boiler and hot water heater are as far away from the dust-makers as can be, but they are not walled off as there are open pass-throughs between the two sides of my basement. I have the boiler's burner cleaned and checked every fall to make sure they are remaining efficient.

I try to do as much finishing outside as possible, but I also tend to stick with BLO/Wax or BLO/Shellac/Wax recipes. I am very careful about BLO rags going outside over a bucket.

The biggest downside I have is lousy access for tools and wood going down (bilco door and steps outside; tight/steep interior stairs), and/or then projects coming up.

[Mike Archambeau]

1.) Get a 2 stage dust collector. I have an Oneida V3000 with hepa filter. Bye-bye dust.

2.) Collect all dust right at the souce as you are making it. If it gets airborne it is too late.

3.) Think seriously about an Oneida dust deputy on a shop vac for sanders, routers, and any other small powered tools. Again get the dust at the source as it is being generated.

If you do this you will be happy and healthy.

[Neil Brooks]

My shop is in the basement. No easy access. No walk-out.

I've set up my 2HP HF DC pretty well. It does a nice job at removing dust at the source:



I run a JDS air filtration unit, that hangs from the 9' joists:



And I JUST finished building my own 30" cube roll-around air filtration unit that -- right now -- is running (2) 3M Filtrete filters and a 5" pleated media filter:



I have it on a 12-hour fan timer, so it runs after I leave the shop:



In total, it's working EXTREMELY well. No complaints !

Good luck !

[Ole Anderson]

No matter how you set up a good DC system, some operations will generate airborne dust, like ripping an 1/8" off the edge of a board. Therefore the need for an ambient filtration unit. And a dust mask. And a door. I have had a basement shop for 35 years, you can make it work. Now if I could put a DC on my electric razor, I could keep the bathroom dust free...

[Aaron Rowland]

I have an up to date home with a walkout basement. The heating system is modern with air intake and exhaust on the outside. The hot water heater uses a forced air exhaust. No worry about back draft in a house like this. Others with old furnaces and stuff may differ. My shop is in the walkout basement and is huge. I rarely use a free standing air filter, though I have one with an industrial HEPA filter of the type used in certified clean rooms. About 12" thick and 24 x 24. The exception is when I do a hand operation with a router. I have not tamed that beast yet. A Dylos meter keeps me informed of air quality.Triggered by the Dylos it will come on automatically when the air quality gets to low. The temp here is moderate. It's about 60F at night right now. In Jan we see temps of 20F at night about half the time.

I do not like the concept of indoor Cyclones or filters. Neither does Pentz. Niosh or other agencies will not permit them inside a building. So when the cyclone comes on it exhausts out side with no filter. Out door air comes in and flushes out any wood dust in the air. No dust can reach the up stairs because the basement is under negative pressure and air from the up stairs flows into the basement. There is no cleaner shop made then mine! A bit of a brag and may be an untruth.

Wait, wait thou sayist. How about heat lost? Air contains very little energy in the form of heat. To raise the temperature of air 1 degree F requires only .018 BTU per cubic foot. So a shop 20x20 x8' has a volume of 3,200. If you pumped out the entire air supply and replaced it in one minute it would take 5.76 BTU's if you lost 1 degree F. Doesn't work that way but figure the math any way you want. The energy loss is zip. My Cyclone flows a huge amount of air at the machines inlets. However being a hobby guy it seldom runs more then a minute.

As a reference point a gallon of liquid propane contains about 91,000 BTU's. It costs about $1.60 a gallon. I'm not going to worry a bit about the expense of heat loss in my shop. I figure it cost me about $5.00 in the coldest month.

If you run a production shop that's a different matter. But the rules that apply to me are also a lot different. Most AQMD will not permit cyclones and require a bag house and that's just for starters. A cyclone filter is a total scam and a waste of money brought to you by the anti PVC ductwork people. They are not cheap and require replacement. They also get to stinking without the use of an ultraviolet light. I use UV light on my HEPA filter to prevent that. Basements are damp and moisture creates mold. Black mold is toxic.

[John Eaton]

I completely walled off my workshop from the rest of the basement - it has doors on either end (this keeps the dust away from my furnace). I then installed a 2 HP cyclone in the corner - since in draws and exhausts in the same room there's no need for exterior air. I've got one of those hanging ambient air filters to pull any dust (it has a timer so I can turn it on when I leave the shop and it airs out while I'm upstairs). The collector pulls the bulk of the dust and I use a sweep for any shavings from a draw knives or hand plane. I try to do most of my sanding outside - otherwise I've got one of those PC tool-activated vacs which does a good job of keeping the air clear of any sawdust when a sander is going. I selected my stationary tools to either have built in DC ports or have adapted those older machines so the DC pulls most if not all dust and shavings. I make sure to both vacuum my hair and clothes and remove any that are dusty before going upstairs (laundry is also in the basement so I'll often drop them off as I go upstairs).

-- John

[Charles Lent]

This is the main reason that I located my shop in a separate building when I moved into a new house. I was never able to totally stop the sawdust from getting from my basement shop up into my home above it. SYMBO would find dust on the furniture and I would be in trouble. There are other benefits to having a separate shop, no noise transmission, nobody "borrows" your hammers and screwdrivers, and the shop humidity level is way lower. I was forever trying to keep my cast iron from rusting. Now all it takes is a wax job every few months.

Charley

[Brian Tymchak]

As someone else mentioned in the thread, I installed a Jet air cleaner and it helped a lot to reduce the airborne dust, and thus, dust in the rest of the house. I also have a DC, but the air cleaner really did the trick for me.

[Rod Sheridan]

1.) Get a 2 stage dust collector. I have an Oneida V3000 with hepa filter. Bye-bye dust.

2.) Collect all dust right at the souce as you are making it. If it gets airborne it is too late.

3.) Think seriously about an Oneida dust deputy on a shop vac for sanders, routers, and any other small powered tools. Again get the dust at the source as it is being generated.

If you do this you will be happy and healthy.

My approach exactly, and I can't emphasize enough how important it is to get the dust at the source.

Every table saw needs an over the blade dust collector, I had an Excalibur on my cabinet saw.

I now have a Euro slider with overhead pick up, and a shroud connected to a 5" port under the blade. Very good dust collection.

My Oneida cyclone was my best purchase...........Rod.

[Aaron Rowland]

My shop is in the basement. No easy access. No walk-out.

I've set up my 2HP HF DC pretty well. It does a nice job at removing dust at the source:



I run a JDS air filtration unit, that hangs from the 9' joists:



And I JUST finished building my own 30" cube roll-around air filtration unit that -- right now -- is running (2) 3M Filtrete filters and a 5" pleated media filter:



I have it on a 12-hour fan timer, so it runs after I leave the shop:



In total, it's working EXTREMELY well. No complaints !

Good luck !

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Nice DIY filter. What blower did you use and how noisy? Without a Dylos meter it's hard to tell how clean the air is both in the shop and up stairs. The really small stuff is deceptive. I fired up a Mapp gas torch the other day for soldering. The Dylos went nuts but I was not aware of any problem.

[Neil Brooks]

I'm absolutely in agreement with you ... that I don't KNOW how clean the air in my shop is without measuring it. A Dylos would be very nice !

I still wear my 3M 7500 respirator quite a bit. The fans are for the house. The mask is for my health.

I bought a used Dayton explosion proof motor, from an ad on CraigsList. It was $100.

It's a couple years old, but ... functionally equivalent to this one:

LINK

[Lee Schierer]

Wait, wait thou sayist. How about heat lost? Air contains very little energy in the form of heat. To raise the temperature of air 1 degree F requires only .018 BTU per cubic foot. So a shop 20x20 x8' has a volume of 3,200. If you pumped out the entire air supply and replaced it in one minute it would take 5.76 BTU's if you lost 1 degree F. Doesn't work that way but figure the math any way you want. The energy loss is zip. My Cyclone flows a huge amount of air at the machines inlets. However being a hobby guy it seldom runs more then a minute.

I think you missed a decimal point. I get 57.6 btu's for heating the 1 degree temp loss for your shop. If the outside air were only 1 degree different your argument is correct. However, if you live in a northern climate with a 40+ degree temp temperature differential you would need 2300 BTU's for every air replacement, certainly not insiginificant.