Is Your Dust Collection System Safe Or Is It A Serious Liability?
How do you know?
As a representative of a company in today’s marketplace, you are constantly assessing exposure to actual and potential liabilities. A dust collection system may or may not be on your radar, but it certainly should be.
Dust and debris falling out and building up in the ductwork of your dust collection system creates serious exposure to risk of fire and explosions. Every year, hundreds of factory fires are reported worldwide, many of which proper dust management could have been prevented. Neglecting to assess your dust collection system could lead to dire outcomes, including severe injuries, loss of life, and extensive property damage.
Most people in the maintenance or management of manufacturing organizations realize this. Is this happening in your system? How do you know?
For comprehensive details on NFPA, NEC, and OSHA standards regarding dust safety and combustible dust hazards, professional consultation is advised. Following these guidelines is critical for your facility's safety and compliance. Further resources and guidance are available through the links provided below.
To keep your factory as clean and safe as possible you need a properly designed dust collecting system tailored to the specific risks of dust explosions. This article focuses on a key aspect of dust safety: maintaining minimal conveying velocities throughout the duct system.
Minimizing Risks
Maintaining the proper conveying velocity to adequately remove dust and debris from a workstation and, more importantly, keep it suspended in the moving air from the collection point, through all of the duct, until it is safely deposited in the hopper of a dust collector is crucially important.
It is the only way to ensure your dust collection system, and facility overall, is safe. So, how often is it verified? Quarterly, bi-annually, annually? While there are standards and requirements from government agencies dictating the required frequency for these checks, do you know if they are being done?
That takes us to yet another area of uncertainty, is the required frequency mandated sufficient in your situation? Without having accurate data documenting minimum velocity requirements, how will you demonstrate compliance?
Legal Liability
Should there be a fire or explosion event, does documentation outlining your adherence to the bare minimum standards required by law absolve your organization from the liability of the situation? Certainly not.
The Solution
One of the benefits of an Ecogate On-Demand Control System is minute to minute documentation of velocities throughout your entire system.
The user can see drop air velocities measured by Ecogate Smart Gates in realtime
While this can, at times, be information that is overlooked and marginalized, being able to demonstrate not only your attention to safety standards but also have minute by minute documentation demonstrating that your system is continuously kept in a safe operating condition could be the difference in winning or losing a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
Safe Dust Collection
The Ecogate System continuously monitors and adjusts airflow, ensuring velocities are consistently maintained above the necessary thresholds for safe transport. By directly measuring air velocity at workstation gates and fine-tuning air volume through a closed-loop system, we ensure that air flow stays within safe ranges. This approach prevents dust from settling and can help improve indoor air quality, safeguarding your team from airborne pollutants. Our system proactively keeps your environment safe and enhances air quality, making it a win-win for workplace safety and health.
On-Demand Dust Collection is a No-Brainer
Installing such a system will pay for itself in short order, maybe the next question you should ask yourself is… “Why wouldn’t I, at the very least, invest a small amount of time into learning more about this system?”
2 minute video on what is On-Demand Dust Collection
You may also explore our website, which is filled with information regarding what on-demand dust collection is, how our technology works, and how you can get started.
To learn more about On-Demand Dust Collection, click here. If you’re wondering what other benefits come with our technology, check out this page.
Questions? Let’s Talk
We encourage you to reach out to an Ecogate representative today to further explore if our system is the right solution for you. We have many decades of combined experience in industrial ventilation systems and look forward to showing you how to make your system work harder for you while saving you money in the process.
Author, Craig Benning
