Since owner Mark Weaver opened the doors in 2008, Weaver’s Custom Woodworking LLC has been a family-owned company whose top priority is ensuring each and every customer is attended to specifically for their needs. Weaver’s builds custom kitchen and bathroom cabinets as well as custom built-ins for offices, libraries and more, all at reasonable and affordable prices for their customers straight out of their shop in New Holland, Pennsylvania.
Weaver’s Custom Woodworking is a company that is on the rise and still growing. In 2017 they moved into a brand new shop that they built for themselves and bought a large dust collector at an auction to be able to meet their growing dust collection needs. However, the new dust collector was actually quite a bit larger than they needed for their shop and they would have spent too much money to keep such a large dust collector running at 100% capacity during working hours.
That’s when Mark Weaver, the owner, realized that Ecogate could help him. By controlling the speed of the dust collection system fan in real-time based on machine demand, Ecogate would dramatically reduce the electricity consumption of the system. “Ecogate made sense,” Mark says.
Ecogate works by monitoring what each workstation is doing at all times using machine activity sensors. These sensors provide input for the greenBOX control unit, which automatically opens electric blast gates to machines that are generating dust, and closes blast gates to machines that are not generating dust. The Ecogate Power Master variable frequency drive automatically slows down and speeds up the dust collection fan to perfectly match the total air volume requirements.
Mark, along with his electrician and the help of a local repairman, was able to install the new Ecogate system himself, saying the process was straightforward. With Ecogate’s on-demand system installed, Weaver’s dust collection system is fully-automated, highly-efficient and now delivers dust collection only when and where it is needed. The system uses only about 30% as much power as it did prior to the Ecogate installation.
The two features that Mark enjoys the most about his system is the electricity savings, as well as the reduction of noise in the factory. An added bonus is that nobody has to worry about turning the dust collector on and off anymore as the greenBOX controller does that.
By Installing Ecogate, Weaver’s Custom Woodworking is saving approximately 70% of what their new dust collector would have been consuming at full capacity. The company also received an incentive from PPL’s Electric Utilities Business Rebate Program towards the cost of the project because of the substantial energy savings.