What Does It Cost to Own Your Dust Collector Filters?

By Tomm Frungillo and Tony Supine, Camfil Farr APC

When it comes to choosing filters for a cartridge dust collector, powder and bulk processors sometimes regard these items as more or less of a commodity. If Filter A and Filter B both offer the same rated efficiency and fill any special requirements – say, for example, the need for fire retardant media – then the lowest-priced filter would appear to be the better choice. In fact, the opposite may be true. But it requires a “Total Cost of Ownership” (TCO) calculation to know for certain.

Similar in concept to life-cycle costing, TCO is a very useful approach for deciding what filters to select for a dust collection application. TCO incorporates a step-by-step evaluation process encompassing three categories:

• Energy – the amount of energy required to operate the dust collector from day to day, including electrical costs, compressed air usage and CO2 emissions.
• Consumables – the items that are replaced periodically throughout the life of the equipment.
• Maintenance and Disposal – the time it takes to service the equipment and the costs of disposing of the consumables.

Dust collector with door open and cartridges visible.

If you are considering the purchase of a complete new dust collection system, you will have control over more of these variables, such as the selection of electrical components that impact energy use. But even if you are simply assessing what replacement filters to use in an existing dust collector, a TCO analysis can yield useful information and surprising results.

Figure 1 is a sample dust collection worksheet used to gather TCO data. Following is a more in-depth look at some of the key items that may be included in such a worksheet and how they impact TCO.