Help! I was visiting recently a Home Center and saw a good number of shop-type vacuums rated as high as 6 Hp at a cost of $100, more or less. When I see in woodworking catalogs Dust collectors rated a 1 1/2 Hp. and costing around $ 250-300 I cannot help but ask why buy a DC when a seemingly three times more powerful shop vacuum costs much less.
For machines that produce lots of shavings and dust I use a Dust Collector ( Duist Boy 2hp) witha 55 gallon barrel. but for my table and band saw, 8″ jointer and12″ cut off saw is one of these high power shop vaccum adeqate?
Thanks in advance
John Cabot
Replies
John,
It's not the power rating that is relevant here, it is the flow capacity in cubic feet per minute (CFM). Lower HP dust collectors will generally move far more CFM than a Shop Vac type of vacuum. Also, dust collectors generally do a better job of filtering fine particulate dust from the air. The third advantage of the dust collectors is the large hose size (4") as compared to 1.5' to 2" line size of vacuums. The smaller hoses will get clogged pretty fast when you are kicking out copious quantities of shavings from your planer, jointer etc.
Shop vacs use screaming universal motors and are not for continuous use. Dust collectors use induction motors that can run all day. I wouldn't use a shop vac for dust collection unless you're into lots of noise and brush-changing parties.
What JROWE said. The HP isn't the spec you need to be looking at, they are different critters.
forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
In addition to everything said above, that 6 hp shop vac is not 6 hp; it would require somewhere around 60 amps at 120V (with .8 pf and .8 efficiency, for lack of better numbers) if it really was 6 hp. The 1.5 hp dust collector, as stated before, really is 1.5 hp (at least the motor is; it may never work that hard, and the more you restrict the flow, the less hard it works). You don't get something for nothing, unless you believe the marketing folks at Sears.
Be seeing you...
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