Dust Collectors

[Dale Penrose]

Does anyone do anything special to ground the hoses/tubes? I added a homemade cyclone to my dust collector, 4" dryer vent between my drum sander and barrel. First day using it I noticed a static shock every time I touched it. I have since placed a length of bare copper wire between the tubes and this eliminated the static. What does everyone else do?

[Bob Hammond]

The static is a nuisance but is not dangerous except in factory-size installations. Some plastics are more susceptible to static charge accumulation. Aside from that, dryer vent hose may not be the best choice for a duct because it's corrugated and often very thin-walled. Try using rigid Sch 30 sewer pipe with swept elbows and wyes. You can make gaskets for the blast gates and fittings from strips of 2mm polyurethane foam from a craft store.

[Mark Fogleman]

Funny...I have never had this problem using a mixture of flex pipe, metal connectors and PVC main lines to the cyclone. The cyclone is located next to the power panel and ~3ft through the wall to the ground rod so this may explain.

[Ronald Southworth]

The static is a nuisance but is not dangerous except in factory-size installations. Some plastics are more susceptible to static charge accumulation. Aside from that, dryer vent hose may not be the best choice find for a duct because it's corrugated and often very thin-walled. Try using rigid Sch 30 sewer pipe with swept elbows and wyes. You can make gaskets for the blast gates and fittings from strips of 2mm polyurethane foam from a craft store.

value added info

[Bryan Bear]

I used PVC sewer pipe for most of my runs trying to keep the flex hoses short. I was worried about static charges so I lined each pipe run and fitting with a strip of aluminum foil tape and made sure all the strips touched in the final installation and connected that to a ground. I don't know if it really made a difference but I have never been zapped when using my thickness sander (I occasionally did when using the shop vac) with the dust collector. My flex hoses are not metalic and therefor not grounded. They are always covered with a film of dist that has been drawn to them. The PVC pipes are mostly in the walls and ceiling so I don't know if they are attracting dust to them or not. It is possible the aluminum tape is having zero effect but it was cheap and easy at the time.

[Eric Baack]

I use a thein separator on a 55 gallon drum and it does a great job of keeping my shop vac clean.

[Barry Daniels]

I added a diy thein to my traditional dust collector and I think it helped keep more fines out of the filter.

[Christ Kacoyannakis]

The main grounding wire from the water main to the ground rod in my yard runs right by my Oneida cyclone dust collector. When I was putting it in, I just screwed a ground wire to the aluminum tubing and attached it to the ground wire. I have not had any sparking issues.

[Steve Sawyer]

The static isn't hazardous, but it will give you an uncomfortable poke. My system is ducted with 6" SD PVC, and I know from my prior systems that eventually (within a few months) a film of dust coats the inside of the pipes and the problem disappears. With the new Oneida system I installed a couple of years ago, the shock was strong enough to almost knock me on my butt. I ran some cheap tie-wire in a spiral (about 18 linear inches for every loop) from one end of the main run to the cyclone and grounded it, affixing the spiral wire every couple of feet with a short self-tapping sheet-metal screw that just barely penetrated to the inside. Problem solved.