Vacuum Blower Tips to Keep In Mind Before You Buy

Thanks to these vacuum blower tips, buying a vacuum blower operated dust collector doesn’t have to be another “you get what you pay for” life lesson. Instead of assuming more horsepower and cfm are always better, an educated buyer understands the engineering behind the four common classes of blowers. If you need a quick refresher on how blowers work, read this post before you go on.

Once you know how these important pieces of equipment work, it’s much easier to understand what factors are important in your purchasing process. To help you along the way, we’ve compiled five tips to help you get the biggest bang for your buck.

Five “Before You Buy” Vacuum Blower Tips

1. Good vacuum blowers list the blower cfm and static suction (in inches of water) with the amperage draw of the motor. This type of vacuum blower is very common and typically costs $300 or more for about 700 hours of operation.

2. The larger the blower impeller, the faster the tip speed and the higher the suction rating, measured in total static suction or inches of water, also called static pressure rating. The air volume may remain low depending on the manufacturer.

3. The higher the static pressure rating the longer any blower will continue to pull air through a dirty collection filter. So if you know maintenance isn’t your strength, look for blowers with a high static rating

4. The diameter of the impeller and the rpm of the impeller are key to static suction numbers because they increase impeller circumference tip speeds. All impellers maximum static and cfm at the point they cannot remain balanced.

5. Each time you change the blower class, the type of impeller changes too. This means as diameter and class increase the air volume decreases but static numbers increase.

Fun Fact:  When you pull 1” of H2O (static) on a door you get just over .4 ounces pull per square inch against the door surface. If you wanted to open a door 36 x 84 inches you would need over 75 pounds pull to open the door, this shows how the selection of the class III blower design chosen for blasting cabinets came about.

Which Blower is Best for Abrasive Blasting Cabinets

There are 4 basic blower classes, one being vacuum blowers, which we explain here. Typically, a 120-volt vacuum blower moves 100 cfm or less, creating a negative pressure inside the cabinet which is required by pollution agencies. If your cabinet chamber is 36” x 30” x 24” you have about 13 to 14 cubic feet of chamber area accounting for the window slope area. That means you’re only getting about 7 air changes per minute, far less than 20 change per minute required by Air Pollution Control when a cabinet requires a permit.

To give you a reference point, many Media Blast models have one (1) air change per second.Because they are changing the air so rapidly, our machines come standard with excellent separator reclaimers to prevent abrasive loss and remove only dust.

Class III Radial Pressure Blowers are normally used to meet the guidelines required for all machines requiring a permit to operate.

To Sum It Up: 

You get what you pay for – but you can pay the same or more and get much less!

To ensure the best blasting cabinet operation, we recommend you make sure what blower type is best for your type of blasting. Give us a call or use our contact page if you’d like to speak to one of our experts.