We’ve been doing a lot of sanding on our restoration projects in the last few weeks and that can take its toll on the shop and your lungs. Air filtration is an important safety aspect of woodworking. Aside from wearing a personal mask, it is also key to try and filter out particulate in the air from the woodshop as a whole. We use a Jet AFS 1000 to pull the dust and other particles from the air.

The system itself works extremely well and we’ve seen a noticeable reduction is dust laying on the shelves and light fixtures since implementing it. However, you absolutely need to be diligent about keeping the filter clean. The filter pictured here is saturated.

This filter is no longer functioning in a useful manner. When it gets to this level of clogged you have two basic options. One, use a vacuum and stiff bristle brush to clean the filter as best as possible. Two, replace the filter entirely. In this case, we chose to replace the filter entirely. Not because the original was beyond recovery but because we had already cleaned it several times. After awhile the fibers just don’t seem to get clean like they used to. The low overall cost of the filters also contributes to how often we replace them. Sometimes it’s better to just install a fresh one instead of trying to clean an old one when safety is on the line.