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Home Central Vac as Shop Dust Collector
QUESTION: Our new 2 floor and basement townhouse has a central vac system with the
machinery in the basement about 15' from where my table saw is.
What are your thoughts about running a line to use as a shop dust
collector? As a shop vacuum?
If I damage the home vacuum system, I'll be out on the street -- and we
have over 2' of snow!
ANSWER: I've though, and even posted, about this for some time now, but have yet to
hear of anybody actually trying this. My situation is different in that I
own the front door knob (the bank owns the rest). Anyway, I want to
install both central vac for the house, and a DC for the shop, and it seems
so redundant that I just can't bring myself to buy both. One other
advantage is that central vac systems already have low-voltage wiring for
the start/stop control, so the whole thread on how to control the DC
becomes moot.
The scheme that I cooked up is pretty simple, and would actually work fine
for your situation as well:
Rig up a normal central vac system, but right where the duct enters the
vac, put in a Y with a blast gate on each leg. One leg goes to the house,
and the other to the shop via a cyclone chip separator. If you want to be
really snazzy, you can rig the 2 blast gates so that they are mechanical
equivalent of a 3-way switch. This would prevent the vacuum from being
activated with both gates closed. I will probably do this and also enable
or disable the start/stop switches in the house and shop according to the
position of the blast gates.
In your case, you could just buy an extra hose and rig it to the output
port of the cyclone. Just plug that hose into the nearest central vac port
whenever you plan on making saw dust.
Some day soon, I'm going to sit down and learn about vacuum systems and
compare the actual numbers of shop vacs, DC's, and central vac to figure
out if this is at all reasonable. Of course, I would love to hear the
experiences of somebody who has tried this, or understands vacuum systems.
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