Care and maintenance of Needlefelt bag dust filters

[Carlow52]

I have a Record DX750 DE which has a needlefelt dust filter.

Just wonder what the consensus is on care/maintenance of them.

I wash it in the washing machine when the trouble and strife is away but wonder should they be replaced regularly.
Thanks

 

[paulm]

I just give mine a good shake outdoors every so often, seems fine.

Cheers, Paul

 

[ondablade]

Hi Carlow. We've been around filtration several times recently - which probably explains the slowish response. Searching may throw up some stuff. I beat them on a wall rather than washed them, it worked fine.

Bags it seems rely heavily on 'seasoning' to improve their filtration, washing may remove this.

At a more basic level it turns out that the first question on bags is whether or not they can filter down to fine enough levels to be useful - i.e. catch the 10 micron and below stuff that's truly dangerous. There's a strong view about that this is typically not the case.

There's also the view about that washing further opens the pores and worsens the situation.

This guy is highly regarded by most, there's lots of reading on some less than reassuring aspects of the topic here: http://billpentz.com/woodworking/cyclone/DCBasics.cfm

 

[dickm]

FWIW, I recently took off my Axi needlefelt filter, beat it on the wall and then reverse vacuum cleaned it. Don't know what this did to the level of filtration, but it made a h**l of a difference to the airflow :shock: