Tag: vacuum air gun

Who Wants to Save on Compressed Air?

Published on by Al WooffittLeave a comment

At EXAIR we pride ourselves on helping our customers optimize their compressed air usage. Our intelligent compressed air products are engineered to be quiet and efficient, saving you on compressed air consumption. This is just one of the six steps that we recommend in order to optimize your compressed air system.

The first step we would recommend is to measure your air consumption. If you are going to attempt to reduce air consumption in your facility, it is necessary to know what is using it. If you know the consumption of your compressed air-operated products, you can make note of this. A more comprehensive solution would be to install some of our Digital Flowmeters in branch lines in your facility. The flow data provided by this will help you narrow down the high consumption areas and processes.

The second step we would suggest is to find and fix leaks. Our Ultrasonic Leak Detector is perfect for this. According to the Compressed Air and Gas Institute, leaks should not exceed 5-10% of your system’s air supply (we would obviously want 0%, but realistically this is unachievable). However, it is not uncommon to see leaks account for over 30% of many facilities’ compressed air supply being lost through leakage. That’s a potential for a 25% gain in compressed air supply!

The third step would be to upgrade your blowoff, cooling and drying operations using engineered compressed air products. All of EXAIR’s products, like our Super Air Knives, or Super Air Nozzles, are designed with efficiency in mind. Upgrading to an efficient EXAIR product is going to reduce your consumption, sometimes dramatically so!

The fourth step is to turn off your compressed air when not in use. This may sound obvious, but it is not uncommon for compressed air products to be left running continuously. We offer many solutions here, from a simple ball valve (found in many of our Drum Vac Kits), to a solenoid valve (found in our Cabinet Cooler Systems), to our Electronic Flow Controllers – combining a solenoid valve and photoelectric sensor.

The fifth step would be to use intermediate storage near the point of use. If you are controlling your compressed air usage through the use of valves and controls, then your consumption won’t be constant. This fluctuation in demand can be evened out with the use of secondary storage, like our Model 9500-60 Receiver Tank. This will ensure you have the volume and pressure when and where you need it.

Finally, our sixth step is to control the operating pressure. More specifically, to reduce the pressure to the minimum required to get the job done. Simply installing a pressure regulator at the point of use will lead to big savings.

If you would like to start optimizing your compressed air system, then give me a call!

Al Wooffitt
Application Engineer

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Lessons From Our Past

Published on by Brian FarnoLeave a comment

My first motorcycle was given to me by a friend of my brother who knew I just wanted to ride and, at the same time, knew I didn’t have the means to buy anything rideable. It came with some stipulations: there wasn’t a key, and it didn’t run. It was given to him by someone else, and the best part was that it actually had a service manual and a title.

1 – Camera phone / my first motorcycle

The bike was a 1984 Kawasaki KZ440 LTD. The issue was, rust in the gas tank had clogged the carb, and then it sat for years with the fuel in it. I had never attempted to rebuild a carburetor and had only heard horror stories. With my basic set of tools and the bike stored at my then-girlfriend’s house, I took the carbs off and figured, how hard could the repair be? I took everything apart, cleaned it all, or so I thought, put it back together, and it didn’t work. So then I took the carbs to a shop, and they warned me they couldn’t get them fully adjusted, but they were running. So I installed them back and found out I had to block off some of the intake, and it ran like a dream. Well, until you sat at idle, because then gas would leak out of the overflow onto the exhaust. I didn’t care, and I rode that bike for two years until the electric starter went out, and I worked on it continuously. Finally, I was able to purchase a fuel-injected bike and swore off carbs. Well, I was wrong. I now attempt to bring old equipment back to life for fun.

Well, last night, in between delivering the kids to Young Life and troubleshooting a car, I also had a carb off my dad’s John Deere 322 with electric choke. The tractor wasn’t running, he needed to get his garden tilled, and this tractor was the only way to do that. He brought me just the carb, and with this being a single-carb 3-cylinder motor, it is pretty simple. Having access to a friend with an ultrasonic cleaner makes it even easier. I opened the carb up and left the two halves fully assembled, then into an ultrasonic cleaner that was filled with piping-hot water and dish soap. No harsh cleaners; from shared experience of others, I have found that good old dish soap and hot water are all that is needed most of the time to clean these parts up.

That is some dirty water, and it had only been about 15 minutes in the cleaner.

After about 45 minutes in the cleaner, I took it out and checked all the jets with a light and a carb brush. Everything looked clean, I went and picked up some new bolts to hold the halves together, and sent them back home with my dad. He called me the next day and gave me the good news that the tractor ran better than it ever has.

All cleaned up, new bolts, and ready for testing.

The entire process made me realize that a carburetor is not far off from a couple of EXAIR products that we offer for refurbishment. Some of the products that we frequently refurbish for some customers are the EXAIR Air Knives and the Reversible Drum Vacs. These refurbishments are often the result of the environment and a failure in the filtration of the compressed air. The best part is that we will evaluate the products for free, determine if they can be repaired or refurbished, and then provide a quote for the process all within a few days of the item getting here. We also offer free videos of how to do things like clean the RDV for free through this blog.

Obviously, at some point, the filter and/or pretreatment for this compressed air supply failed and was not monitored. You can see the outline of the patented shim on the throat of this Super Air Amplifier.

Take this Super Air Amplifier, for instance. The system came in for the issue of underperformance, and we had already discussed with the customer how their filtration had failed about a year ago. They wanted to see what could bring this unit back to life. As soon as we saw pictures of it, we knew that the plenum was clogged up with debris.

If you have any EXAIR product that you think is not performing at an optimal level, please contact an Application Engineer today. If the product cannot be refurbished or repaired, we will give you a replacement option as well. The best part is, stock products ship the same day on orders received by 2 PM ET.

1 – Kris Krug – Camera phone / my first motorcycle – retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kawasaki_Z440_LTD.jpg, 8/17/2005

Compressed Air Use in the Construction Industry

Published on by Russ BowmanLeave a comment

My drive to work involves passing through a growing neighborhood in the northeast suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a wooded lot get cleared & graded for construction of a new house. A week or so ago, heavy earth-moving equipment was digging the basement foundation…and adding to the traffic as huge dump trucks carried the dirt away. Fast-forward to this morning, when I saw that the 2×4 framing of the walls and the placement of the roof joists were almost complete. The backhoes and dump trucks on the lot have been replaced by a small fleet of carpenter’s work trucks, a ‘porta-potty’ (a real plus, considering the number of workers spending 8–10 hours a day on a site that was the utility equivalent of a primitive campsite)…and an air compressor.

Compressed air has been used in construction since ancient times, when manually operated bellows devices were used to stoke fires to increase the temperature inside furnaces that were used to make metal tools and building materials. The first large scale industrial use of compressed air on a construction project was the building of the Mt. Cenis tunnel in Switzerland. Tunnel construction began in 1857 and was expected to take at least 25 years, with some estimates projecting a timeline of over 70 years. However, technical innovations – like the development of pneumatic drills that replaced steam-operated machinery – allowed them to complete it in only 14 years.

In addition to the pneumatic nail guns and impact drivers being used at the new home site along my daily commute, compressed air has a number of other uses in the construction trades. It’s used for excavation, to power de-watering & sludge pumps, hoists, and even material conveyors. For example, a contractor that was building a large fence on sandy terrain used a Model 150200 2″ Heavy Duty Line Vac to remove sand from the hollow fence posts after using hammer drills (which are also air operated, so you know) to anchor them in place. Another user got a Model 151250 2-1/2 NPT Threaded Heavy Duty Line Vac to remove light dirt & sand from holes they dig to set posts in. Both power their Line Vacs with diesel-fueled 185 CFM tow-behind compressors.

Heavy Duty Line Vac: Hardened Alloy Construction and High Performance

EXAIR Air Knives are also used by construction companies. One of our customers bought a Model 110218 18″ Aluminum Super Air Knife Kit to blow an air curtain onto a conveyor to separate filter fabric out of recycled asphalt. Many lumber & building material manufacturers use them to blow off sawdust and loose debris from plywood, OSB board, roofing shingles, etc.

Top: 108″ Super Air Knife is supported & aimed via an array of Model 9060 Universal Air Knife Mounting Systems.
Bottom: Mounting Systems can be ‘overkill’ for some smaller applications, especially when the user is creative. Yes, that’s a door hinge. No, it wasn’t my idea, but I kind of wish it was.

Another customer uses a Model 6901 Spill Recovery Kit with their Model 6395 55 Gallon Premium High Lift Reversible Drum Vac System for cleaning up spills of hydraulic oil from their equipment at construction job sites. The ability to vacuum it up without dragging an electric cord from a shop vac through the puddles of oil is a real plus for them.

The EXAIR Reversible Drum Vac System converts a drum and dolly into a mobile pumping system.

And back to the Line Vacs, an electrical contractor uses a Model 6086 3″ Aluminum Line Vac to pull wire through stretches of underground conduit that are too long for standard fish tapes. They can pull the fish line through 120 feet of conduit in about 30 seconds. The Line Vac also removes any debris that might have accumulated inside the conduit between installation and wire pulling.

If you’re in the construction industry – or any industry, really – and would like to discuss a potential application for engineered compressed air products, give me a call.

Russ Bowman, CCASS

Application Engineer
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Heavy Duty Dry Vac System: Overview

Published on by John BallLeave a comment

EXAIR manufactures a range of industrial pneumatic drum vacuums geared towards cleaning up the messes you’ll find in just about any environment.  They are safe, quiet, and do not have any moving parts or electric motors to wear.  These are workhorses with a long history of durability and reliability. The Industrial Housekeeping Products offer systems suitable for use with dry materials and wet materials, as well as one capable of handling both.  In this blog, I will cover our Heavy Duty Dry Vac System. 

For dry materials, a common issue generated by the dust is premature electrical motor failure.  In many electrically powered vacuums, the motor bearings will fail and wear out.  Typically, this results in a loud screeching noise.  EXAIR’s Heavy Duty Dry Vac System has NO moving parts to wear out, doesn’t require maintenance, and needs nothing but a source of compressed air to operate.  A static-resistant hose is standard which prevents painful shocks when working with dry, dusty materials.  The Heavy Duty Dry Vac is constructed of hardened alloy steel designed to provide superior abrasion resistance.  It is able to produce a powerful vacuum with a level of -60” H2O (-15 Kpa) at 80 PSIG (5.5 bar).  So, it can be used with sandblasting material, garnet, and steel shot.  The bag filter is efficient and durable to keep the dust inside the drum while allowing the air to escape.

Depending on your application and the volume of material you need to vacuum, we provide three different sizes; 30-gal, 55-gal, and 110-gal drums.  Each drum uses the same Heavy Duty Vacuum which uses only 68 SCFM (1,924 SLPM) of compressed air at 80 psig (5.5 bar).  We offer different packages for each drum to help accommodate your application.  We have the standard package which will include the drum lid with the required hardware, a side latching lever lock, a shutoff valve, a filter bag, 10 feet (3 meters) of static-resistance vacuum hose, hose hanger, 20 feet (6 meters) of compressed air hose, a pressure gauge, and aluminum chip wand.  We then move up to the Deluxe package, which will include everything in the standard package plus a drum dolly, heavy-duty aluminum tools, and a toolholder.  The next package is the Premium package, which includes everything in the Deluxe package plus a steel drum.

From March to May 2025, EXAIR will be giving a complimentary gift for qualified orders when purchasing any of EXAIR’s Industrial Housekeeping Systems, including the Heavy Duty Dry Vac System.  You will receive a model 6492 Vac-U-Gun Kit, a $174.00 value, for free.  The Vac-U-Gun can easily be converted from a blow-off gun into a vacuum gun by simply switching the generator inside.  For U.S. and Canadian customers, EXAIR offers a 30-day unconditional guarantee to try these out.  You will not be disappointed.  If you need more details, you can contact an Application Engineer at EXAIR.  We will be happy to hear from you. 

John Ball
Application Engineer
Email: johnball@exair.com
Twitter: @EXAIR_jb