Hi Liz,

You might want to consider a ceiling mounted "air cleaner", while you're at it.

I looked at the various commercially available ones and decided to build my own.

The price was a factor ($250 to $500 Canadian), and being a scrounger, I was able to put one together pretty much for the cost of the filters.

I used the "3M Filtrete Ultra Allergen Reduction Filters 1250". They are about $23 Cnd each and are specifically designed to grab particles between 0.3 and 1 micron. I noticed that the units at Busy Bee are "designed to filter out 98% of dust 5 microns or larger", which means that the finer (more dangerous stuff) blows right through them. IMHO, you'd have to replace or augement the filters on these units to be usefull anyway.

My home built unit has three input filters (one on each "input" side) with over 1000 sq inches of input area. I don't know how much pleated surface that works out to, but it's a lot. The airflow from the fan is hardley restricted at all. The outlet of the fan is just a louvred wood baffle to direct the air (and keep the cat out!).

The fan itself is an old rotary furnace fan that I found on the roadside (some people call it garbage picking - I call it recycling) one garbage day. The motor was likewise liberated from the Keel Valley landfill. A bit of cleanup, and voila! home shop air cleaner. Total cost was about $80 and an afternoon.

I run this when I'm doing any cutting or sanding, and it's almost stopped the distribution of the fine white dust around my shop (and therefore, throughout the house via my feet).

My main dust collector is the single bag version of what you are planning on buying, I purchased a better bag from Lee Valley as I wasn't pleased with the quality of the bag that came with the unit. The original bag seemed like it was designed to distribute, not catch, fine dust. The description of the new bag (from the Lee Valley website):

"The material allows excellent airflow (30 to 40 cfm per square foot) and will trap particles as small as 3 to 5 microns when clean and particles as fine as 1 micron in size as the material loads with dust."

Seems to be fairly accurate. The new bag made a huge difference, the air cleaner makes it even better.

Happy building!

coop